Word of the Month
September

LOYALTY: Faithful, especially to one’s friends, family, team, or country; true to a promise or duty
Vs. Unfaithfulness or Blind Faith
EspanÕl - lealtad

**Please review the following suggestions for content and appropriateness to your child and/or student/s**

Suggested Reading:
ELEMENTARY LEVEL
Sam the Minute Men (Nathanial Benchley)
Exodus (Miriam Chaikin)
The Legend of Bluebonnet (Tomie DePaulo)
Betsy Ross (Alexandra Wallner)
Abe Lincoln's Hat (Martha Brenner)
Three Young Pilgrims (Cheryl Harness)
Good King Wenceslas (John Neale)
The Picture Book of Harriet Tubman (David Adler)
The Picture Book of Frederick Douglas (David Adler)
Just a Few Words, Mr. Lincoln (Jean Fritz)
Can't You Make Them Behave, King George, (Jean Fritz)
By the Dawn's Early Light (Steven Kroll)
Shh! We're Writing the Constitution (Jean Fritz)
Casey Over There (Rabin Staton)
Esther's Story (Diane Wolkstein)
St. George and the Dragon (Margaret Hodges)
Paul Revere's Ride (H.W. Longfellow)
Once Upon A Time: A Story of the Brothers Grimm (Robert Quackenbush)
Walking the Road to Freedom: A Story About Sojourner Truth (Jeri Ferris)
Lincoln: A Photobiography (Russell Freedman)
Beauty and the Beast
The Adventures of Pinocchio
He’s My Brother
Charlotte’s Web

SECONDARY LEVEL
Beowolf
Lord of the Flies
John 15:13
Johnny Tremain (Esther Forbes)
Rifles for Watie (Harold Keith)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Frederick Douglas)
Carver: A Life in Poems (Marilyn Nelson)

Suggested Films:
Milo and Otis rated G
Homeward Bound rated G
The Lion King rated G
Remember the Titans rated PG-13


Songs:
I Really Like Him from Man of La Mancha
Stand By Me
Lean on Me
You’ve Got a Friend

Family Activity:

• Friendship is based on loyalty. How do we show loyalty to our friends?

• Talk to your children about the limits of loyalty to a friend. Help them to understand that there are some things they should not do for a friend, such as lie, or cheat or steal. It may help to point out to your children that a real friend would never ask them to do these things.

• Talk with your children about the values that your family treasures and why they should be loyal to them.

• Talk to your children about being loyal to themselves and what that means. Continually reinforce the fact that they are people of great value and that they should not allow other people to make their decisions for them. Their sense of right and wrong is to be valued. There are many ways to do this, some of them include: asking your children for their opinions about things happening in your family’s life, each day ask them what they did at school, ask them what their random act of kindness was today.

Class Activity:

• Discuss what it means to be loyal to people and what the limits of loyalty to a friend are.

• Talk to your students about the pledge of allegiance. Talk about what it means to give your allegiance, to pledge loyalty to the flag. It does not mean always agreeing with what the government does, but what does it mean?

• Have students put on short skits showing a friend making a sacrifice to help another friend.

• Have students put on short skits showing a person refusing to do something for a “friend” because doing it would violate their code of right and wrong.

High School Activities:

• In our lives we are faced with situations where our loyalties are divided. What process should we use to resolve conflicts of loyalty?

• Is it more important to be loyal to oneself or to other people?

• You probably consider yourself to be a part of several different collectives; a family, a city, a county, a state, a country, a religion, a culture...What should you do when these groups are in conflict? What can you do to bring these groups closer together?

• Which is more important, being loyal to a friend or being loyal to an abstract idea you value? Consider some practical implications, if you knew that a friend of yours was committing a crime would you turn him or her in? Why or Why not?

Creating a Positive Learning Environment:

Teachers should be careful not to attack their fellow teachers or administrators in front of students. This can turn the classroom into a gossip shop and undermine the authority of both teachers by creating the impression that the school is disunited. If teachers exhibit disrespect toward their colleagues, students will assume that they can be disrespectful as well. 

Quotes:

“Be true to your school.”
--The Beach Boys

"If you want to retain those who are present, be loyal to those who are absent."
--Stephen R. Covey

“My Country right or wrong; when right, to keep her right; when wrong, to put her right.”
--Carl Schurz

“He loved his party dear, but his country best.”
--Punch epithet for Joseph Chamberlain

“Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul.”
--Mark Twain

“A true friend is someone who is there for you when he’d rather be anywhere else.”
--Len Wein

“A loving family is the strongest chain of all.”
--Vice-President Dan Quayle

“When eating a fruit, think of who planted the tree.”
--Vietnamese saying

“Friendship, like credit, is highest where it is not used.”
--Elbert Hubbard

“Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.”
--Thomas Jones

Perform a Random Act of Kindness Each Day