Focus on the positive

I’ve been thinking lately about one lesson I learned through parenting a child with behavioral and learning differences. When you parent a child who falls somewhere within that wide field we call “typical,” lots of traditional parenting methods with incentives and consequences might work well enough. But it’s not until we have a child who falls far from the center of the field that we might discover the value of parenting—and teaching—to the positive.

I was most recently reminded of this when my daughter spent a week at her favorite summer camp, Santa Cruz Soccer Camp. The first time I brought her to camp, I was very nervous. I explained that there were various behavioral challenges and that I was willing to stay and help. Coach Bill, without hesitation, asked if she was liable to run off.

1406Soccer1“Well, no,” I answered. That was one challenge she’d never presented me with!

“Fine, then,” he said. “We can handle anything else. Go get some time for yourself.”

And that was the end of the idea that I might have to stay and supervise her at soccer camp. The reason Bill was so sure of his camp’s ability to handle my child was simply that they don’t focus on the problems—they focus on success. They call their approach “learning through enjoyment,” but it’s a variation on lots of approaches with different names that stem from one simple idea: kids learn when they enjoy something and are successful at it, not when they are set up to fail and are punished. Lots of kids have learned deep lessons from soccer, drama, writing, and science—I am willing to bet that few have learned from detention.

Kids learn when they feel a reason for learning: they’re having fun, they’re benefiting personally from what they’re doing, or even when they see that someone else is benefiting from what they’re doing. Kids do learn from failure, but only when it’s in the context of a challenge that makes sense to them. Kids don’t learn when they’re scared—or rather, they don’t learn the lesson we think they’ve learned. A student who is afraid of failing history doesn’t learn history because he’s afraid, but he may well learn how to search for plagiarized history papers online. A child who is afraid her parent will punish her if she’s rude doesn’t learn the value of being polite—she learns how to avoid punishment.

Now that my daughter is eleven, one of the things I’m looking forward to in the near future is leadership training at her soccer camp. This year when Bill asked all the coaches who had been through leadership training to step forward, all but one did (and the one who didn’t just simply didn’t grow up in Santa Cruz!). These wonderful people who spend their summers teaching soccer and success to kids are now adults or almost adults, and many of them started in this very camp when they were five or six. Leadership taught them the value of success, not just for themselves but the value of helping others achieve success.

I looked at a number of potential schools for my daughter to attend next year, and one thing that struck me now that I have this awareness of the value of success is how the staff view their jobs. At one school I visited, the staff—from principal on down—talked somewhat like jailers. They focused on the negative aspects of young teens, talked about all the problems that our kids would face, and warned us that our sweet children were about to turn into sullen, uncommunicative teens.

Guess where my daughter is not going?

Now that she’s a tween, she’s gotten past being a “troublemaker” in the classroom. I don’t expect her to have disciplinary problems, so why would I care how the staff treats these problems? The reason is that how we view the people we work with—whether they’re preschoolers or high schoolers—will affect their achievements. Schools with cultures that focus on success will find that they have fewer problems to begin with. They will find that when you focus on students’ positive qualities, those positive qualities will shine brighter. The students’ problems—their negative qualities—will not disappear, but they won’t be always in the spotlight.

Of course, no approach is 100% successful, so sure, you’ll be able to show me students who didn’t succeed in spite of a focus on the positive. But I’ve seen it with so many children—and the people at soccer camp can vouch for the approach with even more authority. Focusing on a student’s strengths and making sure they’re having fun while they’re working hard is a time-tested recipe for success.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I sure do wish there were some way to have summer camp all year round!

My essential children’s library

School is out this week, and I am thinking toward next week: annual spring cleaning. Our spring cleaning usually happens in the summer and is largely a culling of clothing the kids have outgrown, homeschooling materials we don’t need and will pass on to others, and books.

Yes, my family is part of the rare set of humans who have: a) remodeled their whole upstairs after discussing the need for more bookshelves, and b) bought a house in large part because of the copious bookshelf space in the kitchen.

Despite our feeling that you can never have too many books, when you have kids who love to read, you can have too many books. Books they hated and will never read again, books they bought at their school book fair (hosted by a not-to-be-mentioned publisher of generally cheap and disposable literature), books someone gave them that they will never be interested in.

But there are some books that will stay on our shelves no matter what. I decided to write up a list of these books, the ones I brought with me from childhood as well as the ones we’ve discovered since. My personal list of desert island children’s literature, so to speak.

Personally, I love the old Alice woodcuts and wouldn’t buy a book with modern illustrations!

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

I will admit, this book will always come first for me. I read this book over and over as a child and as a teen. There is nothing else like it in terms of the effect the tale had on our culture, the inventiveness of the language, and the incredible imagination married with observations of the real world.

Harry Potter by J.K.Rowling

This list was inspired a few minutes ago by my standing in front of my son’s bookshelves, musing about how worn out his copies are. He and his sister have read these books to shreds. And the most wonderful thing about these books is that they squeaked in right before the age of i-devices changed children forever. They are perhaps our last, innocent look at childhood before the iPad, the child without Google, the child who has to invent his own games and solve his own problems.

The New Way Things Work by David MacAulay

I wasn’t familiar with MacAulay before a friend bought the original version of this book for my son. This is the book that answers questions about the stuff we use every day in depth and with humor. Really, you could buy any of MacAulay’s books—his books Castle, City, Cathedral, The Way We Workand many others do the same for more specific subjects. When I was a child we had the Time/Life series of books about the world, and this is like a modern take on those (which don’t make my list because, alas, our kids do have Google and Time/Life seems so quaint now).

The collected works of Dr. Seuss

Go ahead, splurge and get them all. Dr. Seuss was born when Theodor Geisel was issued the challenge of writing a children’s book with only the most common 50 words that a first-grader can read. He wrote The Cat in the Hat. Most of us would have written Dick and Jane Do Something Really Boring! Seuss’s books are so amazing because with so little he creates drama, tension, and irony, something often lacking in children’s early readers. Throw away the Bob books—read Seuss over and over!

The lines between good and bad, dark and light, friend and wild beast are all blurred in Sendak’s work.

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Like Seuss, Sendak never worried about corrupting young minds—he knew that young minds love the dark and mysterious parts of life. Like Seuss and MacAulay, the illustrations are also a huge part of the story. Can you imagine someone issuing Where the Wild Things Are with new illustrations? How could any artist improve on Sendak’s dark and silly, scary and cute world?

Books about my part of the world

This, of course, would change with each reader’s location. I think having books set in and about the environment your children are growing up in is a wonderful part of the reading life. When I was a child, I don’t remember a single book covering anything remotely like the place I grew up in. But since I have been raising my children on California’s Central Coast, we have collected both fiction and nonfiction about our area. If you’re a local here, check out my book list of children’s books set in our area. We also have multiple books on redwood forests, a local mushroom guide, several books about the ecology of our seashore, and Tom Killion’s wonderful woodcuts.

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis

I found it fascinating to reread these books as an adult once my kids were ready for them. I had such intense, vivid recollections from the books and had read them multiple times as a child. As adults, both my husband and I found them disappointing, hardly the brilliant tales we remembered. But our children adored them. Just like me, my daughter went through a period where she read and reread them. I guess just as the children can’t go to Narnia once they were grown up, my grown-up self just can’t access the magic anymore. But they clearly still speak to kids.

Little House on the Prairie and sequels by Laura Ingalls Wilder

My adult enjoyment of these books is tempered by what I have read about Wilder and her manipulative daughter. But ignore all that—the Little House series, with all of its distortions and rose-colored glasses, is a deeply important part of American culture. I think all children should read these books, but somehow they seem to be most important to girls of a certain age. I was sure, when I was a girl, that I’d been born into the wrong time. I longed to get up with Laura on icy mornings, stoking up the fire and trudging to the well. Laura has been a trusted friend to American children for so many generations because her stories are so appealing, and so much a part of the history of this country.

My First series by DK

Encyclopedias for the toddler set—these books are wonderful to look at with small children. They are apparently not publishing the one my son loved the most. Simply called My First Word Book, it featured pictures of most of the things that a small child might encounter in daily life, arranged by category. We referred to this book as “the datz book” because whenever he saw something he liked, he would point at it and say “datz!” He did a lot of pointing with these books.

If you’d like to see other book lists I’ve written, click here!


This post is part of the Hoagies’ Gifted Blog Hop—click here to read other great blogs about summer reading.

This month, we focus on Summer Reading. Summer gives many of us extra opportunities for reading… the fiction we love but don’t usually have time for, the non-fiction that we wish we had time to study during the year, or the boundless free time to read on the beach, at the cabin, or on the boat… or in your own living room. Don’t miss the special reading (and Lego!) nook, or the struggle some kids have with reading. Summer Reading is more than just a school reading list.

The Snopes childhood

The other day I was telling my son about the Loch Ness Monster. He’s fifteen and had perhaps heard of the thing somewhere, but it’s hardly a fixture in his childhood as it was in mine. Of course, there are various reasons for this: what is interesting to kids and popular culture changes over time so perhaps Nessie will come around again.

But the biggest reason, I think, is how childhood has changed in this time of the (Dis)Information Super Highway.

Loch Ness Monster
Nessie was a fixture in my 70s childhood.

The Loch Ness Monster was big for kids of my generation not just because it was a funny hoax and funny hoaxes are fun. (If you don’t agree with that, just visit Youtube and start watching.)

Nessie was also big because in the 70s, you had to be seriously dedicated to perpetuate a worldwide hoax. Even crop circles weren’t popularized until the late 70s, and I remember hearing about them in the Midwest only in the early 80s. The people who perpetuated the Loch Ness Monster hoax had to put in real energy and do it with purpose. They had to take photographs at the real site, then physically alter those photos to show the monster. Then they had to show those photos to many, many people, not just their drinking buddies at the local pub. They had to dupe people who were professional skeptics—newspaper editors most of all.

These days, the hoax is a part of our daily lives. Whenever someone posts something fishy on Facebook or forwards it to me in email, I hardly have to think before typing SNOPES.COM into my browser. If the Snopes people ever decide to get a sense of humor (and ditch their sense of ethics) I’m in big trouble!

Hoax me!

Today I fell for a hoax without hesitation. I saw this headline on Facebook:

Computer simulating 13-year-old boy 
becomes first to pass Turing test

To the wife and mother of computer dudes, this is big news (google “turing test” if you don’t know what that is). I clicked, skimmed, and forwarded.

Too bad it was a hoax perpetuated by a known hoaxster who is well-known in the technical world, but apparently not by the very well-educated and (I hope) sufficiently skeptical editors of The New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, Yahoo, ZDNet, Ars Technica… the list is so depressing I won’t go on. Sheesh, even the Santa Cruz Sentinel, our local bastion of fine journalism, didn’t fall for it. But the New York Times? Well, OK, they’re not always the most technically savvy publication, but well-known technology blogs?

So here’s my question:

Are our children growing up in a world in which the line between reality and fiction is no longer clear, in which, in fact, there may be no line?

Are they growing up a world in which reality can be manufactured—-google “truthiness“—-and dismissed just as easily? If so, how will this affect them as they grow older and need to make more and more serious decisions in their lives?

I just finished the last Hunger Games book, which, I agree with others who have said so, didn’t quite live up to the promise that the series had made. However, I really appreciate one of the themes in the series, one that I think really resonates with young readers growing up in this confusing world. Over and over, Katniss sees that what seems real turns out to be manufactured, and what she assumes is manufactured turns out to be real. She lives in a world where the earth under her feet shifts at the will of the government, and her distrust of reality and everyone in it is the most unsettling and meaningful part of the series.

We’re not that far gone yet, and in fact I doubt it’s “the government” that we should fear here. But we are slipping into that world. It’s so easy to be pulled into online hoaxes… how long until they slip into our real world?

For my part, a bit worried, I queried my son by email as to whether he thought that his parents were just an Internet hoax. His answer was somewhat comforting:

"I'm pretty sure you're real..."

…but what’s up with that final ellipsis? Perhaps he has his doubts… And if he does, what’s to say that the question can ever be answered conclusively?

So I have to admit, I’m not planning on asking my 11-year-old the same question anytime soon. I fear what her answer might be…

Learning through play

Kid #1

When our son was ready to enter kindergarten, we had to do some soul-searching to choose between the various local options for education. We narrowed our choices down to three:

  1. The public elementary school, which started very early in the morning (I had a baby at the time) and which was in the midst of No Child Left Behind efforts to pump up test scores.
  2. A local Montessori, which many parents love but somehow rubbed me the wrong way with its no-parents-allowed rules and quiet, orderly classrooms.
  3. What I referred to as our local “granola” or “hippie” school, where the kids played hard and got very, very dirty.

My husband and I figured that the dirtiness of the kids at the end of the day was probably a good indicator for kindergarten, so we signed him up. At his school, he got to work with clay every week. He got to ride a zipline from a two-story play structure. He was so thrilled at being allowed to climb a tall redwood on the property that the school actually had to make a rule (something they seldom did) because he was giving the adults heart palpitations when they looked up and saw a small boy so high in the air.

En garde!
My daughter and friends “working hard” at being homeschoolers.

Though the next year we enrolled him in a public charter because the private school tuition was too much for us, I felt like I’d given him a gift that we couldn’t put a price on. While the public schools were hell-bent on pushing academics earlier and earlier, cutting out art, music, and PE in their zeal to “improve testing outcomes,” we made a commitment to following the research, which is very, very clear:

  • Kindergarteners do not need academics to become good students later.
  • Success in life, or even just school, does not depend on 6-year-olds being able to sit still at desks and color in worksheets.
  • Putting unnecessarily high expectations on children does not make them develop faster.
  • When the choice for an activity for 6-year-olds is between nature and worksheets, nature should always win.

Kid #2

Once our daughter was kindergarten age, we had a whole new host of concerns. She was clearly not going to be able to hack it in a public school classroom, so we ended up homeschooling. And once I started homeschooling, I found out that I wasn’t the only person in the county (as it seemed up until then) who had read the research and knew that academics weren’t important for kindergarteners. Homeschoolers were out there playing in the dirt all the time, and they were showing good results. Kids who had played in the dirt and did no academics at all until they were in their double digits were doing just fine—some of them were getting into our top universities.

Why don’t we play?

So why do we persist in trying to shove academics earlier and earlier when the research is so clear? I think part of it is our Puritan leanings—as a culture, we are uncomfortable with our children “playing” rather than “working.” (I once ran into a neighbor packing her 3-year-old into the car in the wee hours of the morning. The mom cheerfully announced, “I’m going to work at my office, and she is going to her work at preschool.” Really?)

Another reason is that our educational establishment has become obsessed with testable outcomes, and you don’t necessarily get testable outcomes by sending kids out to play in the dirt. When you do worksheets, you can show that little Johnny’s ability to color the apple red and the banana yellow improved through the year. No matter that no typical kid needs to be taught these things. Do we really believe that Johnny would be coloring his apples purple as an adult because he wasn’t taught this in kindergarten? (In fact, the avant garde in me says, what the heck is wrong with purple apples anyway?)

Finally, modern families have found themselves living lives that hardly resemble the lives of families 30 years ago. For a variety of reasons—social, political, economical—parents spend less and less time with their kids. They still love their kids as much as ever, and want to know that their kids are doing well. But when they pick up their kid from kindergarten and all he brings home is dirt in his shoes, that doesn’t feel as satisfying as when they get that stack of worksheets that show that Johnny is indeed “learning” and “working” at school. As families detach themselves from the daily lives of kids, it’s easier for them to believe that “working” is “learning,” though the two have only a glancing relationship at best. So parents themselves often feed into a school’s “work” culture and demand to see more evidence of their children’s achievements.

Parents of children who have been deemed “gifted” may fall victim to these pressures doubly—we often feel compelled to use our kids’ output as some sort of proof that they deserve the label. Although some gifted kids do love doing academic work at an early age, most approach their “work” just as other kids do: through play. Parents of many highly advanced math students say that they had no reason for repetitive worksheets—their kids played math because they loved it.

The proof is in the dirty fingernails

There’s always the issue of how we “prove” that all play and no work is good for young children. There’s lots of better evidence out there (see links below), but I can add that my children, a sample size of two, are doing just fine. My son never had a single day of reading instruction at school, and now he can read anything he wants to, including college level textbooks that he’s using as a high schooler. My daughter played her way through kindergarten, first, second, and third grade, with a tiny bit of “academics” thrown in starting in fourth grade. She’s now in public school sixth grade, doing well and with test scores to “prove” it.

But for a larger sample, just look around at any group of adults over 40. Did any of us have academic instruction in kindergarten? Probably a few. Most of us went to play-based kindergartens where academics was limited to singing the alphabet song. But here we are, inventing amazing handheld devices, making groundbreaking films, running thriving small businesses, working as dental hygienists and truck drivers and police officers…and, most importantly, raising our children.

In our overscheduled world, making time for free play can sometimes seem more difficult than making it to tae kwon do class three times a week. But although all the opportunities we modern parents offer our children are great, we can’t lose sight of the undeniable fact that having nothing to do is good for kids.

As my mother used to say when a child complained of boredom, “Go outside and get out of my hair!”

A few resources to learn more about learning through play:


 

This month, Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page shares our Blog Hop on Gifted @Play.  Bloggers from all corners of the gifted community–parents, teachers and counselors, from the U.S., Europe, Australia and New Zealand–join us to share their perspectives on play: outdoors, indoors, creative, active, child, teen and adult.

Don’t miss last month’s inaugural Blog Hop, The “G” Word.  If you’d like to join our next Blog Hop, contact us at[email protected].  Special thanks to Pamela Ryan for our Blog Hop graphics!

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