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Teaching Day-by-Day: Parents
Parents! Who are they? What's it like to be a parent? How would your students do it better? Let's concentrate on parents or other important relationships from as many angles as possible. by Carol Otis Hurst
- Week One - Let's look at some well-known parents
- My dad, the president. Ask your students to list as many U.S. presidents they can think of who were parents.
- Ask your students to use reference books to check the list they made yesterday. With the class, make a chart showing the number and sex of children each president had. The students should figure out how old each child must have been when his or her father was president.
- The One Bad Thing About Father.
That's the name of a book by F.N. Monjo (HarperCollins, 1987) about being the child of Theodore Roosevelt. Another book by Monjo, Me and Willie and Pa (Simon & Schuster, 1973) is about Abraham Lincoln as a father. Read to the class. - Help students find research books to discover what it's like to live in the White House. Ask them to write about what it would be like to be a president's child.
- Have students make a list of famous women: politicians, rock stars, television and movie stars, scientists, etc. Read My Mom Travels a Lot (Puffin Books, 1985) by Caroline Feller Bauer. Ask your class to imagine they are the child of a famous woman and write about it in a journal entry.
- Pose this question to the class: "If your mother or father was campaigning for the presidency and would take your advice, what changes that affect children would you ask him or her to make?"
- With their families, students write a letter to one of the candidates and suggest some changes they came up with yesterday.
- Children in primitive times had to learn some skills very quickly in order to survive. What do your students think the skills were and how soon did they have to be learned?
- Find out about families during the Middle Ages. Divide the class into at least three groups; use reference books and fiction to investigate parenthood for serfs, merchants and noblemen.
- Students can use the information they gained yesterday to make a mural showing family life in the Middle Ages.
- Which of the passengers on the Mayflower were parents? Did they bring their whole families with them? Ask your class to find out all they can about Mayflower parents.
- Ask your students to imagine that they were a child during the Revolution. Would their parents have been involved in the fighting? On which side? Have a panel discussion with students defending the actions of their families during the war.
- Ask the class to pretend they are children 100 years ago wanting to wear their hair or dress in a changing fashion. Students should partner and write a note to their parents explaining why they're changing the way they look. Partners respond as the parent receiving that letter.
- Students ask their parents about a time when they had trouble with their parents about wearing something new or different.
- Suggest that students write down as much information as possible about their parents and then check their facts for accuracy by reading them to their parents. They should then make the necessary changes.
- If your students were asked to write a biography of either of their parents, the facts they listed yesterday would probably be inadequate. Have the kids design a questionnaire to organize other important information.
- Which decade included the time when your students' parents were in high school? What was going on in the world during those years? What songs and fashions were popular? What major events occurred?
- With the class, make a time line about the important events you found out about yesterday. Students can make sketches of clothing and hair fashions from the decade they're investigating. Make sure they include games and pastimes from their parents' youth.
- Ask your students to go through their family photo albums and find pictures of their parents. Do they look like their sketches? Ask them talk to their parents about the fashions then and now.
- Students can use the photo album, time line and questionnaire to interview their parents. Make sure they take notes or tape record the interview.
- Give your class the assignment of writing a biography of one or both of their parents using the information they've gathered during the week.
- It's hard to believe, but even parents have fears. Students can ask their parents what they were afraid of as kids and find out what things their parents fear today. Are any of those things the same as your students own fears?
- Bring the class to the school library and have them find one poem in a poetry book that they'd like to read to their parents tonight. They can ask their parents to find and read a favorite poem to them. What do they think their choices seem to be telling each other?
- Have students write about a time when their feelings were hurt or something made them cry. They then read their tale aloud to their parents and ask their parents to tell them about a similar time for them.
- Share an embarrassing moment you had with the class and ask them to share as well. They can tell their parents about these incidents and ask their parents to share their own most embarrassing moment.
- Have students think of a toast to say before the Thanksgiving meal which will make their parents know how much they care about them.
- Everybody, even parents, dreams about what they'd like to be or do someday. Ask your students to list their dreams and then ask their parents what they dream for them.
- Some people who aren't really your parents are just as important in your life. Have your students think about one of those people and write a letter to him or her telling him or her about their feelings.
- Ask your students to think about themselves as parents. Do they want to be one? How many children do they want? What would they do differently from their own parents? The same?
- Teachers can be parents, too. Have the class find out which teachers in the school are parents. How old are their children? What are they like?
Week Two Being a parent wasn't always the way it is now. Let's find some differences.
Week Three How much do you really know about the two most important people in your life?
Week Four You know a little about your parents, but there's more.
Week Five Bits and pieces
Carol Otis Hurst is a children's book author whose latest book, A Killing in Plymouth Colony, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2003. Be sure to check out her website at www.carol hurst.com
November/December 2004, Vol.35, No.3
