1–15 of 15
In The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood (2006), the art theorist Ellen Handler Spitz argues that "[t]he topic of adult participation in children's play is delicate, complex, and controversial," largely due to the overwhelming influence a parent or a teacher or even adult-generated entertainment media can…
Whereas teachers and school boards typically decide in advance what knowledge children should receive based on their age, emergent curriculum is the technique of letting topics for study arise out of student interests and actions. Curriculum becomes what actually happens, rather than what was planned to happen. After…
A generation ago 70 percent of children played outside; today the rate is down to 30 percent.209 In 2008 the nine-year-old son of the journalist Lenore Skenazy begged her to let him go home by himself on the New York subway. She agreed, and he made it home without incident. When she wrote about the vignette in a New…
Children learn very early (often as young as 2 years old) to recite the number-word list in order (Fuson, 1988). But at the beginning, the words are merely placeholders—children recite the list without knowing what the individual number words mean. Over time, children fill in the words with meaning, one at a time and…
The tapping game is when I tap one time, you tap two times, and when I tap two times, you tap one time. Children play this game sixteen times, mixing up the times that children are asked to tap once when the experimenter taps twice, and tap twice when the experimenter taps once. In other words, the rules of the game…
All children are curious and I wonder by what process this trait becomes developed in some and suppressed in others. I suspect again that schools and colleges help in the suppression insofar as they meet curiosity by giving the answers, rather than by some method that leads from narrower questions to broader…
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
1. Keep the TV off before the child turns 2. I know this is tough to hear for parents who need a break. If you can’t turn it off—if you haven’t created those social networks that can allow you a rest—at least limit your child’s exposure to TV. We live in the real world, after all, and an irritated, overextended parent…
First of all, language stimulation should begin very early: by just three years of age, children are already headed down vastly different paths of verbal achievement as a result of their cumulative experience with language. Ideally, language stimulation should begin at birth, since we know that newborns' brains are…
Alison and Andy designed an experiment to test this idea further. First they set up an imitation game: you give the toy to me and I'll give it to you; you put the sticker on my hand and I'll put it on your hand. Children are very good at this and love doing it. Then Alison and Andy put a screen on the table between…
;ct. What parents want even influences the very ways they label children. Sara Harkness and Charles Super found that when parents in three cultures were asked about intelligence, their views of what constitutes a smart child differed.^^ In America, an "intelligent" child is one who is aggressive and competitive; in…
They say it's narcissistic to push your kids to follow in your footsteps, but when they say that, they must be talking about other people. After all, my footsteps, often covered with disposable clean-room booties, lead to science, which is a responsibly nerdy career choice. Or is it? Credit: Hal Mayforth Nerdy, yes…
Grandmother says, "You had them and you should never leave them." Such martyrdom is selfish and harmful to both you and the child. Someday such clinging, dependent children will have to be torn from their mothers and get the rude shock that there are other people m the world—on the first day at school, for instance…
IN MOST contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child. In the LOGO environment…
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist…