Manners are something that can be very dull and boring to sit and teach your children. Just using the words, “use your manners”, can make children everywhere cringe and send them running from the room. Author Staci Ericson did a wonderful job making learning manners a lot more fun in her book, If A Very Important Person Invited You to Lunch.

Each page is beautifully illustrated with fun, and colorful designs. They are illustrations that kids can relate to. This story is easily read by early readers but also together during family reading time. If A Very Important Person Invited You to Lunch poses a question to your children in a cool way. What would they do if someone important invited them to eat lunch?

That is how we started out our discussion together while reading this title. First we discussed who we would love to have lunch with. It could be a movie star, person in history, chef, or favored relative. They were allowed to pick from someone dead or alive. This really opened up the children’s excitement. There was someone who wanted dinner with a famous YouTube video maker, someone wanted to eat with our old neighbor whom they love, and the boys imagined eating with their favorite Star Wars characters.

Each illustrated page brought in a new discussion. Such as, Would you be on time? We had a debate about the importance of being somewhere on time. Which is something that as a whole family we can struggle with at times. We were able to talk about the feelings we have if someone we have invited over arrives late. How does it make them feel? So why would we want to upset someone else by not arriving on time? 

Manners dealing with eating, personal appearance, and attitudes are presented. But not in a way that talks down to children and tells them what to do. The author presented the information in question form that really opens up the ability to sit down and have a very relaxed and fun approach to teaching manners.

Our family had such fun planning out who we would invite to lunch, and what we would be having. We were able to act out the scenes in the book and instead of just being told “you shouldn’t do that,” we were able to have an open discussion about why we should not be doing something like that.

This last point has been a great addition to our social skills education with our Autism Spectrum kids. It was a fun way to learn, but also discuss the “why” they cannot do those behaviors. They could see why it would annoy other people when I would perform the poor manners to them during our mock luncheon we held while reading the book. After seeing the importance of good manners, we were also able to discuss that these behaviors are important whether we are having dinner with an important person or just amongst ourselves. 

This Mom’s Choice Awards winner is a great read with your own children or would also make a great gift for expecting parents to add to their libraries.  It’s a fun tale for the whole family, and it really helps to create great communication with your kids in a new way.  Instead of them just being read a story, the whole family can participate.

—Product review by Renita Kuehner, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, October, 2016