Developing Child's Understanding of Games

During the first stage, beginning around age 5, the child does not yet understand there are fixed rules to the game. Children of this age will play Marbles in an improvisational way, possessing a vague notion of rules but not yet understanding the idea of fixed rules. In the second stage, around ages 8 to 10, the child comes to know that there are rules, and will regard these rules with a near religious reverence. The rules are felt to have their own implicit authority, which cannot be quest...

 How Rules Make Games Pleasurable and Encourage Self-Regul...

Picture a child poised excitedly at the starting line of a footrace, ready to run down the track, breathlessly awaiting the starting signal. Rather than giving in to her intense desire to leap from the starting line, she waits for the signal that the race has begun. What's going on here? Why does our player anxiously hold back when she really desires to run? Developmental psychologist L. S. Vygotsky notes that "Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse, i...

 Children are Smarter Than Adults

This precocity of childhood may be said to characterise all the known races of man, and to be even more marked the more primitive the race. On this point, ‘It is an interesting fact,’ says Havelock Ellis (183, p. 177), ‘and perhaps of some significance, that among primitive races in all parts of the world, the children, at an early age, are very precocious in intelligence.’ And again, ‘ It seems that, the lower the race, the more marked is this precocity, and its arrest at puberty. ...

 Video Game Violence is Not Violence

In the 1960s, as Bandura conducted his media effects research, the British folklorists lona and Peter Opie spent years observing and studying children's outdoor play. They watched children play games—many of them made up—with names like Underground Tig and Witches in the Gluepots and concluded, "A true game is one that frees the spirit. It allows no cares but those fictitious ones engendered by the game itself." When children commit to the games, they opt out of the ordinary world and "th...

 Imaginative Play Creates Ownership

Ultimately, the child as creator exercises a whole range of capacities that set the Stage for original thinking. We find the imprint of creative practice in the blending of experiences and ideas, the classifications of real and imagined things, the organization of systemic patterns and narrative sequences, the modeling of worlds, the generation of artifacts, and the synthesizing of all that is known and felt into one grand design. The creating self "owns" the processes and products of make-...

 Children's Art Has Its Own Logic

Even simple scribbles are meaningful. While it was once thought that kids only scribbled to experience the physical sensation of moving their arm along the page, “now it’s been shown that when children are scribbling … they’re representing through action, not through pictures,” said Boston College’s Winner. “For example, a child might draw a truck by making a line fast across the page and going ‘zoom, zoom,’ and so it doesn’t look like a truck when the child is done, but i...

 Trump Antagonizes China

Trump is not behaving as a president who will become master of the White House in a month. He bears no sense of how to lead a superpower. Even the US military did not use the term "steal" to describe the move by the Chinese navy. Trump's second tweet makes people worry that he will treat China-US relations as child's play. Now people don't know if Trump is engaged in a psychological war with China or he is just unprofessional, even though he will be sworn in soon. Regarding the Sino-US relat...

 Earthseed 46-50

46. Do not worship God Do not worship God Inexorable GodNeither needs nor wantsYour worship.Instead,Acknowledge and attend God,Learn from God,With forethought and intelligence,Imagination and industry,Shape God.When you must,Yield to God.Adapt and endure.For you are Earthseed,And God is Change. ∞ = Δ 47. Unenlightened Self-Interest Beware:At warOr at peace,More people dieOf unenlightened self-interestThan of any other disease. ∞ = Δ 48. Hidden within Change God is ChangeAnd hidden with...

 LSD Mimics a Baby's Brain

So let's think. What is it like to be a baby? What's it like to be a child? Our emotions go up and down. We might be in a sort of happy, sort of ecstatic state one minute, giggling, finding everything funny and silly - similar things happen on psychedelics - and then the next minute there's a sudden shift and we're bawling our eyes out, you know? Similar kind of emotional sensitivities and hyper-imaginative processes occur with a psychedelic. Also something quite intriguing is that sense of ...

 Reading: Six Elements for Every Child Every Day

1. Every child reads something he or she chooses. 2. Every child reads accurately. 3. Every child reads something he or she understands. 4. Every child writes about something personally meaningful. 5. Every child talks with peers about reading and writing. 6. Every child listens to a fluent adult read aloud.