In the mid 1940’s European psychiatrists studied the development of babies in institutions, deprived of the emotional warmth of a mother, father, or one-on-one caregiver. These researchers saw infants who failed to thrive and had a high two-year mortality rate. What seemed to heal these children was human touch. Touch communicates powerfully. For our children touch […]
Category Archive:
Children’s basic needs
Paying Attention
Pay attention. As a child that phrase meant to stop whatever else I was doing and focus on the requested activity. The phrase, paying attention, connotes immobility. Here’s the paradox of paying attention. Learning involves movement. Movement done automatically activates few new connections in the brain for learning. When we pay attention to our movements, especially for […]
FREE WEBINAR | Helping Children Learn To Listen
In my many years of working with young children, there is one question I hear frequently from parents and teachers: How do I get children to listen to me? When we are confronted with tantrums, defiant behavior, or worse, it’s difficult to know what to do. But these situations are usually avoidable, or at least […]
Pony Up
My natural proclivities tend toward optimism. During these past three years of pandemic disruptions, though, I’ve had to remind myself more than once of the old joke about “there’s a pony in there somewhere.” As I visit with folks, parents and grandparents, we’re beginning to see the pony. It really is there! Our pony has […]
Educational Freedom
My schooling consisted of six elementary schools, one junior high, one high school, three colleges and two Montessori institutes. I’ve attended schools in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Oregon, Ohio, Washington, D.C, Germany, and Costa Rica. The similarities in all these schools are striking in the fact that the teacher lectured at the front of the room; there […]
BOOK | Stolen Focus
It’s been a long time coming. And now it seems to me we can’t ignore our situation any longer. It may have begun in 1989 with the introduction of Game Boy, which for those of you who don’t know, was played on a handheld device that required only the use of thumbs. By 1993 […]
How Learning Takes Place
In this Kids Talk Series, Exponential Education, we consider how learning takes place. Does our current educational system meet the reality of how our children actually learn? Read the Exponential Education Series to help spark discussion within your family and community. Kids Talk Exponential Education Series Towards The New Education Every Brain Is Unique Learning […]
Why Children Struggle With Academics
When we see children struggle with basic academics–reading, writing and arithmetic– there can be many underlying situations, but issues usually cluster around these three areas: Illiteracy Innumeracy Lack of social-emotional skills Illiteracy What I mean by illiteracy is the inability to read and write fluently. Children feeling defeated by the lessons put in front of […]
Read The Children’s Literacy Series
Here are ten articles from my Children’s Literacy Series to help you understand the process of how children learn to read. Most reading difficulties might be avoided if we as parents and teachers knew the importance of the right kind of preparation for reading we could offer to our young children. If you have a […]
Centuries of Fun
The group of ten-year-olds sat absorbed, thumbs moving. Each played an individual game on his cell phone. Over the past few years I keep noticing this phenomena of groups of children who elect to be connected to their electronic games when there are “live knowledge objects” previously know as “people” sitting right next to them. […]