PBT Question #5 to Ask about Any Secular Book

Does this book have the potential to positively affect the behavior or future of those who experience it? 

Good teachers teach to improve the quality of audience members' lives. With this last question, PBT encourages you to consider the future of your listeners' understanding of God, their places in a family of faith, or their relationships with The Holy.

PBT is all about connecting the content in picture books to scripture and/or spiritual truths so that spiritual growth can be more personally meaningful. Longer lasting learning occurs when theological ideas are connected to realistic situations or meaningful concepts. What affects you connects you!

Asking yourself how a picture book will positively affect your listeners is a worthy consideration that gives focus to your planning and teaching.   

As a nationally certified school psychologist, I’m passionate about improving social and emotional skills; those include spiritual skills. Modern psychological research is finding that social and emotional learning (SEL) and its affects on behavior is crucial for success in all relationships as well as in academic learning. For more on this critical link, check out www.casel.org. CASEL has identified 5 Interrelated Sets of COGNITIVE, AFFECTIVE, AND BEHAVIORAL COMPETENCIES: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills, and Responsible Decision Making.

 

With this last PBT question, I’m offering an example book, Just a Dream by Chris Van Allsburg (see my PBT re-post where I offer it as a Grab & Go book [here]). It's a story of a careless boy and his discovery of an array of environmental concerns. 

Connecting this story to God’s desire that we have respectful and intelligent guardianship of Earth’s inhabitants and resources might inspire listeners to evaluate their relationship with the Earth. They could find connections between their behavior and the Earth’s health and see this as a God-ordained relationship. Additionally, this book addresses all 5 of CASELs competencies listed above. 

Here are a couple of amazing illustrations from Van Allsburg. First, I show a scene from Walter’s bad dream. 

 

Here is a “post-dream” scene in which Walter plants a tree for his birthday:

 

This book is one of many possible books about positive behaviors. Here are others from the PBT archives:

Judgement vs. Acceptance - You Are (NOT) Small

Health & Self-Understanding - many I Am books

Learning from Nature - Ruby's Birds

Compassion - What Happened to You?

Building Community - Circles All Around Us

Inclusive Behavior - The Big Umbrella

Loving Behavior - various Bucket books

Responsibility - The Little Hummingbird

Here's another strategy: Think of an important SEL skill, find it or a related word in the large list of search words at the bottom of this screen (on the web version), and see the vast potential PBT has for your ministry and/or your family. May your own SEL learning be enhanced as you teach!