Adding “Boxcars” to the Storybox Special

Do you know someone who cares for children regularly in his or her home? Do they live in or near Alamosa, CO? They could be a licensed home childcare provider or they might be what I affectionately refer to as a “Granny or Auntie,” a family member who cares for an extended family’s children.

If you are one of those special people or know someone who is, please get in touch with me (scroll down the left hand column for phone and email info). Why?

Because Storybox Special is expanding! Storybox Special is Southern Peaks Library’s early literacy program for home childcare providers. Each month I’ll pick up your previous month’s box of books and deliver a new box to your home for you and your kids to enjoy (and in the process develop early literacy skills).  The only requirement is taking an initial (free) class about early literacy; the entire program is free.

How did we become so blessed with an expansion? Last night the Friends of the Library received a $3000 grant from the El Pomar Foundation to grow the program further here in the San Luis Valley!

I am so tickled and so thankful–and I can’t wait to connect with more families in the month’s to come, thanks to El Pomar!

So give me a call or email!

Babette

Best for Kids? Kindle, Nook, iPad?

This cartoon says it all. Click here.

And I am not saying this just because I’m a librarian. Research into early literacy supports this point.

So for part of the day, put them away.

Babette

Burn Off those Winter Wiggles!

Here’s one of my favorite indoor winter games for kids. It really burns off the energy, leads to lots of giggles, and requires nothing but up and down movement! They’ll even build a bit of phonological awareness in the process.

First, show a “B b” letter and remind kids of the sound.

Then, teach them the song, “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.”

Next, while they are all sitting, tell them when they hear a “b” sound to stand up if they are sitting and to sit down if they are standing. Now start singing!

It sounds simple but it is hysterically difficult even for older kids!

Have fun!

Babette

Alien Reads

Got an older elementary kid (probably boy) that just finished a great book with aliens or spies or great big swords? What can he read next?

Here’s a list I put together for someone last week:

• The Alex Rider series by Horowitz; the first title is Stormbreaker.
• Percy and the Olympians series by Riordan; the first title is The Lightning Thief. Yeah, that one with the movie coming out soon. Don’t let that hold you back. Haven’t met a kid yet that didn’t love these.
• The Johnny Maxwell series by Pratchett; most adult novelists cannot pull off a good kid’s book but Pratchett can. These are laugh out loud funny. The first one is Only You Can Save Mankind (and it does have aliens!).

Read on!

Babette

How to Fix Education

Big messes are never easy to fix. But they are possible when we have the big picture in mind–and when that picture is accurate. Dr. Susan Engel does a marvelous job of refocusing the big picture in the NY Times today; click here. Take a few minutes to read it; she defines the issues just so, making it well worth the read.

We’ve known for over fifty years, through research and experience, what children need to learn. In many ways most children don’t need much; human beings are designed to learn. It’s like feeding them; basic nutrition is not rocket science or we never would have survived as a species. Learning is the same. Yet slowly and incrementally we have eroded that starting point. We have replaced what truly works with “stuff” that grows out of our attitudes. We, as adults, want to feel good and look good and we’ve used children as our props.

Our educational system is busted. It’s a mess and it needs fixing. Some honesty is needed, though, before any changes will matter. And most of this honesty involves attitudes:

More is not better. A malnourished child and a well nourished child do not need the same things. Neither does a “educationally” nourished child need the same things as the “educationally” malnourished child. Middle and upper class parents need to turn loose of this attitude. It strains resources and it harms children who do not need all that “extra” nourishment.

Earlier is not better. There is no research that supports that the earlier a child does something, the better they are at it later. Is your child better at using the toilet at age ten because he potty-trained 9 months before his cousin? Of course, not, how silly.  The same principle applies to learning to walk, talk, read, or count. Doing it “early,” first off, does not last, and second, does not bear out later in “being better.” And when we push for earlier, we stress children, burn them out, kill the love of learning that’s built into them, and take away time from the learning “stuff” they would be doing–if they weren’t working flashcards, beginning readers, or worksheets. Earlier is better has been the mantra in the schools for over forty years–but in the same space of time, results have fallen and fallen. We need to make the connection. It makes us feel like we are “doing more” for children and that makes us look and feel good, but it is counter-productive.

Giving your child every “educational” advantage does not make you a better parent, give you status, or change how you feel about working full-time–or staying home full-time. We as parents need to separate what we claim we do for our kids “for their good” and what we are really doing because it makes us feel better. This is hard, separating our needs from those of our child, but it is essential to good parenting (and to any good relationship). When these get muddled, we sign up for everything “they” (marketers) tell us is needed and we pressure child cares and schools to “do more.”

I hope more people like Dr. Engel get involved in the conversation as NCLB gets revamped. But parents need to be involved also. Schools and legislators need to hear that this is “all right” with parents, that we will support them as they make these desperately needed changes. If you want further reading on this subject, I highly recommend Dr. David Elkind’s book Miseducation.

Read, think, watch your kids–and be honest! We can do what’s best for kids!

Babette

Life in 2010: The View from 1972

There are some movies I remember watching as a kid that I just didn’t “get.” Why? Because I was too young. Remember, this was in the days before videos and dvd’s. If you wanted to see a movie, you went to the theatre. And if your mother, father, or grandmother wanted to see a movie, you went too (well, most of the time. I couldn’t get my teenage aunt to let me go with her and her date to see Valley of the Dolls).

So off to the movies I went! And most of what I saw before the age of ten left me with nothing but a vivid image or two.  And left me feeling pretty clueless.  Here’s a partial list:

• Sound of Music (all I remembered was the graveyard scene)
• Planet of the Apes (all I remembered was the Statue of Liberty at the end)
• Thunderball (watched this one in my pj’s from the back seat of a VW at the drive-in; all I remembered was the cool underwater scooter-thingies)
• Gone with the Wind (all I remembered was the scene before intermission with the rotten carrot)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (I remembered a little more: apes and bones, and the cool talking tv/phone)

What’s this got to do with kids and reading? Conversation, of course! (Hang with me a minute more.)

I have never forgotten the cool talking tv/phone thingie in 2001 over all these years. And in fact, every single time I use Skype to talk with my college kid, I think of it! It still amazes me that we are using something, and using it for free, that was in a movie I saw when I was seven! And it stuck with me then and over all these years (a lot of years, trust me, I know, I have a birthday this week) because it was so fantastic, amazing, and almost unimaginable!

Just a few years later, in 1972, Geoffrey Hoyle, a sci-fi writer of the day, wrote a children’s book, 2010: Living in the Future. And Daniel Sinker has a copy of it, still, and has kindly placed every page online where you can read it with your kids. Click here.

And talk. Lots. About the past. About now. About the future.

About what it was like when you were a kid. About what has changed. And what hasn’t.

About what remarkable things have happened since you were a kid their age. They’ll eat it up. It’s fun for all. (And pssst, you’re building literacy and thinking  skills at the same time. But don’t tell them.)

Have fun!

Babette

The Power of Children

“Children lead us back to the fountainhead

We are blase; We have seen too many strange things.

They call, inviting us to look at, and admire, pictures

That owe their strength to simplicity.”

Paul Hazard (by way of  the blog,  Seven Impossible Things)

Kafka for Children?

Well, Kafka’s not really age appropriate and neither’s Godot. But a new psych study shows that the human brain works incredibly hard to make sense of nonsense and in the process our thinking improves. Read more here.

While the study did not involve children directly, I find the results interesting for those of us who read to children. Nonsense has been a part of children’s stories and books for well over a hundred years–whether it’s Mother Goose rhymes, Rash’s Are You a Horse?, or Shel Silverstein’s poetry. In fact, I’d wager a substantial number of children’s picture books are based either on straight out & out nonsense or have at least an element of “this isn’t quite right, is it?” built into them.

Now obviously, no one knew of this study when those stories were written. So why have we as humans spent so much time and energy writing them and sharing them? It’s because our brains like the nonsense! We like figuring it out!

And the more we expose children to the silliness, nonsense, and off kilter humor found in stories, the more their little neurons are wiring and firing, over and over. And the more they look at the world around them with a wider and wider scope, making more and more connections.

And they just think it’s fun!

Now where’s my copy of Jabberwocky,

Babette

Dinosaur Ballet

Ah, me, reminds me of some preschool ballet classes I’ve watched.

Click here for 45 seconds of fun, compliments of Ross Butter who says, “I got in touch with my inner child. He made me do this.” Yeah, inner child!

Smile!

Babette

New Media Usage Report: Kids Online How Much?

It’s been a week since the news: Kids between the ages of 8 and 18 spend more than 7.5 hours a DAY using some kind of media device.  That’s 47% of their waking hours IF they only sleep 8 hours a day (and the majority of children and teens need more sleep than that). No matter what you think the effects of that usage are, that is a lot of hours!

I like the New York Time’s report on it (click here) which includes a link to the report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, but it’s been reported in multiple news outlets which you can easily find. So instead of rehashing it, I’d like to give you some of my thoughts on it (and this may become a multi-post topic for a couple weeks).

First, a bit about our family and media. We’ve always had a limit on “screen time” with our boys. All screens combined (tv, computer, video games, handheld, whatever) were limited at first to none, then one hour a day, then to two.  We have no tv’s or computers in any bedrooms (including parents’). We have one tv, no cable, and until the last couple months when I started teaching online, we had only one computer. That “family” computer, though, we’ve had since 1995, heavily used by all of us over the years. We have “only” two cell phones in the household, the third is at college with the oldest; all three are prepaids and we use them quite minimally with texting not even set up on them.

We’ve tried over the years to accept the usefulness of developing technologies without ignoring them or trying to block them out entirely. We try to keep the focus on “tech as tool,” nothing more and nothing less. It is as Dr. Rich stated in the NYT article, they are present “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”

But bottom line, as parents, we still are the gatekeepers for health and safety for our children’s air, water, food–and media/tech use.

It’s not easy. We’ve just been through a painful period with our youngest over video games (which I will write more about later). I frankly get tired of evaluating, evaluating, evaluating my usage and my child’s usage on what feels like almost a daily basis. Many days, I just wish it would all go away.

But then, here I sit, using it to do two of the things I love best–blogging (a form of outreach and teaching, I hope) and teaching an online course. And I love it.

So what’s a parent to do? Here’s some  ideas that work for us:

• Remember you are the parent. And media is not an essential for a healthy life. It truly isn’t. Confront some true suffering in life and you’ll get in touch with this very quickly. It’s a tool. It is useful. It is not life. Help your children learn to find the balance because they will have to do it on their own one day.
• Keep your perspective. The article suggested that listening to music while surfing was an increase over what the study found. I’m not sure I agree. All my life (but especially when I was a teen), I listened to music while studying, while talking with friends, even while eating. I also spent an embarrassing number of hours on the phone with my friends. Is my son’s time IM’ing really that much different? On the other hand, if he begins to continually flip through songs without listening all the way through, if he never spends any face to face time with friends, those media uses are probably crossing the line into the potential problem area. And I help him correct those before they become habits. But otherwise, perspective tells me he’s actually being a pretty normal teen and just using a different modality than I did.
• Set limits. And talk with other parents about these so “sneaking around” and being the big, bad “meanie” are less likely to happen. When media starts taking the place of doing other good things, there’s a problem. And with support from your child’s friends’ families, you’ll all be able to monitor those limits easier. (I guarantee you, they have the same concerns.) When the kids can’t do the easiest thing and get plugged in, they’ll find other things to do–and discover they can enjoy themselves and life without the electronics.

What are your concerns? What works for you?

More later!

Babette

MLK Jr. Quote

God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. And history has proved over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive . . . I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Self-Study in Child Development

Not a psych major? Never had the chance to take a course in child development? But always wanted to and don’t have

from Florida State Archives via Flickr

the time or money right now?

Never fear! That’s what books and libraries are for! (That’s from my dad. I heard throughout my childhood that if there was something you wanted to learn, go to the library and get a book.)

I was tickled pink yesterday to have a woman ask me what she could read to understand children better. She’s been working with two year olds, is loving it, and wants to learn more.

And she’s right on target. Children are not miniature adults. They think, learn, behave, move, and in some respects even feel differently than adults. There’s nothing wrong with that though. Nothing that needs “to be fixed.” It’s the way they are made and meant to be–at whatever stage of development they are in. That’s why understanding those stages can be so incredibly helpful for anyone who interacts with kids regularly–be it parent, childcare worker, preschool teacher, or librarian. And that type of understanding is the best gift we can give children!

So what did I recommend to her? Here’s my list:

A Piaget Primer by Dorothy Singer: short, clear explanation of Piaget’s theories (still one of the best and holding up to the test of time); it’s only about 100 pages and examples are drawn from children’s stories and comics!

Miseudcation by David Elkind: ok, regular readers are going to get tired of hearing about this book but its message of the detrimental effects of pushing kids beyond their current developmental level is more timely than when it was written in the late 80’s; it also gives excellent summaries of Piaget and Erikson and of the development of early childhood education; truly a “must” read.

Your Baby and Child by Penelope Leach: the Brit guru of parenting; she covers birth through age 5 and does a marvelous job of clearly conveying the theoretical and the practical; Penelope saved my sanity when I became a first-time mama.

Einstein Never Used Flashcards by Roberta Golinkoff: enjoyable read that connects current brain research with past developmental theories–as well as describing why earlier is not better.

Your Three-Year-Old by Louise Bates Ames: another classic, this is one volume of the Gesell Institute series; there’s one volume for each age up to nine; covers all the bases, emotional, social, physical, etc.,  clearly and succinctly.

Of courssseee, I could go on and on. But that’s my “starter” list. What do you think needs adding?

Babette