The Teenage Book of Manners--

This book is great. I used it to teach a manners course for 7th and 8th graders along with their Bible class. I will use it again this semester and hope to have the book available for each student next year. The students loved the book. I used my owntransparencies to teach from the book. They had fun and always wanted to know on Thursday or Friday if we would start with manners. Those 2 days were manners days. The book was interesting to them and I used my own thoughts and teaching approach to reach the students. They practiced what they learned from introductions,telephone manners, table, dating, car, classroom and probably the most fun and importance to them was the emphasis I put into Personal Manners and Personal Values.I had two hairdressers come in to talk about personal care. Two students were picked by a drawing for a makeover. Also, another student went to a very formal dinner and told his mother he knew from "manners class" exactly what to do with the utensils on the table. Fred Hartley is to be commended for writing such a humorous approach to manners for teens. It absolutely fit exactly what I was looking for when I found it. It is also based on Scripture which makes it all the more important to me and to reach students that I teach.

Fred Hartley writes in his introduction to the Teenage book of Manners that he would like to provide a simplistic approach to manners, a skill in which many teens are lacking. He does just that as he, along with help from his entire family, compiles various areas of etiquette, from basic introductions to eating to dating, into a short easy-to-read book. The book, which is slightly over 200 pages, is filled with humorous illustrations, and in less than two hours, can provide any teen with the foundation to become the next Mrs. (or Mr.) Manners. While the book ddoes not cover every subject in depth, it does try to touch on many different categories. Hartley writes the book using his family as examples and the constant use of "we" begins to wear thin the reader's nerves. A major downside of the book is it is written as if the reader was raised in an incredibly strong Christian based family with strict morals and values. Innumerable references to God and conducting your life around a certain faith's beliefs detracts immensly if the reader is not familiar with that faith. Overall, if the reader moves past the many colloquialisms and religious refrences, the guide offers a stron base for teenage etiquette.