Children are curious creatures. What was that? Where are we going? What are you doing? Why is he wearing that? Why?
Why?
Why?
How do you respond to all of these questions? I used to think I was doing my daughter a favor by answering her questions.
Daughter: “What was that sound?”
Me: “An airplane.”
Sometimes my answers were more involved:
Daughter: “What is that sound?”
Me: “It’s the sound that tells people that it’s okay to walk across the street. Most people can see the walking man sign that tells us it’s okay to walk, but some people can’t see it, so this sound tells them when it’s time to cross.”
I’d run with it and take it as a teaching moment to tell her more about people with disabilities and then segue into a lesson about compassion and empathy. She would eat it all up. Boy, I LOVE TEACHING! I just can’t stop myself. I enjoy being the first to unveil the mystery of why people walk outside with umbrellas on sunny days and what all the weird noises are. I love to watch her learn new things, discover how the world works, and make sense of things. But that’s just the thing: If I am always giving her the answers to her questions, maybe she won’t learn very well how to discover answers on her own and make sense of things herself.
If I simply answer all the questions, I rob her of the opportunity to think for herself, to hypothesize, and to develop confidence in her own ability to discover answers. Maybe all my teaching and answer-giving is actually doing her a disservice!
“No, No! DON’T. TAKE. MY. BOOK!!!!” she cried, running over and yanking the book out of his hands.
He had recently learned to crawl, and his new life goal was to put every object into his mouth.
“THAT’S MINE.”
You’d think it was her favorite treasured book, but really it was just one of many books that she enjoyed reading. That’s just how it is though, isn’t it? When someone else wants it, its specialness suddenly spikes and we feel extra possessive for it. I’m still like this, even as I try to train my daughter to respond otherwise.
How would you respond in this situation? Make her give it back? Encourage her to share with him? Ignore it? Tell her to take turns with him? Let her keep it and distract him with something else to play with?
Here’s what I do: I remind her to be more gentle, and then I have her practice being more gentle right then and there.
“Sweetie, you need to be more gentle with your little brother. Let’s try that again. This time, gently ask him if you can use the book, and if he’s okay with it, take it away- gently. Let’s see it.”
I place the book back in his hands and watch her try again, this time doing everything with more gentleness and respect.
Bear-crawling along the blue line
There is a long line of blue tape that runs across our living room. It looks like a very, very long “I.” It’s only been there for a few days, and I’m already forgetting that it’s a weird look in a house. Blue tape? Across the floor? What’s so weird about that? Doesn’t everybody have a pretend balance beam running across their rug and wooden floor?
Well, as long as it makes sense to my toddler, it’s all good. It’s there because when I started taking her to gymnastics class a few weeks ago, I realized she had some room to improve when it came to things like… walking straight haha. So I set down a blue line and did exercises with her every day, and the following week, she showed tremendous improvement in class! Bonus, it got her as good and tired as a good romp around a playground would have done… without stepping foot outside of the house! This is always a win when you’re holing yourself up at home for the afternoon so the baby can get a good nap in!
Here are some of the exercises we’ve been practicing. If you’ve got a toddler in the house, try ’em out! You can use an existing straight line that goes across the kitchen or put some blue tape down to make it feel official. It’s amazing how many activities you can build around a straight line!
Magnatiles are magnetic tiles. They are one of the hottest STEM toys out there!
Last week, I sat my daughter down with her box of Magnatiles. Then I went to go clean up in the kitchen. A few minutes later, she called out, “See, Mama, see! Don’t destroy it!”
I came to see. It. Was. Spectacular.
I mean, she’s not even 2.5 yet. I’m over 30, and I’m not sure I could make something that cool. Half serious.
To be fair, I don’t think she sat down and thought, Hm, I think I’m going to create an awesome mansion castle building thing. Let me create a solid foundation using a combination of squares and right triangles. Now I will build a spire with these isosceles triangles, and mini decorative towers here with four equilateral triangles… ah. Yes. My vision is complete. Mother, come hither.
I’m pretty sure her thought process was more like, I’m going to build a crib. And when she ran out of squares to build up the sides of the crib, she made some out of right triangles. And when she ran out of those, she started sticking other triangles here and there and then she ran out of tiles and lo and behold… her creation looked cool, and her mouth said, “See, Mama, see! Don’t destroy it!”
If you asked me five months ago if I thought she’d be able to make that, the answer would be a clear, flat, no. Because five months ago, she had just opened this box and could only figure out how to play with it in 2D. I was a little disappointed, because this thing is not cheap and I had been hanging onto it for months in anticipation of the time when she’d be ready for it, and it seemed like she still wasn’t old enough to really make something of it.
But then the teacher in me kicked in, and I decided to give her the tools to do more with it. Of course these are open-ended toys and part of the beauty of it is to not make it too structured and instead allow for open-ended play. There’s a lot to be said for letting her just explore and learn things on her own, too. But I felt like if I didn’t intervene and start giving her some “building blocks” for new ways to use these, she’d lose interest and we’d miss an optimal window of learning and she’d put them aside and forget about them.
Teaching philosophies aside, I figure some of you might have some Magnatiles at home and be thinking, “Okay, my kid’s kind of played out with these. Now what?” So I thought I’d share the steps we took in teaching her ways to play with Magnatiles that led, five months later, to her building this all on her own!
This is a basic instructional tip that teachers and parents need to master. NEED. It’s very simple: When instructing your child, frame directions positively. That means tell them what they SHOULD do, not what they shouldn’t do (unlike my image title…). For example, it will be more effective to say, “Keep your food in your mouth!” instead of “Don’t spit out your food!”
Framing things positively helps your child focus on the words and actions they should do. Not only does it keep the image of unwanted actions out of their heads, it replaces them with positive desirable actions. One of my teaching instructors once put it like this: “Okay, I want you guys to do exactly what I tell you. Don’t think of the color blue. NOT blue. NOT BLUE. NOT BLUE. DON’T THINK ABOUT THE COLOR BLUE. ANYTHING BUT BLUE– you’re totally thinking about the color blue, right?”
We laughed. It was true. He kept SAYING blue, so even though we were trying to follow his instructions, the color blue kept cropping up in the visuals of our minds. Even when we had pink or red or yellow passing through our minds, blue kept flashing through as he kept saying it.
That’s what comes to mind when I hear myself say to my child, “Don’t spit! Don’t spit! DON’T SPIT OUT YOUR WATER.” I watch in horror as water, seemingly involuntarily, comes dribbling out her mouth, down her chin, and all over her shirt. Perhaps she’s being disobedient, or perhaps I’m just making it hard for her by using the very verb I’m trying to have her avoid. Instead, I try to remind myself to say, “SWALLOW IT! SWALLOW your water! KEEP IT IN YOUR MOUTH!” I often find that this results in her making a concentrated effort to swallow and keep it in her mouth.
Hello Readers! Hilary Smith is a writer and parent who specializes in spreading positive parenting techniques, focusing on the use of social media and new technologies by tweens and teenagers. These are hard topics that I hardly know how to talk about, but I’m glad someone is! I think you will find this information very useful if you have a child with access to technology!
Like what you read? Follow her twitter @HilaryS33.
Did Your Child Receive a Smartphone Recently? What You Need to Know
Guest post by Hilary Smith
Digital citizenship comes with a price many of us don’t realize until after we hand our kids a Smartphone. Lurking behind the glow of their screens and friendly social media apps hides an underbelly of cyberbullying, sexting, oversharing, and predator grooming occurring right under our noses. If your son or daughter has recently acquired a Smartphone, there are a few things you need to know to help protect your child.
A couple weeks ago, I shared about how I tried to teach kids to communicate effectively. We talked about the importance of body language, eye contact, and showing understanding. I didn’t want to leave it at that. In this post, I’ll share how I brought their conversational skills to the next level.
Once my students seemed to understand how to listen well, we moved onto the next step: learn how to have a discussion. It’s basically expanding on the “showing understanding” step from before, and then adding a fourth step: Add your own thought. This can also be thought of as a lesson on “How to Agree and Disagree Politely.”
I think this is an essential life skill that every person should work on! Myself included :P. I eventually found a way to do it that was really fun for everyone. Here’s how it went:
Me: So you know how we’ve been working on improving our communication skills?
(Suddenly they all straighten up give me penetrating eye contact :))
Me: Ah yes, I see you remember! Well, today we’re going to take it a step further. It’s good and all to learn to listen well, but you also need to learn how to share your own thoughts well. Now, this doesn’t mean just blabbing on and on and always talking. It also doesn’t mean sitting there just waiting for your chance to say what you want to say and only concentrating on your own thought. I’m going to teach you a polite and courteous way to do it. It’s two steps. First, you SHOW that you were listening, and then you ADD your own thoughts. Again, SHOW your listening, then ADD your own thoughts.
Let me give you an example.
I think my friend Rachel needs to start a blog. Until that happens, I get to pick her brain and ask her to write guest posts for us here! I say that like I’m going to keep asking. Because I probably will :D. (Rachel, you’ve been warned ;)). A couple months ago, she shared her awesome tips on How Teaching Has Influenced My Parenting. Today, I am sharing her equally thoughtful and practical ideas on How Parenting Will Affect My Teaching. It’s everything I had hoped it would be, and more! I am super excited for you to read it. Teachers, I’d love to hear how parenting has affected you as an educator as well! Please feel free to share in the comments below.
How Parenting Will Affect My Teaching
A guest post by Rachel K.
Being a stay-at-home mom is a gift in many ways: It has allowed me to watch my kids grow up, shape the way they see and interact with the world, take an active role in their education and in helping them develop life skills. All of which, I would consider, standard fare (things you could reasonably expect to experience when you are at home with your children). As an educator on hiatus, however, I have been gifted in unexpected ways too. I have gotten to experience life from the outside of the classroom looking in. I have helped with homework I haven’t assigned, quizzed for tests I wasn’t giving, and attended parent conferences and IEP’s where I got to listen instead of lead. It has been, and continues to be, quite the learning experience. What follows are my top 3 take-aways that I will be implementing when I return to education.
Take Away #1: Less homework. More meaningful homework.
It wasn’t until my son became a kindergartner that my view on homework changed. And I am so glad it did! I used to see real value in homework. I still do, to a degree. But nowhere near what I did before I had school-aged kids.
It started as a lesson to prepare my students for book club discussions. In my early years of teaching, I noticed that kids always seemed so preoccupied with saying what they wanted to say during a discussion that they hardly seemed to pay attention to what others were saying. If I’m honest with myself, I know some adults who are like this. (If I’m really honest with myself, sometimes I’m like this! Hah.)
So I prepared a lesson to teach my fourth graders to be better at these discussions. While my original purpose was to improve book club conversations, our class conversation soon morphed to focusing on the importance of showing courtesy and respect when conversing with anyone, anywhere! In the years following, I made sure to teach conversational skills early on so we could practice all year long. The kids always loved this lesson, because it was real and it was a social skill they could tell was applicable to all of life.
I usually started it off like this:
“Today, we’re going to talk about how to communicate effectively. Usually, we think of communicating as talking, but there are lots of ways to communicate with others. For example, you are always communicating with your body. Think about what your mom looks like when she’s talking with another mom. When she’s listening, she’s usually nodding her head, looking the person in the eye, and says, ‘Uh huh… yeah! Oh, totally…’ and other things to show she is listening, right?”
I can see, as I’m imitating mothers, that my students are envisioning their own moms showing these excellent listening skills.
“It’s not just what she’s saying, but it’s the way she is furrowing her brow, looking intently, nodding, and holding her arms still that shows she is interested and engaged. What if, instead of all those things, she did this?”
I repeat the same words- “Uh huh… yeah… Oh, totally…” but this time while rolling my eyes, sighing in the middle, tilting my head away from the speaker, and using bored inflections in my voice.
The kids laugh.
“It’s funny, right? I mean, I said the same things, but it was clear from my body language and my tone of voice that I was not really listening well. Body language sometimes communicates a lot more than your words, so when we are in conversations, we should be sure to use good body language that says, ‘I’m listening!’ to show respect to the other person. That means you’re sitting up, making eye contact, your mouth is closed and not talking over them, and your hands are still.”
Even as I’m saying it, I see all their backs straighten, their eyes fixed on me, mouths shut, with perfect little snowball hands. How darling.
I introduced playdough to my girl a few months ago, but it wasn’t until she turned two that she really, really got into it.
Playdough is fantastic for imaginative play, fine motor skills and well, keeping your kid occupied while you cook dinner. Look, she might even make you a wrap with arugula and cheese while you’re at it!
Looks tasty, right? 🙂
One annoying thing about playdough is its tendency to dry out quickly. We have a lot of little tubs of Play-doh, and even if we remember to put it back into the tub each time, it still starts getting dry in a matter of days, and that’s not as fun to play with. Of course, half the time we forget and leave it out and come back to an icky, crusty chunk of dough that is not pliable at all. No fun. Also, the tubs of Play-doh are so unsatisfyingly small. You can barely shape a strawberry out of one before you run out!
I’m so over that. Now I can use a few simple pantry ingredients to make a HUGE ball of playdough that she can make a grand feast with! Now she has huge hunks of “bread” that she can really cut through with a plastic knife, and lots of pasta “dough” to extrude noodles with. It is so satisfying to have a huge hunk of dough :). I also like that we can make it whatever color we want (although our purple one pictured above came out kind of muddy looking).
She helped me make it last time, and she learned so many fun things through the process! Some examples:
- scooping and leveling flour
- stirring
- pouring water carefully
- red and blue mix together to make… PURPLE!!! PUR-PO MAMA, PUR-PO!!!
- heat causes chemical reactions (okay she might not totally grasp this concept yet, but it was a great introduction to it!)
- how to knead dough
It was a great morning activity and we still have a moist blob of playdough to show for it. I also feel like mom of the year, so that counts for something, too. If it’s your first time, I’d suggest starting the the quarter recipe and making more in the future if you like. Enjoy!!
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