Growth and honesty: words from a story chapter
A story about growth shows how a character changes. To read it, ask: What does the character do wrong or find difficult? What does the character feel? What choice does the character make? What does the character learn? Some key words help: someone who is dedicated works very hard because he or she cares; trust means believing that a person is honest and reliable; honesty means telling the truth, even when it is difficult; self-awareness means knowing your own feelings, strengths and weaknesses. Quit means to stop before the end (She never quits before the finish line), and agriculture is the work of growing crops and keeping animals. Honesty is not always easy, but it builds trust, and trust helps a person to grow. Knowing a weakness is part of self-awareness, but you do not have to share it: it is private and you can decide with a grown-up what to say. Your book has Chapter Five of a serial story on pages 78–79: read it after this lesson and answer the four questions above. Here we practise with our own text.
| Question | Answer from our text |
|---|---|
| What is difficult? | Selim cut a table leg too short. |
| What does he feel? | He is afraid and wants to hide it. |
| What choice does he make? | He tells the truth. |
| What does he learn? | Telling the truth makes him feel lighter, and his uncle trusts him. |
Selim was an apprentice in his uncle’s carpentry workshop, and he was dedicated: he arrived early and stayed late to practise. One day he made a small mistake with the saw and cut a table leg too short. He was afraid, and for a moment he thought about hiding the leg behind the other wood. Then he remembered that his uncle trusted him, so he told the truth. His uncle was not angry. He said, “Thank you for being honest. Now we can fix it together.” Selim learned something about himself: when he is afraid, he wants to hide, but telling the truth makes him feel lighter. This self-awareness helped him to grow, and in the following months his uncle trusted him with harder jobs.
Growth line. Draw a line with three points: a mistake you made, what you felt, and what you learned. Choose a mistake that you are happy to talk about. Tell it to a grown-up in four sentences and say which words from the lesson fit your story.