Screen Time Study Finds Education Drop-Off

By MOTOKO RICHJAN. 24, 2014

Researchers say that as children age, they spend less time using TV and electronic devices for educational activities. J Pat Carter/Associated Press

With children spending more time in front of screens than ever, parents sometimes try to convince themselves that playing Angry Birds teaches physics, or that assembling outfits on a shopping app like Polyvore fires creativity.

According to a study scheduled for release on Friday, however, less than half the time that children age 2 to 10 spend watching or interacting with electronic screens is with what parents consider “educational” material. Most of that time is from watching television, with mobile devices contributing relatively little educational value.

What is more, the study, by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a nonprofit research institute affiliated with the Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit producer of “Sesame Street,” shows that as children spend more time with screens as they get older, they spend less time doing educational activities, with 8- to 10-year-olds spending about half the time with educational content that 2- to 4-year-olds do.

Athena Devlin, a professor of women’s and American studies at St. Francis College in Brooklyn and the mother of two children, said that her son, Elias, a kindergartner, still watched quite a bit of public television, including shows like “Wild Kratts” and “Dino Dan,” and that she has been impressed by the detailed facts he learns.

But her daughter, Laura, a fourth grader, prefers shows like “Jessie” on the Disney Channel or “Total Drama Island” on the Cartoon Network, which Professor Devlin sees as the preteen equivalent of her own addiction to “Scandal.”

“I feel like with the educational content of television, the bottom drops out of it after age 5 or 6,” she said. “It’s a bummer, and I’ve looked out for it.”

She said that when playing games, her daughter liked Wizard101, while both children gravitated toward Fruit Ninja or Clumsy Ninja, whose educational value Professor Devlin does not rate highly.

“It would be nice if they could get pleasure out of something that also taught them something,” she said.

According to the survey, 2- to 4-year-olds spent a little over two hours a day on screen, with one hour and 16 minutes of educational time, while 8- to 10-year-olds spent more than two and a half hours a day on screen, but only 42 minutes was considered educational. The survey was based on interviews with 1,577 parents and conducted online from June 28 to July 24 by GfK, a research company.

The survey allowed parents to assess whether a game or program taught social and emotional skills, as well as cognitive learning related to vocabulary, math or science.

The survey said lower-income families reported that their children spent more time with educational programming on screen than middle-income and higher-income families did. Families earning less than $25,000 said 57 percent of their children’s screen time was educational, while families earning $50,000 to $99,000 said it was 38 percent.

Michael H. Levine, the executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, said that particularly for the most vulnerable children who might falter in their academic careers, “we need to have a better balance in the way these media are used.”

Vicki Rideout, who wrote the report, said that with teachers seizing on digital media as a new way to ignite children’s interest at school, more needed to be done to ensure that out-of-school screen activities were not only educational but of high quality.

“It’s far too easy for the best stuff only to be available for the kids who already have many opportunities,” said Ms. Rideout, “and to flip into content that has the gloss of education on it, without the substance, for the kids who are in need.”

Michael Thornton, a second-grade teacher at Meriwether Lewis Elementary School in Charlottesville, Va., and the father of three children under 6, said parents were increasingly asking him for referrals to educational apps, like Geared and Glass Tower, for teaching math and spatial recognition skills, and Chicktionary, for vocabulary.

But, he acknowledged, “you have to really take your time to search through them.”

Girls Should Play More Video Games, and Other Thoughts on "Cognitive Balance"

Girls Should Play More Video Games, And Other Thoughts On “Cognitive Balance”

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

This article went out yesterday to more than 12,000 susbcribers to The Brilliant Report, my weekly newsletter. If you’d like to get The Brilliant Report delivered to your e-mail box, please sign up in the box to the left.—Annie
Girls should play more video games.
That’s one of the unexpected lessons I take away from a rash of recent studies on the importance of—and the malleability of—spatial skills.

First, why spatial skills matter: The ability to mentally manipulate shapes and otherwise understand how the three-dimensional world works turns out to be an important predictor of creative and scholarly achievements, according to research published this month in the journal Psychological Science. The long-term study found that 13-year-olds’ scores on traditional measures of mathematical and verbal reasoning predicted the number of scholarly papers and patents these individuals produced three decades later.
But high scores on tests of spatial ability taken at age 13 predicted something more surprising: the likelihood that the individual would develop new knowledge and produce innovation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the domains collectively known as STEM.
The good news is that spatial abilities can get better with practice. A meta-analysis of 217 research studies, published in the journal Psychological Science last year, concluded that “spatial skills are malleable, durable and transferable”: that is, spatial skills can be improved by training; these improvements persist over time; and they “transfer” to tasks that are different from the tasks used in the training.
This last point is supported by a study published just last month in the Journal of Cognition and Development, which reported that training children in spatial reasoning can improve their performance in math. A single twenty-minute training session in spatial skills enhanced participants’ ability to solve math problems, suggesting that the training “primes” the brain to tackle arithmetic, said study author and Michigan State University education professor Kelly Mix.
Findings like these have led some researchers to advocate for the addition of spatial-skills training to the school curriculum. That’s not a bad idea, but here’s another way to think about it: the informal education children receive can be just as important as what they learn in the classroom. We need to think more carefully about how kids’ formal and informal educational experiences fit together, and how one can fill gaps left by the other.
If traditional math and reading skills are emphasized at school, for example, parents can make sure that spatial skills are accentuated at home—starting early on, with activities as simple as talking about the spatial properties of the world around us. A 2011 study from researchers at the University of Chicago reported that the number of spatial terms (like “circle,” “curvy,” and “edge”) parents used while interacting with their toddlers predicted how many of these kinds of words children themselves produced, and how well they performed on spatial problem-solving tasks at a later age.
As kids grow older, much of the experience they get in manipulating three-dimensional objects comes from playing video games—which brings us back to the contention at the start of this article. Males have historically held the advantage over females in spatial ability, and this advantage has often been attributed to genetic differences. But males’ spatial edge may also reflect, in part, differences in the leisure-time activities of boys and girls, activities that add up to a kind of daily drill in spatial skills for boys.
If that’s the case, then offering girls more opportunities to practice their spatial skills may begin to close the spatial-skills gender gap—and produce more female scientists, engineers and mathematicians in the bargain. So suggests a study by University of Toronto researchers, published in the journal Psychological Science. They found that playing an action video game “can virtually eliminate” the gender difference in a basic capacity they call spatial attention, while at the same time reducing the gender difference in the ability to mentally rotate objects, a higher-level spatial skill.
Exposure to video games, the authors conclude, “could play a significant role as part of a larger strategy designed to interest women in science and engineering careers.” Participants with little prior video-game experience “realized large gains after only ten hours of training,” they note, adding that “we can only imagine the benefits that might be realized after weeks, months, or even years of action-video-gaming experience.”
Parents of daughters may blanch at the idea of actually encouraging “years” of action video game play. These moms and dads should tell themselves that their daughters aren’t wasting their time—they’re readying themselves for brilliant careers as scientists and engineers.
Note to Brilliant readers: I’m especially interested right now in thinking about how we all—adults and kids alike—can compensate for the gaps in our knowledge and skills by creating situations, inside or outside formal education, that balance the experiences we get elsewhere. (See this week’s Brilliant Quote from UCLA psychology professor Patricia Greenfield, below, for another take on this notion.) I’d love to get your input on how we can achieve, as Greenfield puts it, “a complete profile of cognitive skills.” Please leave a comment below, or email me directly at annie@anniemurphypaul.com with your thoughts.
Brilliant Quote
“The informal learning environments of television, video games, and the Internet are producing learners with a new profile of cognitive skills. This profile features widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills, such as iconic representation and spatial visualization . . . Formal education must adapt to these changes, taking advantage of new strengths in visual-spatial intelligence and compensating for new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes: abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination. These develop through the use of an older technology, reading, which, along with audio media such as radio, also stimulates imagination. Informal education therefore requires a balanced media diet using each technology’s specific strengths in order to develop a complete profile of cognitive skills.”—Patricia Greenfield, “Technology and Informal Education: What Is Taught, What Is Learned”

Does Philanthropic Peer Pressure or Morality Matter More?

By CATHERINE NEWMAN

Do you know the philosopher Peter Singer’s thought exercise about charitable giving? It’s this: Imagine you’re on your way to work, but you see a child who has fallen into a pond and appears to be drowning. The idea of ruining your shoes or suit — or even, say, your brand-new Christmas iPhone — would not keep you from rescuing that child. You would, in fact, do it again the next day. So, why don’t we? What is keeping us from giving more to ill and malnourished children around the world, whose lives could be saved by the cost of a pair of shoes?

KJ Dell’Antonia

We grapple with it as a family, the problem of weighing our own luxuries and creature comforts against another person’s ability to simply live. And I just don’t know — about why we do what we do, or whether we’re talking to our children about it in a good way. For example, our Haiti Jar. These are funds earmarked for the organization Partners in Health, and they’re generated when we decide consciously to give up something we don’t need so that others can have something they do. So, for example, despite my wanting of an eggnog latte, I make coffee at home and plunk into the jar the $3.50 I would have spent at a cafe. We commit to getting our movies from the library, even if one of the discs of “Parks and Recreation” turns out to be scratched, and we add the Netflix savings to the jar.

Come the end of the year, the kids do their own allocation of funds (allowance that’s been put aside for the purpose), and we decide, as we do every year we’ve lived in this house with its kitchen so full of boots and thawing sludge that I want to kill myself, that we don’t need to build a mudroom. We might not even have the clearance to build a mudroom, and it’s possible that I would rather give the money away than talk awkwardly to our neighbor about an easement. And what if they were our children, lying hungry or ill in our arms, and we looked across the world to see the “problem” of somebody’s excess shoes valued over our barest sustenance? It’s hard to measure the precise weight I put on each of the many arguments against renovation, but the mudroom money we’ve saved, a sizable amount, goes into the Haiti Jar.

Besides constantly wet socks, one problem that arises is the inadvertent cultivation of a certain smugness (“We’re the kind of people who …”), a certain hypocritical sanctimoniousness, even as we continue to go out for chicken wings and buy organic dishwasher detergent and drive our Subaru and live just generally huge, at least globally speaking. Writing this now, I asked my kids what they thought about our choices — why we continue to live relatively decadently when we know that the money we spend could save lives. We do some; obviously, we could do more.

“In some ways it’s really complicated,” my 10-year-old daughter says. “I wouldn’t describe us as a selfish family.” She falters. “But maybe it’s not actually complicated. We’re basically selfish. I mean, in a nice way, but still.” Oof. Our 14-year-old son defends us, “I bet we give relatively more than most people,” he says.

Then again, this boy is more or less Alex Keaton from “Family Ties:” the money-loving kid stuck in a family of disheveled hippies. (We showed our friend, the columnist Ron Lieber, Ben’s second-grade “Map of My Heart” painting, with “$” taking up nearly all of the available landscape, and “family” and “the world” tacked onto the bottom as an afterthought. I think Ron is still laughing.) Ben is caring and kind, but he has expensive tastes. I think he wishes we would neither build a mudroom nor give the money away, but rather fly first-class to Hawaii so that he can snorkel among the colorful fishes before sinking into a gold-plated armchair with the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. Instead, he is stuck snorkeling in the pond by our campsite, where he can see only muck, bare legs and the dollar-bill signs in his own eyes.

Maybe I’m goading him, but what I feel is confused. “Comparing ourselves to other people doesn’t seem like a very good test of moral behavior,” I say. How do we justify putting even tiny amounts of money aside for our own hypothetical futures — college, retirement — when someone else’s real, material present is in jeopardy? I want to be more like Zell Kravinsky, the utilitarian philanthropist who gave one of his kidneys away to a stranger. We live in a world, it seems to me, that demands immoderate action. Is Ben right, that it isn’t true morality but relative morality that defines that action?

“If we knew other people were giving more than us, you think we would give more than we do,” I say. Ben nods, considers, then says: “If everyone we knew lived in a one-room house and gave all their money away, we’d probably do that, too. But we don’t. You’re influenced by everyone else’s decisions. And then you try to give more than what is typical.” It’s like philanthropic peer pressure. Keeping up with the charitable Joneses.

And that just feels wrong. Cry me a river, right? Philanthropy — talk about a first-world problem. But if St. Francis of Assisi was right, it really is in giving that we receive. And maybe I just want more.

TV That's Good for Girls

10 television shows with awesome female role models.

Sierra Filucci January 22, 2014 Categories: We recommend

Senior Editor, TV and DVD | Mom of two

Girls deserve so much better than much of what they see on TV. First, they deserve to see more girls and women on the screen in the first place -- only 30 percent of kids' TV characters are female, according to the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media. And when girls or women do appear on-screen, they are still heavily stereotyped and sexualized -- portrayed in traditional roles or wearing sexy clothing -- in both kids' TV and prime-time shows.

This lack of great female role models in the media has a negative effect on kids -- both girls and boys. But parents have the power to filter out at least some of the negative images and messages and replace them with shows that kids will enjoy and that show female characters as strong, smart people with something positive to offer the world.

Check out this collection of great shows both old and new, and program that DVR!

Sheriff Callie's Wild West, age 3+

Callie calls the shots in her town. She manages to be a strong leader while remaining honest, fair, and aware of other people's feelings. When conflict arises, she devises creative resolutions that show, rather than tell, kids why strong character is important and gives them examples of how they can use these social skills in their own relationships.

Peg + Cat, age 3+

Peg tackles relatable preschool problems using logical thinking and math skills. There's no trouble too big for her to reason her way through, and her friends are there to help when she needs them.

Doc McStuffins, age 3+

She's a doctor! At least for her toys. And her parents encourage her dreams and her desire to follow in the footsteps of her mom, a full-fledged human doctor. Doc also is patient with her younger brother and always willing to lend a hand when he runs into trouble.

Sofia the First, age 3+

She may be a princess, but Sofia doesn't balk at taking a stand on what's important to her, even if that means she seems different from the other royalty. Her willingness to stand up for what she believes often has a positive influence on those around her. Some of her peers are standoffish and snooty, but she follows her heart rather than them, and her actions sway their opinions about "proper" princess behavior.

Design Squad Nation, age 6+

This lively engineering show subverts the idea that only boys like building stuff. The hosts are male and female, and the kids who appear on the show are a diverse bunch, with plenty of girls in the mix who show off their smarts.

When Calls the Heart, age 7+

The central female characters challenge the roles they were expected to take on as high-society women in frontier days. Instead of being blindly obedient, they exercise free will and rely on their faith in God to see them through their many trials. Each is of high integrity and stands up for what's morally right, even at the expense of what she wants.

Dear America, age 7+

The girls at the heart of this historical anthology series usually exhibit personal strength that sees them through the challenges of the time. Most of the time a solid family structure is behind their strong character and helps them weather the storms, and they often make surprising discoveries about people they assumed to be enemies.

Legend of Korra, age 8+

Korra is a determined, goal-oriented heroine whose strong sense of duty guides her to embrace her training and develop her talents. She's not perfect, and she often finds that her impetuous nature impedes her ability to learn from her even-tempered mentor. Ultimately, though, she tries to be open to new ideas and is dedicated to improving her skills.

The Bletchley Circle, age 14+

The quartet of strong women at the center of this period murder mystery are smart and hardworking and may make young viewers more interested in math and science, which these savvy ladies use to solve crimes.

Parks and Recreation, age 14+

Leslie Knope is absolutely brilliant and completely devoted to her job as a public servant. She's also found romance and love while wearing sensible pants suits. What else could you ask for?

7 Media-Savvy Skills All Parents Need in 2014

Smart strategies for managing your kids' media and technology this year.

	Caroline Knorr •	January 4, 2014 •
	Parenting Editor \| Mom of one

Instagram. Snapchat. Facebook. Everyday there's some new thing we parents need to figure out. Getting up to speed -- plus giving our kids guidance and limits -- is a daily challenge.
You don't have to become an expert to help your kids make good decisions. Just get involved in their media lives. By engaging with them, you can help them use these tools responsibly, respectfully, and safely. Here are some ways to be a media-savvy parent this year:
Check out your kids' social sites. From videogames to apps -- even music -- nearly everything has a social component these days. Your kids may enjoy posting status updates, uploading photos, IMing, commenting, gaming or any number of online sharing activities with friends. Ask them to show you where they visit, what they do there, who they talk to, what they upload. Make sure they know the rules for safe, responsible, respectful online communication.
Take their games seriously. Give their favorite game a whirl -- or just ask them to recount their gaming experiences. (In fact, once they start, you may not be able to get them to stop). Use the opportunity to ask them questions about the game, like choices they made, puzzles they solved, or strategies they tried. You may be surprised at how much thought goes into their gameplay. (Check out our favorite video games.)
Share music. With MP3 players and headphones, music is often a solitary experience. But it doesn't have to be. Download some of your favorite oldies but goodies for your kids. Then ask them to play something for you that you've never heard. Have a conversation about the music.
Use YouTube's advanced features. Every kid loves YouTube, but we all know that there are plenty of videos that aren't age-appropriate. Telling your kids to stay off probably won't do any good, so learn how to manage it. Take advantage of YouTube's built-in content filter, Safety Mode, which blocks mature content. Then set up Channel Subscriptions, Playlists, and Watch Later feeds which give you greater control over what your kids watch.
Take control of your TV. There are lots of ways to exert more control over what your kids watch. You can use a digital video recorder, on-demand programming, and websites like Hulu to watch what you want when you want it. This allows you to be choosier about what your kids see. You can preview the shows, fast forward through the ads, use the mute button, and avoid the stuff you don't want your kids to watch.
Research your kids' apps. It's kind of amazing what apps can do. But you have to set some rules around downloading or you may wind up with some age-inappropriate apps. Always read through the app description (and check our reviews) before installing. Play with your kid a few times so you know what the app is capable of -- some offer in-game purchasing, connect with other people, or use your location.
Establish a digital code of conduct. When you give your kids digital devices -- cell phones, computers, and other personal electronics -- set rules around responsible, respectful usage. Check in on where your kids are going online -- look at browser histories, set appropriate age filters, and check out the parental controls. Teach your kids the basics of safe searching. Don't let them figure it all out by themselves.

"Talking math" with kids

"Talking math" with kidsDo you speak math with your kids?

Many of us feel completely comfortable talking about letters, words and sentences with our children—reading to them at night, helping them decode their own books, noting messages on street signs and billboards.

But speaking to them about numbers, fractions, and decimals? Not so much. And yet studies show that “number talk” at home is a key predictor of young children’s achievement in math once they get to school. Research provides evidence that gender is also part of the equation: Parents speak to their daughters about numbers far less than their sons.

A study published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology drew on a collection of recordings of mothers talking to their toddlers, aged 20 to 27 months. Alicia Chang, a researcher at the University of Delaware, and two coauthors determined that mothers spoke to boys about number concepts twice as often as they spoke to girls. Children this age are rapidly building their vocabularies, Chang notes, and helping them become familiar with number words can
promote their interest in math later on.

That was made clear in another study, published in Developmental Psychology in 2010, which also used recordings of parents talking to their children to gauge how often number words were used (the kids in this study were between the ages of 14 and 30 months). Psychologist Susan Levine of the University of Chicago and her coauthors found huge variation among the families studied: Some children were hearing their parents speak only about two dozen number words a week, while others were hearing such words about 1,800 times weekly.

The frequency of number talk in the children’s homes had a big impact on how well the youngsters understood basic mathematical concepts such as the cardinal number principle, which holds that the last number reached when counting a set of objects determines the size of the set (“One, two, three—three apples in the bowl!”). A subsequent study by Levine found that the kind of number talk that most strongly predicted later knowledge of numbers involved counting or labeling sets of objects that are right there in front of parent and child–especially large sets, containing between four and ten objects.

Though it may not come naturally at first, parents can develop the habit of talking about numbers as often as they talk about letters and words. Some simple ways to work numbers into the conversation:

• Note numbers on signs when you’re walking or driving with children: speed limits and exit numbers, building addresses, sale prices in store windows.
• Ask children to count how many toys they’re playing with, how many books they’ve pulled out to read, or how many pieces of food are on their plate.
• Use numbers when you refer to time, dates, and temperatures: how many hours and minutes until bedtime, how many weeks and days until a holiday, the high and low the weatherman predicts for that day.
• With older children, math can become a part of talking about sports, science, history, video games, or whatever else they’re interested in.

With practice, parents and children alike will find that math makes a very satisfying second language.

What Do Students Need Most? More Sleep

By JESSICA LAHEY

Jessica Lahey

When I travel around to schools to speak to students, I deliver one line in my talk that kills, each and every time. The students do not simply laugh, they whoop and holler, throw their heads back in open-mouthed guffaws and shake their heads in disbelief. I would love to lay claim to the funniest educator joke of all time, but sadly, I don’t have that kind of comic game. I’m not even aiming for their funny bone when I proclaim, “In order to function at your mental and physical best, adolescents should be getting at least nine hours of sleep a night.”

For many students, nine hours of sleep is so far beyond their reality that their only logical response is laughter. Four out of five adolescents are getting less than that, and more than half of them know they are getting less sleep than they need to function well.

Surveys conducted by the National Sleep Foundation reveal that teenagers are getting nowhere near nine hours of sleep a night. The average weeknight sleep duration for 13-year-olds hovers around 7 hours 42 minutes and decreases to 7 hours 4 minutes in 19-year-olds. And if you think your teenagers are getting enough sleep, think again. Ninety percent of parents say they believe their children are getting sufficient sleep, and yet when asked, 60 percent of teenagers report extreme daytime sleepiness.

Adolescents naturally get tired and fall asleep sleep later than younger children because adolescent sleep patterns adhere to what is called a “phase delay.” Delayed melatonin release in adolescent brains means they get sleepy later and subsequently wake later as well. When Edina, Minn., shifted its high school start time from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30, the district reported that students were getting more sleep with fewer sleep disturbances, they reported fewer episodes of depressive feelings, and on the whole received better grades. Most shockingly, the SAT scores of Edina’s top students rose from a pre-time shift average of 683 math/605 verbal to 739 math/761 verbal one year later.

Researchers have long understood that sleep is an important human activity (why else would we render ourselves helpless against predators for so many hours of our lives?), but they did not understand why. However, as Maria Konnikova described in the Sunday Review, one researcher may have figured out why sleep is one of the most important activities we can do to keep our brains healthy.

“Sleep, as it turns out, may play a crucial role in our brain’s physiological maintenance,” Ms. Konnikova wrote. “As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking.” In other words, just as our kidneys remove accumulated waste products from our blood, sleep allows the brain’s own filtering system to sweep out the waste products that have built up over a day of cognitive exertions.

Sleep is a big deal for us all, but especially for children and teenagers, who spend even more time in the sleep cycles that are responsible for strengthening neural connections, consolidating memory and creating links between disparate memories.

Not convinced? Consider this (from the National Sleep Foundation’s report): less sleep means more traffic accidents, increased moodiness and aggression and, possibly, A.D.D. and A.D.H.D. diagnoses. It increases the risk of drug use and sports injuries. On the decrease? Academic performance: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s book “Nurture Shock” sums it up best by linking the loss of one hour of sleep to the loss of two years of brain power.

I’m convinced that sleep is the single most important factor in ensuring my children’s health and academic success. Given the choice between one more review session for that French test and a bedtime that will ensure those nine hours, I will always encourage them to choose sleep.

How can you improve sleep habits at your house?

1. Make sleep a priority. It is not an afterthought or an optional activity that can be sacrificed. It is a vital biological function, not a waste of time.

2. Dim it down. Light delays sleep. Laptops, smartphones and tablets emit approximately 30 to 50 lux, about half the illumination of a room light, more than enough light to affect circadian rhythms and delay the production and release of melatonin. Keep hand-held digital devices, televisions and computers out of the bedroom.

3. No caffeine after noon. According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, while the effects of caffeine peak within 30 to 60 minutes, effects can last from 8 to 14 hours, which not only reduces total sleep time but can also reduce the duration of deep sleep cycles.

4. Encourage exercise. As reported in one study, subjects who exercised for three or four 30-minute sessions a week “slept, on average, 45 minutes to an hour longer on most nights, waking up less often and reporting more vigor and less sleepiness.”

5. Don’t go to bed angry. Life with an adolescent can be unpredictable, but try to avoid arguing or discussing upsetting issues in the evening. Even if you are really worked up over something that happened earlier in the day, if you can let it go until morning, do. You – and your teenager – will sleep more soundly for it.

A Masterly Menagerie

‘What’s Your Favorite Animal?’ by Eric Carle and Friends

JAN. 15, 2014

Children’s Books

By SARAH HARRISON SMITH

Children ask illustrators to name their favorite animals at virtually every school and library visit. In some cases, the artists probably come up with something on the spot and then sketch the rabbit or dromedary in question. But the urge to answer more thoughtfully must weigh on them with a little bit of l’esprit de l’escalier.

In “What’s Your Favorite Animal?,” 14 renowned children’s book illustrators have a chance to give the question the attention it deserves, depicting their favorite creatures — from cats to cows — and explaining, each in his or her own way, why they appeal. Though the book seems tailored to please the illustrators’ adult fans, there’s enough charm and variety here to entertain and amuse children too.

Each artist is given two pages to use as he or she chooses — and they take very different approaches. Carle, whose painted-tissue-paper collages give books like “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and, most recently, “Friends” an immediately identifiable visual style, starts the book off with a recollection about his old cat Fiffi, who once hid a string bean in Carle’s shoe. The illustration is classic Carle: A goofy-looking black cat with slightly crossed eyes concentrates hard as she considers how to get a very long string bean into the only slightly longer shoe.

Later, Tom Lichtenheld, probably best known for illustrating Sherri Duskey Rinker’s “Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site” and “Steam Train, Dream Train,” uses his pages for a full-color scene of giraffes with their heads in the clouds. Rather than writing a prose narrative, he provides a nifty five-line poem reminiscent of Hilaire Belloc's “The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts.” “Though meeting a giraffe is rare,/ You must be prepared not to stare./ They’re easily amused,/ So don’t be confused./ Just say, ‘Hey, how’s the weather up there?’ ”

Nick Bruel, whose “Bad Kitty” books are grade-school favorites, allows that naughty cat to disrupt his initially conventional paean to the octopus. Jealous of Bruel’s admiration of the sea creature’s intelligence and unusual mastery of camouflage, Bad Kitty takes over, advocating for his own favorite animal (meatloaf) and then writing a groveling fan note to Carle.

There’s sentiment as well as humor. Chris Raschka (of the Caldecott Medal-winning “A Ball for Daisy”) paints an enormous snail in loose whorls of blue and orange, writing: “You may find her (or him) a little ugly — too squishy. But all her life she works at her craft, adding to it day by day until, when she dies, she leaves us something of great beauty.” Perhaps this is a portrait of the artist in disguise?

Lucy Cousins, Susan Jeffers, Steven Kellogg, Jon Klassen, Peter McCarty, Peter Sis, Lane Smith, Erin Stead, Rosemary Wells and Mo Willems also contribute to the volume. Proceeds from its sale benefit the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass., the only full-scale museum of children’s book illustration in the United States. It’s a good cause — and a surprisingly good book.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE ANIMAL?

Written and illustrated by Eric Carle and friends

36 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 3 and up)

And So to Bed

Harriet Ziefert’s ‘It’s Time to Say Good Night,’ and More

From "It’s Time to Say Good Night"

By SARAH HARRISON SMITH

Published: November 27, 2013

If breakfast is the most important meal of the day, surely the half-hour or so before bed is, for families, the day’s most important moment: a time to reflect on the past, plan for tomorrow, and read together. Three new picture books for bedtime offer very different pleasures for children of different ages and temperaments.

IT’S TIME TO SAY GOOD NIGHT

By Harriet Ziefert

Illustrated by Barroux

36 pp. Blue Apple. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 2 to 5)

DREAM ANIMALS

A Bedtime Journey

Written and illustrated by Emily Winfield Martin

32 pp. Random House. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 2 to 6)

BEDTIME MONSTERS

Written and illustrated by Josh Schneider

32 pp. Clarion Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 8)

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From "Dream Animals: A Bedtime Journey"

Enlarge This Image

From "Bedtime Monsters"

Harriet Ziefert’s “It’s Time to Say Good Night,” illustrated by the Paris-based artist known as Barroux, takes its inspiration from the Betty Comden and Adolph Green song “I Said Good Morning.” It’s a cheerful book, starring a happy little boy who looks out the window at the sun rising over green countryside and greets each thing he sees. “Good morning to the birdies and the bees. / Good morning to the garden, / Good morning to the earth, / Good morning to the water and the seeds.” Next, he hops onto a scooter and visits a city, where he says says good morning to trucks, cars and garbage cans. And then he turns around and says good night to them all before heading for his own cozy bed.

Barroux’s paintings have the look of watercolor painted with a thick brush: His colors are clear and bright, and his trick of leaving a white outline around each thing draws the eye to them and keeps his pages attractively light despite color that stretches all the way to the corners. He and Ziefert have worked together on other books (including “Bunny’s Lessons”) for Blue Apple Books, a small publisher in Maplewood, N.J., and their work here is complementary. While Barroux’s illustrations are freewheeling and casual, Ziefert’s update of the 1950s-era Comden and Green song is repetitive in a way that will appeal to toddlers who enjoy predicting what will come next. In the end, what comes next is — one hopes — a good night’s sleep.

Emily Winfield Martin’s “Dream Animals: A Bedtime Journey” is a rare, enchanting mixture of graceful rhyming verse and adorable, Hummel-sweet illustrations. Big-eyed boys and girls, of diverse ethnic backgrounds, embark on dream adventures with their animal familiars — their teddy bears or plush rabbits who at night grow big enough to carry the children to magical lands. “You only have to close your eyes / And when you snuggle in … / You’ll be carried to your dream tonight / On wing or paw or fin.” Martin’s paintings, in rich, creamy opaque colors, have a retro look that recalls early Golden Books, but with more brush-stroke texture. They’re so nursery-worthy you may be tempted to snip a few out and frame them. Martin, who previously wrote and illustrated “Oddfellow’s Orphanage” and “The Black Apple’s Paper Doll Primer” is in touch with something in the zeitgeist both old-fashioned and on-trend. “Dream Animals” belongs on the night stand of any child with a taste for extreme winsomeness.

Kids who like their bedtime books funny and not-so-sentimental will find Josh Schneider’s “Bedtime Monsters” to their taste. Arnold, an energetic boy of about 6, plays with his blocks after dinner — or more precisely, imagines himself as a monster attacking the city he’s built.

       “It’s time for bed, Arnold,” said Mom.
       “I’m still destroying New York,” said Arnold.
       “Well, finish up,” said Mom.
       Arnold tromped down Fifth Avenue with a terrible roar, then went and put on his pajamas.

Finally in bed, Arnold says he’s a little afraid of “the monster that comes out at night and bites off toes.” But his mother — fairly no-nonsense — tells him, “I’m sure he’s just as scared of you as you are of him” and turns out the light. What happens next proves both Arnold and his mother right as monster after monster, each with a hilarious, Dahl-esque name (the grozny buzzler, the winged fargle) appears and ends up in bed with Arnold, cowering in fear of, you guessed it, terrifying creatures called Arnolds. Throughout, Schneider’s writing is as entertaining and sharp-edged as his almost contour-style line drawings, painted in transparent but deep hues of yellows, purples and blues. Children ready to laugh at nighttime fears and recognize a bit of themselves in strong-willed Arnold should find lots to enjoy in “Bedtime Monsters,” which ends, like so many of the best books — and the best bedtimes — with a child smiling as he drifts off to sleep.

Want More Women in Tech? Fix Misperceptions of Computer Science

How to help kids see CS applied in real-world contexts, creative fields and altruistic careers

CC BY 2.0 Flickr user vauvau

Code.org’s Hadi Partovi recently wrote a blog post titled “The real reason there aren’t more women in tech.” He listed three reasons:

Computer science is not taught in US schools;
As an elective, it doesn’t contribute to graduation requirement;
The nerd stereotype is proven to drive away women.

While I agree with his assertions, I believe that there is another systemic and underlying factor at play. Students harbor a narrow and misguided view of what CS as a discipline and career entails. This is not so much a “stereotype” as sheer lack of awareness.
Remember Code.org’s “What Most Schools Don’t Teach” video? Vanessa Hurst’s words at the 4m09s mark strike at the heart of this issue, one that remains largely ignored and unaddressed in this huge push to take CS to schools and make it an attractive career choice especially for girls: “I think if someone had told me that software is really about humanity, that it's really about helping people by using computer technology it would have changed my outlook a lot earlier.”

Computer science has a fundamental image problem

Imagine being a kid and believing that jobs in a certain career mostly involved studying and/or repairing a complex machine. Would the average girl, or even boy for that matter, with such beliefs (or with no notions whatsoever about what being in that field really means) wish to pursue such a career?
Here’s news for all: Even today, most children between the ages of 11 and 18 either have no idea about CS or overwhelmingly associate a computer scientist with “building,” “fixing,” “improving” or “studying” computers. While some add ‘programming’ to this list, most don’t see even that within the ambit of computer science.
Research also reports that students finishing high school have a difficult time seeing themselves as computer scientists since they do not have a clear understanding of what computer science is and what a computer scientist does. This is rather unfortunate in light Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius’ powerful study on the idea of “possible selves,” the type of self-knowledge that pertains to how individuals think about their potential and their future.
It’s plausible that students harboring ignorance, or worse, misconceptions of a field are likely to make poor educational choices and career decisions; and that the lack of interest and negative attitudes towards CS, especially among girls, is attributable to an inaccurate view of what one does with computer science. These popular beliefs likely impact girls’ choices more than boys’ as they preclude a view of CS as an engaging discipline with uses in social and creative domains. Children must be cognizant of the broad applicability of computer science in many diverse fields of human endeavor, including creative fields and altruistic careers that often appeal to females. This need has been stressed in research on the “technological imaginations” of girls and boys, and more recently in Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher's Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. The importance of attending to this aspect of K-12 CS education simply cannot be emphasized enough.

Simple ideas to remedy the situation

Part of my work revolves around studying these perceptions of CS and helping kids think beyond just the “computer” to real world contexts in which they can create and use powerful tools in service to society. As it turns out, simple illuminating examples of CS in action beyond obvious ones like Facebook and video games can go a long way. (Although most kids fail to associate even those with computer science.) Here are some video clips that I have used with success with 7th to 9th graders in week-long units in classrooms as well as short sessions at Stanford Splash:

Special effects in movies (Kelly Ward explaining her awesome work on simulating Rapunzel’s hair for the Disney movie ‘Tangled’);
Robotics (Boston Dynamics “Big Dog” video is a hit);
Saving people’s lives on the road (Sebastian Thrun’s moving TED Talk about Google’s Driverless Car touches a nerve);
Medical innovations (MIT’s “Making the Invisible Visible“ is simply captivating);
Art and e-textiles (Leah Buechley’s videos on her work while at MIT are as fascinating to boys as they are to girls);
Space exploration (there’s a fun video of the Mars Rover playing the Birthday tune to itself);
Artificial Intelligence applications (the video of IBM Watson crushing the humans at Jeopardy tickles kids no end);
Big Data in Presidential Politics (How Obama’s presidential campaign mined social networks in the 2012 election is an eyeopener).

All of these exemplify innovations in ways that kids find interesting and also demonstrate computing being used in a context most don’t usually associate with computer science. “Show and discuss” these fascinating real-world applications in addition to mundane ones like traffic signals, ATMs, digital imaging, and the Internet, and they begin to see CS in a new light.
Additionally, bite-sized videos of computer scientists describing applications in their day-to-day work (or bringing in people to chat with them) can make computer science all the more real. In addition to my list, there is also a playlist of videos created by CSTA for CSEdWeek in 2010 that are also great for this purpose.
Discussions around these videos also provide a rich opportunity to discuss CS topics like robotics, computer vision, simulation & modeling, data mining, AI, voice & gesture recognition, and computational science. Perhaps adding them to the “Hour of Code” and other toolkits that Code.org has created for K-12 teachers can help students better envision the wide range of real-world applications for computer science. Below are some comments from some of the female students after such “show and discuss” sessions:

“I have never seen anything like it before and it allows you to be as creative as you want… Some of the most interesting computer science videos I've seen I think, And I now really want to learn more about coding and what I can do with it. ”
“When I thought of computer science before the video I think of computers and only about computers. But now I see that computer science goes so much further than that. Now I can't think of anything that doesn't use computer science. It's really cool”
“It was a fun way to combine programming with music and art to create some music. I learned how much CS can be used to create something for fun, not just work -- for example, the Beat Table, and Evelyn's line program.”
“That is so cool! >< I wish they would just sell the program to doctors so they could put it in good use. It'll be good for monitoring newborns.”
“ I have always liked using computers and I like programming, and these show me that being a computer scientist is the type of job that I would love to do. I finally know what to do with my future.”
“I’m really very intrigued by coding. I did not know that’s how Minecraft or Facebook were done..I want to know how the Google car was programmed. I was really amazed, and I’m wondering whether there’ll ever be a time in my life when I’ll see driverless cars on the road, coz now everytime I see my mom in traffic or my dad, I say to myself, this is why we need Google cars!”

As the move to introduce computing to K-12 schools gains momentum, and amidst the many initiatives to increase interest in computing among girls currently underway, an important piece of this puzzle is to tackle students’ misconceptions of computing. We must make sure all children, especially girls, are aware of exemplary societal uses of CS as a creative and engaging discipline that is relevant and applicable to all walks of life. It’s crucial to broadening the women-in-tech pipeline and all associated learning trajectories.

The Difference Between Reading on Paper and Reading on a Screen

The Difference Between Reading On Paper And Reading On A Screen

Friday, May 3, 2013

An utterly fascinating article by Ferris Jabr on the Scientific American website, about the psychological differences between reading on paper and reading on a screen:
“Understanding how reading on paper is different from reading on screens requires some explanation of how the brain interprets written language. We often think of reading as a cerebral activity concerned with the abstract—with thoughts and ideas, tone and themes, metaphors and motifs.
As far as our brains are concerned, however, text is a tangible part of the physical world we inhabit. In fact, the brain essentially regards letters as physical objects because it does not really have another way of understanding them. The human brain perceives a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure.
The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared.
We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen text. An open paperback presents a reader with two clearly defined domains—the left and right pages—and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders. One can even feel the thickness of the pages read in one hand and pages to be read in the other.
Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there’s a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text.
In contrast, most screens, e-readers, smartphones and tablets interfere with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit people from mapping the journey in their minds. A reader of digital text might scroll through a seamless stream of words, tap forward one page at a time or use the search function to immediately locate a particular phrase—but it is difficult to see any one passage in the context of the entire text.” (Read more here.)
This exactly evokes my experience of reading paper book and e-books: with text on paper, I feel rooted, grounded, conscious of where I’ve been and where I’m going; with digital text, I feel lost, floating in a void.
Do these two kinds of reading feel this way to you, too?

So your kid just got a new device. Now what?

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Avoiding the Midwinter 'Back to School' Slump

Avoiding the Midwinter ‘Back to School’ Slump

By JESSICA LAHEY

Jessica Lahey

It’s back-to-school time again. No, not the exciting September return, with all its newness and promise, but the other one, the January return. The one that arrives not with a bang but a whimper.
Some serious teaching strategy is required to propel students through the first days of the bleak midwinter, and teachers spend a lot of time and energy preparing their classrooms and curriculums for this phase of the school year. My Twitter feed is full of teacher tips and tricks for keeping students engaged and motivated after the January return to school, and I particularly enjoyed the fifth-grade teacher Pernille Ripp’s favorite strategies for dealing with the “January humdrum.”
Her blog post is concerned with strategies that will help teachers manage this challenging time of year, but there is a lot parents can do to help their children dive into the New Year with resolve and enthusiasm.
1. Reassess rules. Ms. Ripp notes that “students get a little tired and a little more restless” in winter, so she likes to begin the New Year with a second look at her classroom rules and a chance for her students to weigh in on their role in the success of the entire class. I adopted Ms. Ripp’s classroom strategy in my own home, and over this holiday break, we took some time to re-establish the rules of the road in our own home. My husband and I talked about our expectations for behavior and schoolwork, and discussed the consequences that will come to pass if our kids don’t meet those expectations. One fabulous byproduct of clear expectations and consequences is that children can be allowed to take responsibility for their work, and parents can back off and let kids get a taste of some independence.
2. Talk about work space and study habits. Ms. Ripp uses the January return to school as an opportunity to talk with her students about whether or not the classroom spaces are working well for them. Try this same strategy at home. Are your kids doing homework in a quiet, comfortable space? Do they have the resources and supplies they need, when they need them? Is that space distraction-free? Dynamic and lyric-driven music can impair the storage of short-term memory, and frequent email or text alerts can make concentration a challenge, so talk to your kids about the importance of keeping distractions to a minimum when they study. Study spaces should be free of cellphones and other unnecessary digital distractions.
3. Check in on long-term projects. Once your children have set some short-term goals, ask them about their longer-term assignments. Where are they with those projects, and what needs to be done? Do they have a plan for their completion? My older son’s school holds midterms and finals just after the holiday break, so while we are all tempted to mentally abandon academics during the break, he needs to be thinking ahead a bit. The ability to manage complex and long-term projects is part of executive functioning, skills that continue to develop well into adolescence, so they may need a bit of help with their planning. While it’s important to avoid nagging (it has a detrimental effect on your child’s motivation), it’s a good idea to check in and make sure everyone understands what’s coming on the horizon.
4. Make reading a part of your daily life. According to Reading Is Fundamental (RIF), “children who are solid readers perform better in school, have healthy self-image and become lifelong learners, adding to their viability in a competitive world.” Reading is an escape, and books can light up an otherwise dark and dreary winter. Read those books you received over the holidays, and let your kids see you doing so. Lots of organizations put out “best of the year” book lists, so take a copy to your local library or bookstore and pull some new favorites off the shelf. To get you started, here’s the American Library Association’s list of notable children’s books for 2013.
5. Set new goals. Goals, rather than grades, should be the focus of the family’s efforts to support academic efforts. I encourage my students and my children to set measurable, attainable goals on a weekly basis so they can go into each weekend with a feeling of accomplishment. Check in with your kids on a regular basis to praise their efforts in reaching those goals and help refocus when they fall short.
6. Get outside. Sunshine, however rare this time of year, can do a lot to wake the brain, elevate a winter mood, energize the body and stimulate creativity. Short days and low light can cause depression and anxiety in the form of seasonal affective disorder, so bundle up, head outdoors and embrace the all-too-brief sunlight hours.
7. Give in to the season. Or, as Ms. Ripp writes, “embrace the slowness. January seems to slow us all down as we wind down after the craziness of December and winter in general. Instead of fighting it, I tend to embrace it at home with my own kids. We read more, we light more candles and we do more family things in a small way.” Allow your kids more time for quiet contemplation on winter afternoons, opportunities to see that certain slant of light before the renewal and rush of a spring thaw comes to carry everyone away.