Looking for some great books to gift the children in your lives? Here are some TPN recommended books:
Books for Holiday Gift Giving
Free Peace Activity Ideas for Parents and Teachers
~ Let Us Teach Peace ~ Check out these teacher-tested classroom and family-friendly activities that promote peaceful personal relationships, an understanding of the futility of war, and ways to world peace. Click on the title for the full lesson plan -Build a Peace Wall – Combine your ideas for peace with everyone else’s to make […]
Warriors A Review and Lesson Plan
~ The Warriors ~ by Joseph Bruchac Classification Chapter Book Elementary – 4th and up The Warriors: A Summary When Danny’s mother, a lawyer, gets a job in Washington, he must leave the Mohawk reservation where he has grown up and adjust to life in a new school. A skilled lacrosse player, Danny makes new friends, […]
Heart of a Chief – Review and Activities
~Heart of the Chief ~ Can one boy make a difference? Author Joseph Bruchac Upper elementary-Middle school Heart of the Chief: A Summary This book depicts Native Americans today facing a society that does not understand their culture. Set on an intentionally fictional reservation in New England, a boy enters the local middle school and deals […]
Are You a Teacher? Form a Peace Group
~ Why form teacher peace groups in our schools? ~ Teachers are confronted daily with the challenge of forming a group of diverse students into a peaceful cooperative classroom where everyone can learn and thrive. This is not easy to do in a world in which the media glorifies violence and nations settle differences by […]
Addressing Bias with Our Children
~Bias: Sometimes We Just Don’t See It~ In the current issue of Harper’s Magazine there is a small chart showing the analogies created by a computer. Researchers at Boston University and Microsoft analyzed 30,000 words in Google articles for gender bias. Here are some of the results (You can read the entire study here): Woman […]
Ten Questions to Ask About Any Book
~ Questioning What You Read ~ Thinking of buying a new book for your children or class? With the hundreds of children’s books and young adult books published every year, it is often hard to make a wise selection. Those glossy cover books sitting up front in the bookstore or hyped on Amazon or Barnes […]
Are You an Altruist? Giving More
~ Giving More Than One Can Bear ~ What is an Altruist? Being an altruist is when we give of ourselves to someone even though it may require us to sacrifice more than we can afford, perhaps in some situations, even our lives. According to Kristen Renwick Monroe, people who display altruistic behaviors see themselves […]
Can We Cooperate? 10 Books about Community Gardening
~ Why Is It Hard to Cooperate? ~ Everyone agrees that cooperating with others is a good thing. So why is it so hard to do and so rare to find in school s and business? It Requires Sharing It’s hard, because being cooperative is dependent on being willing to share. When we work with […]
Too Quick to Judge – A Video for Discussion
Making a Snap Judgment In the following video, two people assume they know what the other person is thinking. They make snap judgments about each other. When you make a snap judgement it means that you have taken a mental position such as right or wrong, good or bad before having all the facts. When […]
Footsteps: An Activity for Developing Empathy
Step into Another Person’s Mindset Jim Ziolkowski’s National Bestseller Walk in Their Shoes: Can One Person Change the World? details his life changing experience. A business major, he had planned to go into a corporate career. However, while backpacking through Nepal in his senior year, he discovered how simple kindness and caring can change people’s […]
Sharing Kindness
Kindness: Pass it On This video shows ways we can help each other and spread caring and compassion by observing someone needing help and acting on it. Follow up viewing the video by creating a list of all the small things people did for each other in the video. Discussion Questions: Have you ever done any […]
