Discipline Children Forward

Tim Elmore, in a helpful article for parents and teachers about disciplining children in a positive way says this:

The idea is—this kind of discipline looks ahead at what you are cultivating, not behind at the immature act that just happened. This parent or teacher is always in a futuristic building mode.

Any number of discipline styles can work in the moment, but the truly effective parent or teacher sees today's discipline as the foundation for a joyful, purposeful life.

Read the article.

ADHD and the Relative Age Effect

Children develop in different areas at different rates, and they can mature significantly in just a few months.

Younger children are diagnosed with ADHD at much higher rates than older children in the same grade. (32% higher for children born in the month before the school entry cutoff than for children born the month after according to the US study linked to below.)

Researchers in Taiwan looked at data from 378,881 children ages 4 to 17 and found that students born in August, the cut-off month for school entry in that country, were more likely to be given diagnoses of A.D.H.D. than students born in September. The children born in September would have missed the previous year’s cut-off date for school entry, and thus had nearly a full extra year to mature before entering school. The findings were published Thursday in The Journal of Pediatrics.
...
Other research has shown similar results. An earlier study in the United States, for example, found that roughly 8.4 percent of children born in the month before their state’s cutoff date for kindergarten eligibility are given A.D.H.D. diagnoses, compared to 5.1 percent of children born in the month immediately afterward. 

"Is It Really A. D. H. D. or Just Immaturity" NYT editorial

Here are some ideas for mitigating the relative age effect in the classroom without prescribing too much Ritalin. How about assessing children's readiness for school and being flexible with cutoff dates? Or take a cue from youth sports leagues that are organized into age cohorts narrower than one year. If the goal is to treat every child the same and expect the same from every child in the class make the age cutoffs every six months instead of every year.

Our preschool, takes the opposite approach and embraces various maturity levels. We have 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds together in a multiage classroom where differences in maturity are expected and desirable.

Help Your Child Read with Discernment

I'm reading through the Harry Potter series (amazon affiliate link) with my son. The books are good, but have some iffy content. I thought about writing here about how to help kids read with discernment, but just today I came across this excellent post by Christina Fox at the gospel coalition.

She recommends that parents consider

• the worldview that the author of the book promotes

• what kind of character traits the book promotes and what kind of consequences follow good and bad actions

• whether the book is good literature or not. She says that good books "enrich children's vocabulary, enlighten their imagination, increase their knowledge, and encourage their desire to read." 

And finally she recommends the practice of reading together with your child.

Read the full article.

Home School, Private School, Public School

As we shift back toward homeschooling, I found the following series of articles very interesting. Three moms share why they send their kids to public schools, send their kids to private schools, and keep their kids at home for school, respectively.

Perspectives on Our Children's Education: Going Public

Perspectives on Our Children's Education: A Private Enterprise

Perspectives on Our Children's Education: Homeward Bound

"Grit" Trumps IQ in Predicting Student Success

I see this in school and life all the time. It is those with grit who succeed. Check out Angela Lee Duckworth's paper, "Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents" pdf or if you prefer video to dry, academic papers, watch her TED talk.

The Internet and Education

There's a really good discussion happening between Doug Wilson and Levi Heiple about technology and education. Both men believe strongly in the benefits of Christian education. They have a lot of common ground, but are a ways apart in a few areas, especially in how much to embrace and depend on technology in education--flipped classrooms, blended learning, and the like.

Check out what they've written so far:

Wilson: Chasing the laser pointer dot

Heiple: The internet and education: clarifying the issues

Wilson: Not all cake

Heiple: Delicately disrupting school

There will probably be some more back-and-forth. I don't know if I'll get around to updating this post with the links, but you can figure it out.

Remainders (1/10)

• I recently put together a list of Bible verses about love. What amazed me as I researched for it was the overwhelming number of verses about God's love for us compared with verses about our love for God or others. It's really true that "we love because he first loved us."

• Justin Hyde gives a peek into his family's intentional evenings in a blog post titled "How I Pastor My Family." 

• If your the type who isn't into plowing through the Bible in a year, then maybe the Daily Bible Meditation Guide (pdf) is something you would be interested in. Actually, the whole life2gether blog is really good. (via)

• Flip teaching, or backwards teaching, is a classroom teaching innovation that interests me. The idea is that kids watch lectures and videos at home, and then class is for hands-on work and face-to-face interaction with teacher and peers.  Check out this article in the Daily Riff and this one in the Telegraph. Like many other educational "innovations," homeschoolers have been doing it for a long time.

Benefits of Sudoku

We're on a sudoku kick at the moment. I spent a couple hours today on a really tough one and messed it up twice. T, R, Tomomi and her parents are all in on the action. Besides being fun, addictive, and sometimes frustrating, sudoku helps development in the following areas.

• logic
• problem solving
• working memory
• concentration
• perseverance
• pattern recognition
• creativity
• confidence
• dealing with frustration

by jen_maiser

Of course it's important to start children out with easy puzzles so they don't get too frustrated right away and give up. You can model solving a puzzle and talk your way through it, but once your child has the basic concept, don't help too much. A big part of what makes sudoku fun is the satisfaction of completing a puzzle "all by myself!"

You can find easy printable sudoku puzzles beginning with 4x4 grids.

Here is a link to the more typical 9x9 sudoku grids with various levels of difficulty. 

If you'd rather work with words than numbers, there are lots of logic puzzles that are more like story problems. Here is a collection of 12 printable logic puzzles with grids.

Proto-Website for New Hope International School

I blogged earlier this month about New Hope Preschool's plans to expand into an elementary school and beyond. Well, we now have a location for the school, at least on the internet. We have acquired a domain and put up some information on a rudimentary website. Please check it out.

www.newhopeschool.net

New Hope School Expanding

You may know that I'm the director of New Hope International Preschool in Tokyo, a school that has been around for about five years. We've always dreamed of expanding into older grades. Recently we have been pursuing that dream. Now it looks likes we will be opening our school to elementary school children as early as next fall.

We have been planning behind the scenes for over a year. In October we held our first public meeting. The turnout was big, and there was more interest and support than we had thought. Since then, we've been working hard, choosing curriculum, visiting other schools, seeking advice, and talking to potential teachers and students' families.

New Hope International School will be unique: Christian, unit-based, multiage, and bilingual (more English than Japanese). I look forward to working with children and their families from preschool right through the school years.

If you want to learn more or are interested in helping out, please leave a comment on this blog post or contact us through the New Hope Preschool website. We appreciate your prayers, ideas, and any other support you can offer!

Math Help Online

The web is full of great resources for supplementing our children's regular math curriculum. For example, one of my kids was struggling a bit with place value. Japanese is different from English in that there are words for ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, AND ten-thousands. Then it goes to ten ten-thousands (10,0000), a hundred ten-thousands (100,0000), a thousand ten-thousands (1000,0000), then another word for a hundred million (1,0000,0000), and so on. Add to that the fact that yen are two orders of magnitude different from dollars in value, and you've got guaranteed place value confusion for kids growing up bilingual (and their parents)!

All that to say why we needed extra math help, and how we found some wonderful math resources online. Sal Khan has hundreds of excellent, concise math video lessons, all for free at the Khan Academy. He begins with 1+1=2 and goes right through linear algebra. He has even branched out and done some videos on science, history, finance, and test prep. Here is his first place value video and links to his others. (Click the video to start it. Click it again to see it in a larger size on youtube.)

• Place value 2
• Place value 3
• Decimal place value
• Decimal place value 2

I'm all for teaching math through fun games like UNO, but sometimes you've just got to crank through a worksheet or two to solidify mastery. Softschools.com has help for several subjects including free math worksheets to cover subjects from pre-K through middle school. I like that you can set the minimum and maximum number of digits. Here are the ones I used for place value.

• Place value worksheet
• Numeral to number word worksheet

These are just two of the many, many resources out there. Please share your favorites in the comments.

How Not to Talk to Your Kids

This is an article on how general praise ("You're smart") can actually demotivate a child and prevent him from trying something at which he may not succeed. It's better to affirm effort, especially specific instances of effort ("You worked really hard on those problems"). It originally appeared in the New Yorker a couple years ago and is republished here at fishfulthinking.com. (Try to get past the corny template.)

Playing Competitive Games Cooperatively

The big news around here is that R graduated from kindergarten. Once our photos are a bit more organized, I'll post about that. For now though, I want to share a nice article from The Homeschool Classroom that I read about making board games more cooperative. The author uses Candyland, Sorry, Guess Who, and Scrabble as examples and suggests four ways of modifying the rules.

1. Each player helps all the tokens make their way around the board.
2. Pick a token to be the "bad guy" and everyone takes turn playing for the "bad guy" trying to make him come in last place. Cooperating this way takes deeper strategic thinking than playing the normal way.
3. Play against the clock instead of one another.
4. Play for fun--don't keep score.

Of course competition can be good fun and it is important to learn to win and lose graciously. However, life is more about cooperating for mutual good than just beating everyone else. Read the article for more explanation and ideas about how to make fun and cooperative "house rules" for games.

Aussie Educational Online Games

I just came across an Australian web site with lots of educational flash games for children. On the "Early Years" page, linked to here, there are games that teach math, business, Australian history, civics (by solving common playground problems), and science. There are several other games for different age groups and subjects. Use the sidebar on the left to navigate. The games seem to be just a few of many more that are available only to schools in Australia and New Zealand.

The First Thanksgiving

Here's a good Thanksgiving web site to check out with your kids while you eat turkey sandwiches and leftover pie. T, R, and I just spent some time looking around and learning things like "each pilgrim family was allotted around 800 square feet--about the size of a small apartment." (But a couple hundred square feet bigger than our apartment in Tokyo. Hmmm.)

(Scholastic Thanksgiving)

Dusting Off the Cobwebs

No, I haven't abandoned this blog. Other things, mostly good things, have gotten in the way. This is my first post since June. I won't try to catch up on everything but here are a few highlights.

Summer vacation with grandparents, aunties, uncles and cousins on both sides of the family was great! The kids ended up having about six birthday celebrations among all the traveling.

Our children continue to delight us. Every day when D goes to preschool with Tomomi to drop off R, he walks right up to the easel, puts a piece of paper on it, and paints something colorful. The painting only takes up the bottom third of the paper because that's as high as he can reach.

T is learning multiplication. Here is a conversation he and R had this afternoon.

T: Thirteen times one is thirteen. Know what sixteen times one is?
R: Um, sixteen?
T: No way! How do you know all about multiplication?!?!

I've been reading a lot recently. Here's a sampling:

• The Chronicles of Narnia (because T's reading them and his excitement reignited something in me). This time around Puddleglum in The Silver Chair was my favorite character. Lewis made him so heroic and so comical. He's like a cross between Eeyore and Lieutenant Dan with a touch of what Lucas tried but failed to do with Jar Jar Binks.

• George MacDonald: An Anthology compiled and edited by C. S. Lewis. There are 365 brief, yet rich readings. Here's an example. "While a satisfied justice is an unavoidable eternal event, a satisfied revenge is an eternal impossibility."

• Several books on preschool and elementary education like The Schools Our Children Deserve, Any Child Can Write, Teach a Child to Read with Children's Books, Writing with Ease, and How to Teach Any Child to Spell. I've been trying to understand the debate between phonics proponents and whole language proponents. Like most issues where intelligent, well-meaning people disagree hotly, it looks like both approaches have their merits. They can be combined effectively and much depends individual teaching and learning styles. If I have time, I'll write more later about specific things I'm applying to my teaching.

I've recently started using facebook as a way to stay in touch. It seems like a more appropriate place than this to share family events and photos. This blog will be more of a journal of what I'm reading, thinking about, and experimenting with. It won't be updated very frequently so if you want to see what I write, I recommend mousing to the upper right corner of this page and subscribing either for email updates or rss. If you use facebook and we know each other "in real life," let's connect there.

The Next Generation

This is something that hit my inbox recently and was originally published in "Our Daily Bread." As a preschool teacher and a guy with great Christian parents, it's obvious why this story touches me.

A man who played double-bass in the Mexico City Philharmonic told me that the finest instruments are made of wood that has been allowed to age naturally to remove the moisture. “You must age the wood for 80 years, then play the instrument for 80 years before it reaches its best sound,” said Luis Antonio Rojas. “A craftsman must use wood cut and aged by someone else, and he will never see any instrument reach its peak during his own lifetime.”

Many important things in life are “next generation” matters—teaching, training, and parenting are among them. The apostle Paul invested himself in people whose spiritual influence would continue long after he was gone. He wrote to Timothy: “The things that you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2). Paul, Timothy, “faithful men,” and “others” represent four spiritual generations built on the enduring foundation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Are we living only for today and the short term, or are we giving ourselves to others who will continue the faith after our race is run? Living for Christ and making disciples are all about the next generation.

Tips on Raising Bilingual Children

I just read a good article called "Raising a Bilingual Child" (it's a pdf) by Julia Gariel and Jo Bristow. It gives good, common-sense tips, many of which we follow with our own children and those at the preschool.

Here's an excerpt.

For language learning to be successful it is essential that all exposure provides positive experience. There is no room for destructive criticism or negative comments. What the child needs is praise for effort, celebration of success, joy and laughter. Don't worry if he makes mistakes in grammar or pronunciation. Try to avoid correcting negatively. Just repeat the sentence back to him accurately, model it for him. In time he will automatically use the right structure which the language-learning area of his brain will have stored away for future use. For example:

Child: "Want go now park."

Adult Solution A:
"That's not the right way to ask. If you want to go to the park learn to ask properly. Say it like this . . . No, like this . . . ."

Result A:
Child feels wrong, gets bored repeating words, loses interest in going to the park, loses confidence in his ability to make his needs known. A learning opportunity is lost.

Adult Solution B:
"You want to go to the park now? I want to go to the park now, too. We'll go when we're ready."

Result B:
Child hears his sentence modeled correctly and stores it away. His needs are acknowledged, he feels good about the communication. Further language learning opportunities will take place in the park.

There are several other articles too. Check them out here.

Parking Lot Game

Here's an online game I just stumbled across. The higher levels will make your brain hurt. Make sure you have several minutes to kill before starting.

link

Or if you want to play without looking at a screen, you can get the atoms not bits version at amazon.

[Edited to add the link to amazon]

"The Mother Tongue"

I just finished reading "The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way" by Bill Bryson (thanks Molly!). He writes knowledgeably and hilariously about the history of the language from the Indo-European roots to Cockney rhyming slang and everything in between. As a teacher in Japan, I was particularly interested in the passages that explain why English is so tough to pick up as a second language. He writes of how "no other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced so differently," giving the following list of paired words as an example. Phonics can only take a student so far.

heard--beard
road--broad
five--give
fillet--skillet
early--dearly
beau--beauty
steak--streak
ache--mustache
low--how
doll--droll
scour--four
four--tour
grieve--sieve
paid--said
break--speak

Here's another list that illustrates the difficulty of English spelling. "See if you can tell which of the following words are mispelled."

supercede
conceed
procede
idiosyncracy
concensus
accomodate
impressario
irresistable
rhythym
opthalmologist
diptheria
anamoly
afficianado
caesarian
grafitti

Click the comments link below to check your answer.

And here's a list of British and American synonyms. Cover the column of the country you are most familiar with and see how many words you know. (The list was designed for Americans so British will probably have an easier time of it. And sorry if the table looks weird; I can't get it to look quite right.)

British	American
Cot	Baby’s crib
Cotton (for sewing)	Thread (for sewing)
Courgette	Zucchini
To skive	To loaf
Candy floss	Cotton candy
Full stop (punctuation)	Period (punctuation)
Inverted commas	Quotation marks
Berk	Idiot, boor
Joiner	Skilled carpenter
Knackered	Worn out
Number plate	License plate
Old Bill	Policeman
Scarper	Run away
To chivvy	To hurry along
Subway	Pedestrian underpass
Pantechnicon	Furniture removal truck
Flyover	Vehicle overpass
Leading article	Newspaper editorial
Fruit machine	One-armed bandit
Smalls	Ladies’ underwear
Coach	Long-distance bus
Spiv	Petty thief
To grizzle	To whine
To hump	To carry a heavy load

Despite having a degree in English literature and having worked with British colleagues for several years, I only knew eight of the British words.

Just to show how Bryson combines scholarship and humor, here is what he writes near the end of a section about how the 60-million-word Oxford English dictionary came into being:

But perhaps the most notable of all the OED's minor quirks is its inistence that Shakespeare should be spelled Shakspere. After explaining at some length why this is the only correct spelling, it grudgingly acknowledges that the commonest spelling "is perh. Shakespeare." (To which we might add, it cert. is.)

If you're interested in this book, check it out on amazon with this link. And don't forget to check the comments below to see how many of those words were spelled incorrectly.