Word of the Month
APRIL

PERSEVERANCE: Working steadily and enduring hardships to achieve a goal without giving up
Vs. Giving up
EspanÕl - perseverancia

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

Suggested Reading:
Hansel and Gretel
Silent Locus (Jeanne M. Lee)
Acress the Wide Dark Sea: The Mayflower Journey: Jean Van Leeuwen
The Little Engine that Could (Watty Piper)
A Chair for My Mother (Vera Williams)
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (Virginia Lee Burton)
The Little Red Hen
Tillie and the Wall (Leo Lionni)
The Three Little Pigs
The Tortoise and the Hare
I Can’t Said the Ant
The Little Engine that Could
Stories about Valley Forge
Ephesians 6:18
The Wild Swans (Hans Christian Andersen)
Peppe the Lamplighter (Elisa Bartone)
The Ten Mile Day: The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad (Mary Ann Fraser)
Hidden in the Sand (Margaret Hodges)
John Henry: An American Legend (Ezra Jack Keats)
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (Eleanor Coerr)
Seven Ravens (Grimm)
Knots on a Counting Rope (Bill Martin and John Archambault)
Seven Ravens (Grimm)
Least of All (Carol Purdy)
The Incredible Journey (Shelia Burnford)
Hatchet (Gary Paulson)
The Trumpet of the Swan (E.B. White)
Little House in the Big Woods (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal (Joan Blos)
Adam of the Road (Elizabeth Janet Gray)
Lyddie (Katherine Paterson)
Where the Red Fern Grows (Wilson Rauls)
Watership Down (Richard Adams)
Bud, Not Buddy (Christopher Paul Curtis)
Out of the Dust (Karen Hesse)
Call of the Wild (Jack London)
So Far From the Bamboo Grove (Yoko Kawishima Watkins)
Up from Slavery (Booker T. Washington)
All Quite on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)
The Miracle Worker (William Gibson)
The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)

Suggested Films:
Forrest Gump rated PG-13
October Sky rated PG
Simon Birch rated PG
Hoosiers rated PG
Rudy rated PG
Remember the Titans rated PG-13

Songs:
I’m Still Standing
Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
Time, Love, and Tenderness

Family Activity:

• Work with your children to help them set high goals and reach them, one achievable step at a time.

• Discuss difficult situations for your family and discuss how you can work through them.

• Show your children that if money is saved, something expensive can be purchased; this could be done by saving part of their allowance and combining it with money earned from recycling so that they can purchase a toy or other item.

• Periodically, take your children to the bank with you and purchase a US Savings Bond for them. This might be a good birthday present. Explain to them that by purchasing a bond, they are helping other people today and that they will get more money in the end.

• Help your children with their homework, make sure that they do it and help them to understand it.

• When you set rules for your children, stick to them, especially if your children keep breaking them. If you do not persevere, they will disobey rules that are designed to help and protect them.

Class Activity:

• Discuss obstacles that students overcome in their lives and how important perseverance is.

• Also, discuss the limits of perseverance, that is, when it is appropriate to recognize one’s limitations and move on to another goal.

• Give an assignment and make students redo the assignment until they can get a perfect score. Spelling lists and math tables are ideal for this type of assignment.

High School Activity:

• Encourage students to develop a post high school education/work plan and outline the steps needed to meet it.

• Many students struggle to learn what is being taught. Take time out to thank them for trying so hard. Talk to them and find out if there is anything you can do to help them to succeed.

• Many seniors are struggling to keep their senior projects moving, encourage them to keep going and continue making progress.

• Have students apply for a scholarship for college or vocational school.

 Quotes:

In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins - not through strength but by perseverance.
---H. Jackson Brown

When you get in a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.
---Harriet Beecher Stowe

Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.
---Josh Billings

The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
---Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.
---Vince Lombardi

Endurance and to be able to endure is the first lesson a child should learn because it's the one they will most need to know.
---Jean Jacques Rousseau

I am a slow walker, but I never walk backwards.
---Abraham Lincoln

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that perseverance means a strong will and obstinacy means a strong won't.
---Unknown

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
---Ralph Ellison

You’ve got to say, "I think that if I keep working at this and want it badly enough I can have it." It’s called perseverance.
---Lee Iacocca

People who soar are those who refuse to sit back, sigh and wish things would change. They neither complain of their lot nor passively dream of some distant ship coming in. Rather, they visualize in their minds that they are not quitters; they will not allow life's circumstances to push them down and hold them under.
---Charles R. Swindoll

Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.
---Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
        -Jacob Riis

“It is our sacred duty to defend the cause of the Union. Whatever the hardship, whatever the cost we will persevere.”
        -Capt. Matthew Waters, 1862

“There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.”
        -Kin Hubbard

“We must not slacken in our efforts until we have won this war, and saved mankind.”
        -Winston Churchill

“Never give in, never give away, and never, ever, give up.”
        -Alan Clark, MP

“A task half done is time wasted”
        -Anonymous

“[There is] no rock as hard but that a little wave may beat admission in a thousand years.”
        -Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process.”
        -Thomas Edison

“Be patient and calm – for no one can catch fish in anger.”
        -Herbert Hoover

“Fall seven times. Stand up eight.”
        -Japanese proverb

“If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
        -Mary Pickford

“The way to succeed is never to quit. That’s it. But really be humble about it.”
        -Alex Haley

“Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter, we persevere in nothing great but from pride in overcoming them.”
        -William Hazlitt

“The greater the obstacle the more glory in overcoming it.”
        -Jean Baptiste Molière

“What does not destroy makes me stronger”
        -Friedrich Nietzsche

“Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them – every day begin the task anew.”
        -Saint Francis de Sales

“Success consists of getting up just one more time that you fall.”
        -Oliver Goldsmith

“Energy and persistence conquer all things.”
        -Benjamin Franklin

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common that unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
        -Calvin Coolidge

“People may fail many times, but they become failures only when they begin to blame someone else.”
        -Anonymous

“One is defeated only when one accepts defeat.”
        -Marshall Foch

Perform a Random Act of Kindness Each Day