Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught?

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  Holly Andres for The New York Times

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  Holly Andres for The New York Times

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  Holly Andres for The New York Times

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  Holly Andres for The New York Times

Students from Leataata Floyd Elementary, in Sacramento, and Prospect Sierra, in El Cerrito, Calif., demonstrate various emotional states. Above, Jason Perez, 10; Yamiah Lockhart, 7.

By JENNIFER KAHN

Published: September 11, 2013 445 Comments

One day last spring, James Wade sat cross-legged on the carpet and called his kindergarten class to order. Lanky and soft-spoken, Wade has a gentle charisma well suited to his role as a teacher of small children: steady, rather than exuberant. When a child performs a requested task, like closing the door after recess, he will often acknowledge the moment by murmuring, “Thank you, sweet pea,” in a mild Texas drawl.

As the children formed a circle, Wade asked the 5-year-olds to think about “anything happening at home, or at school, that’s a problem, that you want to share.” He repeated his invitation twice, in a lulling voice, until a small, round-faced boy in a white shirt and blue cardigan raised his hand. Blinking back tears, he whispered, “My mom does not like me.” The problem, he said, was that he played too much on his mother’s iPhone. “She screams me out every day,” he added, sounding wretched.

Wade let that sink in, then turned to the class and asked, “Have any of your mommies or daddies ever yelled at you?” When half the children raised their hands, Wade nodded encouragingly. “Then maybe we can help.” Turning to a tiny girl in a pink T-shirt, he asked what she felt like when she was yelled at.

“Sad,” the girl said, looking down.

“And what did you do? What words did you use?”

“I said, ‘Mommy, I don’t like to hear you scream at me.’ ”

Wade nodded slowly, then looked around the room. “What do you think? Does that sound like a good thing to say?” When the kids nodded vigorously, Wade clapped his hands once. “O.K., let’s practice. Play like I’m your mommy.” Scooting into the center of the circle, he gave the boy, Reedhom, a small toy bear to stand in for the iPhone, then began to berate him in a ridiculous booming voice. “Lalalala!” Wade hollered, looming overhead in a goofy parody of parental frustration. “Why are you doing that, Reedhom? Reedhom, why?” In the circle, the other kids rocked back and forth in delight. One or two impulsively begin to crawl in Reedhom’s direction, as if joining a game.

Still slightly teary, Reedhom began to giggle. Abruptly, Wade held up a finger. “Now, we talked about this. What can Reedhom do?” Recollecting himself, Reedhom sat up straight. “Mommy, I don’t like it when you scream at me,” he announced firmly.

“Good,” Wade said. “And maybe your mommy will say: ‘I’m sorry, Reedhom. I had to go somewhere in a hurry, and I got a little mad. I’m sorry.’ ”

Reedhom solemnly accepted the apology — then beamed as he shook Wade’s hand.

Holly Andres for The New York Times

Jamal McBride, 8.

Wade’s approach — used schoolwide at Garfield Elementary, in Oakland, Calif. — is part of a strategy known as social-emotional learning, which is based on the idea that emotional skills are crucial to academic performance.

“Something we now know, from doing dozens of studies, is that emotions can either enhance or hinder your ability to learn,” Marc Brackett, a senior research scientist in psychology at Yale University, told a crowd of educators at a conference last June. “They affect our attention and our memory. If you’re very anxious about something, or agitated, how well can you focus on what’s being taught?”

Once a small corner of education theory, S.E.L. has gained traction in recent years, driven in part by concerns over school violence, bullying and teen suicide. But while prevention programs tend to focus on a single problem, the goal of social-emotional learning is grander: to instill a deep psychological intelligence that will help children regulate their emotions.

For children, Brackett notes, school is an emotional caldron: a constant stream of academic and social challenges that can generate feelings ranging from loneliness to euphoria. Educators and parents have long assumed that a child’s ability to cope with such stresses is either innate — a matter of temperament — or else acquired “along the way,” in the rough and tumble of ordinary interaction. But in practice, Brackett says, many children never develop those crucial skills. “It’s like saying that a child doesn’t need to study English because she talks with her parents at home,” Brackett told me last spring. “Emotional skills are the same. A teacher might say, ‘Calm down!’ — but how exactly do you calm down when you’re feeling anxious? Where do you learn the skills to manage those feelings?”

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Why Guessing Is Undervalued

Being able to estimate may be more important than doing quadratic equations

By Annie Murphy Paul @anniemurphypaulNov. 23, 2011Add a Comment

Robert Deutschman / Getty Images

Quick, take a guess: About how many feet high is an eight-story building? Approximately how many tons does the average pickup truck weigh? About how many oranges must be squeezed to yield a gallon of juice?
Maybe you gave these your best shot — or maybe you skimmed right over them, certain that such empty conjecture isn’t worth your time. If you fall into the second group, you may want to reconsider. The science of learning is demonstrating that the ability to make accurate estimates is closely tied to the ability to understand and solve problems. Estimation, this research shows, is not an act of wild speculation but a highly sophisticated and valuable skill that, some experts say, is often given short shrift in the curriculum. “Too much mathematical rigor teaches rigor mortis,” says Sanjoy Mahajan, an associate professor of applied science and engineering at Olin College. Many math textbooks, he notes, “teach how to solve exactly stated problems exactly, whereas life often hands us partly defined problems needing only moderately accurate solutions.”
(MORE: Is English Making Us Dyslexic?)
Everyone, even people without formal mathematical training, possesses a basic capacity to estimate. This aptitude appears astonishingly early in life: babies are already able to discriminate between different-sized sets of objects at six months of age. But it’s also the case that there are pronounced individual differences in the ability to estimate, and that these differences are linked to a more general facility with arithmetic. Especially in children, it appears that one leads to the other: strong estimation skills lay a solid foundation for learning more math as students grow older. In a 2004 article published in the journal Child Development, for example, psychologists from Carnegie Mellon University reported the results of an experiment in which they showed a group of elementary-school pupils a line with a 0 at one end and a 100 at the other. The researchers asked the children to indicate where they thought various numbers would fall on the line. The more accurately a child estimated, the higher was that child’s score on a math achievement exam.
Other researchers have examined the strategies used by people who are skilled at estimating and explored how such techniques could be taught to all. Their first finding: good estimators possess a clear mental number line — one in which numbers are evenly spaced, or linear, rather than a logarithmic one in which numbers crowd closer together as they get bigger. Most schoolchildren start out with the latter understanding, shedding it as they grow more experienced with numbers. Surprisingly, one of the best ways to give kids such experience is to play board games with them. Flicking the spinner or rolling the dice in a game like Chutes and Ladders, then counting out the number of spaces to move their tokens, gives them helpful cues as they construct the number line that they carry around in their heads. And, in fact, an intervention program employing board games, led by professor of education Sharon Griffin of Clark University in Massachusetts, produced large and lasting improvements in children’s math performance.
(MORE: The Secret Code of Learning)
Another strategy used by good estimators is to compare an unfamiliar quantity to one they know well: a football field is the length of 60 Dads, stretched out head to foot. Parents and teachers can help kids acquire a large and flexible store of mental benchmarks by remarking on the dimensions they encounter in everyday life: how many miles from home to school, how many pounds a basket of apples. Children benefit, too, from hearing the range of others’ estimates — so try having each member of the family guess how long it will take to get to Grandma’s house, or having each student estimate how many inches of rain fell last month. This open-ended approach will give kids a familiarity with the way math works in the real world — and tools to help solve real-world problems. How often does life hand us such problems? Professor Barbara Reys, co-director of the Center for the Study of Mathematics Curriculum at the University of Missouri, puts the proportion of mathematical applications that call for approximation, rather than exact computation, at 80%. Of course, that’s an estimate — but it sounds to me like a pretty good guess.

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/11/23/why-guessing-is-undervalued/#ixzz2fFTF6oyQ

Very Young Programmers

By LISA GUERNSEY

Published: September 2, 2013

Ten years ago, a computer programming language called Scratch emerged from the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using colorful stackable icons to represent the sequencing and logic of computer code, Scratch was designed to make programming easy for children 8 and older. Today the free program is used in more than 150 countries and thousands of schools, with more than 1,500 animations and games uploaded to the online Scratch community each day. Even third and fourth graders call themselves coders.

But who says that 8 is the youngest you can teach children how to program? Now there is Scratch Jr. for children still learning to read and tie their shoes.

Designed for children in kindergarten through second grade, Scratch Jr. is not yet available to the public, though its founders are preparing for an iPad version in 2014. This school year, they are evaluating how it works in a handful of classrooms in Massachusetts. The project is led by Marina Umaschi Bers, a professor in the department of child development at Tufts University, and Mitchel Resnick, Scratch’s founder at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Last year, kindergartners at the Jewish Community Day School in Boston used Scratch Jr. once a week to display collages and play animations about what they learned. In one case, they created an online project about the biblical plague of the locusts, programming computers to show the insects landing on a tree’s leafy branches, which suddenly went bare.

Dr. Bers calls programming “a language of expression,” making it a natural fit for the early years when children are learning how to express themselves. Her work started with wooden blocks covered in bar-coded stickers that could be “read” by a computer. Her team at Tufts has also been testing a robotic prototype called KIWI (Kids Invent With Imagination) and a programming language called Cherp (Creative Hybrid Environment for Robotic Programming) in the Boston Public Schools.

Boosting computer science in public education is now the subject of a national campaign, with celebrities like will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas and the actor Ashton Kutcher championing the importance of learning to program.

A petition on the Web site for Code.org, an advocacy group, stating that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn to code, has attracted around 780,000 digital signatures.

Most of the support for student coding on Code.org is from advocates focusing on middle and high school students, yet “the earlier you catch them, the better off they are,” said Claire Caine, an information technology instructor at the Jewish Community Day School. Before age 8 or 9, she said, children are less likely to be swayed by stereotypes. “The idea that they might not be good at something hasn’t entered their mind yet,” Ms. Caine said.

“But,” Dr. Bers said, “you have to get the interface right.” For example, in Scratch Jr., children can code scenes in which characters utter words in cartoonlike thought bubbles — and that may entice children to try to read them — but programming the computer to advance the scene’s action does not require that children know how to read.

She has also seen signs that at or before age 5, the concepts of sequencing — the “if, then” language of coding — take time for children to grasp. Her team is now building a curriculum — Click it. Solve it. Make it. — with steps for teaching Scratch Jr.

In some circles, teaching young children to code raises eyebrows. When she started, Dr. Bers said, “people were like, why do you want kids in front of the computer?”

That is changing. People stopped objecting, she said, when they saw that it was developmentally appropriate in that “the work was collaborative or coming from the kids’ imagination.” Now she has a different problem: “Everyone wants to be our tester.”

Don't just learn -- overlearn

In this week's issue of The Brilliant Report: Why we should push past mere learning, all the way to overlearning—plus a Brilliant Quote from Pepperdine University professor Louis Cozolino, about the stress of new learning and the relationships that can help us deal with it.

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Don't just learn—overlearn"Why do I have to keep practicing? I know it already!” That’s the familiar wail of a child seated at the piano or in front of the multiplication table (or, for that matter, of an adult taking a tennis lesson). Cognitive science has a persuasive retort: We don’t just need to learn a task in order to perform it well; we need to overlearn it. Decades of research have shown that superior performance requires practicing beyond the point of mastery. The perfect execution of a piano sonata or a tennis serve doesn’t mark the end of practice; it signals that the crucial part of the session is just getting underway. Evidence of why this is so was provided by a study published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience. Assistant professor Alaa Ahmed and two of her colleagues in the integrative physiology department at the University of Colorado-Boulder asked study subjects to move a cursor on a screen by manipulating a robotic arm. As they did so, the researchers measured the participants’ energy expenditure by analyzing how much oxygen they inhaled and how much carbon dioxide they breathed out. When the subjects first tackled the exercise, they used up a lot of metabolic power, but this decreased as their skill improved. By the end of the learning process, the amount of effort they expended to carry out the task had declined about 20 percent from when they started. Whenever we learn to make a new movement, Ahmed explains, we form and then update an internal model—a “sensorimotor map”—which our nervous system uses to predict our muscles’ motions and the resistance they will encounter. As that internal model is refined over time, we’re able to cut down on unnecessary movements and eliminate wasted energy. Over the course of a practice session, the subjects in Ahmed’s study were becoming more efficient in their muscle activity. But that wasn’t the whole story. Energy expenditures continued to decrease even after the decline in muscle activity had stabilized. In fact, Ahmed and her coauthors report, this is when the greatest reductions in metabolic power were observed—during the very time when it looks to an observer, and to the participant herself, as if “nothing is happening.” What’s going on here? Ahmed theorizes that even after participants had fine-tuned their muscle movements, the neural processes controlling the movements continued to grow more efficient. The brain uses up energy, too, and through overlearning it can get by on less. These gains in mental efficiency free up resources for other tasks: infusing the music you’re playing with greater emotion and passion, for example, or keeping closer track of your opponent’s moves on the other side of the tennis court. Less effort in one domain means more energy available to others. While Ahmed’s paper didn’t address the application of overlearning to the classroom or the workplace, other studies have demonstrated that for a wide range of academic and professional activities, overlearning reduces the amount of mental effort required, leading to better performance—especially under high-stakes conditions. In fact, research on the "audience effect" shows that once we've overlearned a complex task, we actually perform it better when other people are watching. When we haven't achieved the reduction of mental effort that comes with overlearning, however, the additional stress of an audience makes stumbles more likely. “The message from this study is that in order to perform with less effort, keep on practicing, even after it seems the task has been learned,” says Ahmed. “We have shown there is an advantage to continued practice beyond any visible changes in performance.” In other words: You’re getting better and better, even when you can’t tell you’re improving—a thought to keep you going through those long hours of practice. I love to hear from readers. Please email me at annie@anniemurphypaul.com. You can also visit my website, follow me on Twitter, and join the conversation on Facebook. Be brilliant!

Saying Good Riddance to the Clean-Plate Club

By MARYANN JACOBSEN

Dear Camp Counselor,
Thanks for making camp a fun experience for my daughter. When it comes to her lunch and snack, please allow her to decide when she is done eating and to eat her food in any order she likes. Thanks!
This is the note I include in my 6-year-old daughter’s lunch box when she spends the day at summer camp. I know from experience that she is often asked to eat more than she wants, or is instructed to eat her “healthy foods first” when others supervise her eating.
As a family nutrition expert, I don’t make my children eat more when they say they are done, and there is no order in which they must eat their food. But when I go to birthday parties and observe other families in restaurants, I can see I am in the minority. There was the 4-year-old boy at a Mexican restaurant who declared he was full, only to have his mom instruct him to finish his taquito, and the 6-year-old at the party who was told to finish her broccoli and ended up throwing it up at the table. Then there are the parents who tell me their toddlers beam with pride after finishing all their food, because they learned at day care that an empty plate is a “happy plate.”
Research tells a similar story. A 2007 study, published in Appetite, revealed that 85 percent of parents attempt to get young children to eat more at mealtime using praise, food rewards and reasoning. Another study, published in Pediatrics this May, showed that more than half of parents asked their adolescent children to eat all the food on their plate, while a third prompted their kids to eat more even when they stated they were full.
This isn’t about pointing fingers at parents. After all, getting children to eat all of their meal was a necessity for most of human history, when food was scarce. Children didn’t have the luxury of taking only a few bites or skipping a meal, because the next meal wasn’t certain. But today, we live in a food-plenty environment in which the next meal, snack and eating opportunity is certain and bigger than ever. Despite this reality, children are still born with the ability to regulate their food intake. Unfortunately, research shows controlling feeding practices, like “clean your plate,” negatively affect food regulation skills as children age.

Leann Birch, director of the Center for Childhood Obesity Research at Penn State, first examined the effects of “clean your plate” in 1987. She found that preschoolers asked to focus on external signals of eating (like food on the plate) ate more food after a high-calorie meal than the children focused on internal cues. In 2008, Brian Wansink, author of “Mindless Eating,” found that boys required to clean their plates also asked for large portions of food outside the home. And in a 1999 study, obese adults remembered more food rules growing up than their leaner counterparts, with “clean your plate” being the most common. Of course, none of these studies prove cause and effect, but they are significant nonetheless.
Pushing food is not always about getting children to eat more — it’s also about the quest to get them to eat healthy. For example, caregivers may insist children eat fruits and veggies before other items, or reward children with dessert for eating more healthy food. Unfortunately, this strategy makes children less likely to (intrinsically) prefer healthy foods while making sweets even more desirable. And with all the negotiations at the table, children lose sight of their internal signals of hunger and fullness. By the time they are adults, the “shoulds” of eating rule over their body’s own wisdom and they don’t even know what being “full” means.
The good news is that we are starting to see research showing that approaches that focus on internal cues of eating have real benefits. For example, researchers at the University of Minnesota found that young adults who used hunger and fullness to guide eating not only had a lower body mass index than those who didn’t, they also had lower instances of disordered eating. The girls were also less likely to diet and binge-eat. In the latest edition of “Intuitive Eating,” the authors Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch highlight 25 studies to date touting the benefits of an intuitive eating style.
So I’m saying what we don’t say often enough in the age of obesity statistics. It’s time to say good riddance to the clean-your-plate club and other practices like it. A “happy plate” is one in front of a child who’s permitted to listen to her body, not our out-of-date “rules.”

Green Eggs and E-Books? Thank You, Sam-I-Am

By JULIE BOSMAN

Published: September 4, 2013

Dr. Seuss books, those whimsical, mischievous, irresistibly rhymey stories that have been passed down in print to generations of readers, are finally catching up with digital publishing.

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"The Cat in the Hat" will soon be available for download.

The Dr. Seuss canon will be released in e-book format for the first time, beginning later this month, his publisher said on Wednesday, an announcement that could nudge more parents and educators to download picture books for children.

E-book sales have exploded in the last five years in adult trade fiction, with many popular titles, like “Fifty Shades of Grey,” selling far more copies in digital format than in print.

Picture books have lagged far behind. Several publishers said e-books represent only 2 to 5 percent of their total picture book sales, a number that has scarcely moved in the last several years.

But the release of the Dr. Seuss books, still hugely popular after decades in print, could move that number higher. The e-books will be available on color tablets, including the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook HD. The first titles to be released, on Sept. 24, include “The Cat in the Hat,” “Green Eggs and Ham,” “There’s a Wocket in My Pocket!” and “The Lorax” (featuring an environmentally conscious character who might be happy about the announcement).

The e-books will be faithful reproductions of the print books in terms of text, illustrations and layout, said Susan Brandt, the president of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the organization that manages the books and the movies, and the apps and television shows based on them. Enhanced versions with bells and whistles might come later, she said.

Barbara Marcus, the president and publisher of Random House Children’s Books, said she did not envision digital sales of picture books overtaking print, but that the releases would provide an additional option for parents who want the convenience of e-books.

“We see it as a companion to print,” Ms. Marcus said. “We are facing, in a happy way, a transitional moment in picture books. I believe the school market is becoming more interested in digital, and we want to be there.”

Random House is the primary English-language publisher of Dr. Seuss’s books, and Ms. Marcus, who took over as publisher last fall, said one of her first goals was to “ratchet up the Dr. Seuss publishing strategy.”

“When you start to look at how many amazing books there are, and how many amazing properties there are that he wrote and didn’t illustrate, then you start to look at what hasn’t been promoted or touched recently,” she said. “You start to realize that this is a whole wealth of wonderful books and properties, and there’s so much great opportunity.”

The author of the Dr. Seuss books, Theodor Seuss Geisel, died in 1991 at 87. But he held on to the digital rights for his books, Ms. Brandt said.

“He was a genius in many ways, and one of his geniuses was that he held these rights,” she said.

More than 600 million print copies of Dr. Seuss books have sold to date.

Educators and literacy experts have been divided on whether parents should avoid exposing their children to e-books. Junko Yokota, professor emeritus and director of the Center for Teaching Through Children’s Books at National Louis University in Chicago, said that when a picture book is replicated exactly in digital form, there is very little reason to shun the digital version.

“I don’t think it matters,” she said. “They’re both reading experiences. And I don’t think kids who don’t have access to the e-book will be hurt by their lack of access to it.”

Apps for Arts and Crafts Projects for Families

By KIT EATON

Published: July 24, 2013

My home grows a little noisier this time of year because my children are on their summer break from school. You might be in the same boat.

 

 

The Dorling Kindersley’s Kids’ Crafts app simply designed, in bold colors and with straightforward graphics, and has a few nice touches, like a jingling bells effect to appeal to children.

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Foldify is a $4 iPad app that can create printable templates for toys made of paper.

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The PaperChibi app creates 3-D figures, though its templates are more limited — you pick from set options for eyes and hair color and so on.

So here’s an idea: Instead of occupying the children with a television or handing them an iPad and sending them on their way, try using tech more creatively. Many apps are jammed with arts and crafts ideas for children and families.

Foldify, a $4 iPad app, helps parents make something tangible with their children. It has many shape templates ready to be printed, cut and glued into temporary toys, like a cube-shaped person or a car. Inside the app, children can color the templates to their hearts’ content using a digital painting interface.

They can even drop in their own photos, cartoon eyes and other amusing extras onto the template. The app displays how the final assembled 3-D item will appear as you paint.

Once the template is complete, it can be shared via e-mail, Twitter or Facebook, or printed for assembly. The app even has an online database of templates that other users have designed that can be downloaded and printed. This app is really easy to use, but its features mean younger children could use some supervision.

On Android, a roughly equivalent app is PaperChibi, which costs $3. This 3-D app with paper templates is more limited. Instead of free-handing designs on its main screen, you pick from set options for eyes and hair color and so on.

The templates are limited, as well, including a person, car or dinosaur.

When it comes to printing, the app lets you choose different complexities for the final model, from a simple box to a highly detailed figure that would easily take a half-hour to cut out and glue. Though it can make fun toys, the app has a menu system that is a little frustrating.

Dorling Kindersley’s Kids’ Crafts is a $7 iPad app based on the publisher’s successful books. It’s simply designed, in bold colors and with straightforward graphics, and has a few nice touches, like a jingling bells effect to appeal to children. The app is a mix of games to play on-screen and instructions to make real-life playthings.

For example, the “Cross-Stitch” game lets you color in a virtual cross-stitch square without having to lift a real needle and thread, but “Pirate Pete” has step-by-step instructions on how to make a simple fabric pirate doll. The app’s various projects are a delight, but there are just six of them; that’s not much for $7. It also helps if you already know how to knit to “Make Ted.”

Kids Craft Ideas is a simpler, free Android app. The app has about 100 photos of craft objects that you can make with your children, using the usual ingredients: colored paper, pipe cleaners, glue and so on. But each object comes with a single, nicely captured photo of the final product, and there are not step-by-step instructions or materials guide. Users are on their own.

A similarly named but more detailed app is Kids’ Crafts, free on iOS. It offers detailed ideas for many craft projects, as varied as “stained glass” made out of tissue paper and “recycled box boats.” Each project has a list of the necessary materials, and step-by-step instructions. But the app is dense with words and has many links to a store to buy raw materials. So it’s best if an adult manages using the app while instructing children what to build. The app also has unpredictable scrolling behavior with the various panels of the instruction pages scrolling differently.

Finally, check out Craft-A-Day Summer Edition, a $3 iPad app. It’s beautifully designed and has a different arts and crafts project for every day through the summer, with very simple instructions. They’re not the most complex projects, but they are cute.

Have fun, and remember: Most of the joy in doing crafts with children is making things up and being creative, so try using the ideas in these apps as the inspiration for even better ideas.

Quick Calls

The free VLC app is back on iOS after a protracted absence, and it's better than ever. It's a full-featured video app that can play videos in many formats on your iOS device without having to convert them. ... Aviary's popular Photo Editor has arrived as an official app on Windows Phone 8 devices. The app is a fast and friendly way to adjust or augment photos taken on the phone. It’s free for a short while.

‘Sesame Street’ Widens Its Focus

Kassie Bracken/The New York Times

‘Sesame’ Science: In a Sesame Workshop lab, preschoolers play physics and engineering games with Grover and Elmo. It’s the newest effort in a mission to teach science concepts to children. But is it working?

By ELIZABETH JENSEN

Published: September 2, 2013

On “Sesame Street,” a distressed cow has a big problem. She made it up the stairs to the beauty parlor but now, her bouffant piled high, she’s stuck. Cows can go up stairs, she moans, but not down.

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Zach Hyman

Murray Monster, shown here attending Robo Fun School, appears in science-focused segments with children.

Enter Super Grover 2.0. Out from his bottomless “utility sock” comes an enormous ramp, which, as the cow cheerily notes before clomping on down, is “a sloping surface that goes from high to low.”

Simple ABCs and 123s? So old school. In the last four years, “Sesame Street” has set itself a much larger goal: teaching nature, math, science and engineering concepts and problem-solving to a preschool audience — with topics like how a pulley works or how to go about investigating what’s making Mr. Snuffleupagus sneeze.

The content is wrapped in the traditional silliness; these are still Muppets. But the more sophisticated programming, on a show that frequently draws an audience even younger than the 3- to-5-year-olds it targets, raises a question: Is there any evidence that it is doing anything more than making PBS and parents feel good?

Officials at Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization that produces the show, believe the new approach has succeeded in introducing children — at least, the target-age audience — to scientific ideas and methods.

“This is working,” said Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president, curriculum and content. Still, they acknowledge there are challenges in measuring a young child’s scientific understanding, and experts are only just beginning to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Each new season of “Sesame Street” starts with a curriculum, drawn up by educational consultants and a research staff, laying out concepts and ideas to be taught. The show’s writers incorporate these into scripts acted out by the beloved Muppets. The science curriculum began in 2009 with new programming that tried to capitalize on children’s natural interest in the world around them, an effort inspired by Richard Louv’s 2005 book “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder,” Dr. Truglio said.

Bigger words, like “pollinate,” “hibernate” and “camouflage” were added to the “Word on the Street” rotation. In one episode, Jimmy Fallon played a “wild nature survivor guy,” who found water in leaves and shunned a coat in favor of warm feathers.

After the program’s educational consultants requested more emphasis on urging children to investigate, as opposed to simply explore, the show introduced the “Super Grover 2.0” segments. A blue Muppet known for confidently getting things wrong, Grover uses magnets, springs and “superpowers” of investigation, observation and reporting to solve problems through trial and error. Before settling on a ramp for the stuck cow, for instance, he tries a trampoline.

Elsewhere on the show, Murray Monster conducts mini-experiments on the streets of New York with children, discovering what bridge design holds the most weight and how a boat’s shape helps it float. Last season, Elmo began starring in a daily musical of his imagination that sneakily incorporates math; in “Guacamole,” he quizzes the “Rhombus of Recipes” and adds up the avocados on two trees.

On Sept. 24, the material — as well as new videos, online and mobile games, and parent and teacher resources — will find a new home online when Sesame Workshop unveils a hub on the “Sesame Street” Web site called “Little Discoverers: Big Fun With Science, Math and More.” In one game, little fingers manipulate a virtual spring to launch pieces of trash into Oscar the Grouch’s trash can, a “Sesame Street” version of “Angry Birds.”

“Sesame Street” is just one of many television programs trying to teach math and science to preschoolers. Even young children can learn basic scientific concepts, experts in educational development say. Most children are already curious about everything from weather patterns to what sinks and floats in the bath.

“They actually are already thinking about these things,” said Kimberly Brenneman, assistant research professor at Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research and an education adviser for PBS’s “Sid the Science Kid.” Educators, she said, can “create a show that is likely to meet kids where they are, and go a little further.”

Results of two studies with nearly 600 children conducted by the Workshop “demonstrate that children can learn sophisticated vocabulary and valuable science concepts from ‘Sesame Street,’ ” according to a presentation by Dr. Truglio and her colleagues at the International Communications Association in May 2011.

A just-completed third study with 337 children confirmed the results, said Jennifer Kotler, the Workshop’s vice president for research and evaluation. Ms. Kotler’s team tested elements of the show’s programming with children in low- and middle-income day care centers. Through one-on-one interviews, the researchers assessed what the children knew before watching the programming and what they retained afterward.

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Can New Building Toys for Girls Improve Math and Science Skills?

By
• DIANA KAPP

Are girls' toys the secret to increasing the number of women in the fields of engineering and other careers that rely on top spacial skills? Diana Kapp joins Lunch Break. Photo: Lego.

Amid concern among parents and educators about girls' math and engineering skills, a growing number of companies say they have an answer: toys.
Construction toys for girls, once a well-intentioned but unsuccessful part of the toy market, are blossoming. Small toy makers littleBits, GoldieBlox Inc. and Maykah Inc. are marketing products they say can bolster spatial skills, which recent research has linked to degrees and careers in these disciplines.

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Roominate

A Maykah Inc.'s Roominate kit, which girls can use to build dollhouses and other products, includes circuits to power a light or fan.

Traditional construction brands like Lego A/S and Mega Bloks are also marketing toys for stacking and erecting aimed at girls. Most of the products target girls ages 4 to 10.
"The old chestnut that girls don't build is really gone. Now there is considerable interest in girls building," says Adrian Roche, a vice president at Mega Bloks, part of Mega Brands Inc. MB.T +0.39%
To woo girls, some of the latest construction toys marry building with storytelling. Roominate, the first product line from Mountain View, Calif.-based Maykah, is a wired dollhouse kit. Girls build a duplex or the ambitious "Chateau de Roominate," and integrate circuits to power a light or fan.

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Lego

The Lego Friends line launched last year with items like 'Olivia's Tree House.'

With GoldieBlox, girls help Goldie fix her busted music box by creating a belt drive from lavender pegs, spools and ribbon.
"Building electronics isn't the end goal. Moving parts help create a more exciting story," says Maykah co-founder Alice Brooks.
LittleBits, which first shipped its products in 2012, makes tiny purple, green, orange and pink snap-together electronic modules that can be transformed into talking puppets, buzzing piggy banks, sound-triggered lamps and more. The company says it strives for its toys to be unisex.
"I very much disagree with this idea that the products need to be gendered," says Ayah Bdeir, founder and CEO of littleBits, based in New York City. She says the company's toys appeal to girls with bold colors, a simple design aesthetic and a range of projects that girls and boys alike are prominently shown building in a video on the website.

Goldie Blox

For the founder of GoldieBlox, one aim is to get girls to love engineering.

Lego Friends, a girls' line launched last year, features mini-figurine "friends" Emma, Olivia and pals, along with the Lego bricks to create their groovy camper or cafe.
In 2011, 91% of Lego sets were purchased for boys, says Michael McNally, brand relations director at Lego Systems Inc. In 2012, Lego's top-selling Lego set was "Olivia's House," a Lego Friends product. And one year after Lego Friends launched, three times as many girls were building with Lego bricks.
Mega Bloks joined with Mattel Inc.'s Barbie, and in 2012 began selling the Barbie Build 'n Style line, which girls can use to build a mansion or ice-cream cart. Mr. Roche declines to break out sales but says they were strong, adding, "We've had tremendous pickup by all retailers."
Makers of stacking and building sets have been attempting to appeal to girls for decades. But they either just made blocks pink, or they went too far away from their core product into, for instance, making your own jewelry. "They finally figured out you can't just shrink it and pink it," says toy analyst Sean McGowan with Needham & Co. "Those products didn't sell because that's not how girls play."
Pastels have not gone away, judging from the colors of the new products, but many of the products also feature girl characters or dolls on the packaging, often with animals and fashion accessories. The building sets often turn into pet salons, beach lofts, cafes or bedrooms.
With Lego Friends, "the play pattern is much more traditional girls' social play, dollhouse, re-enactment of real life," says Mr. McGowan.

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littleBits

LittleBits aims for its snap-together electronic modules to appeal to both genders.

For many girls, this is the point. "Girls want that story line—there has to be an emotional component, that emotional thing that girls do," says Roberta Bonoff, CEO and president of Creative Kidstuff, a six-store chain in the Minneapolis area.
For the founders of many emerging building-toy brands—women engineers in their 20s and 30s—creating an opportunity for girls to work on their spatial skills is critical. Several of them cite as motivation the fact that there are far fewer women in science and technology professions than men.
GoldieBlox, which is based in Oakland, Calif., places a video starring Debbie Sterling, its founder, front and center on its website in which she talks about how spatial skills are important for technology fields. Her goal, she says, is to get little girls to love engineering as much as she does.
At Maykah, co-founder Bettina Chen pictures girls using the toy to learn computer coding skills. "At some point we want the girls programming."
Scientists say that, on average, girls' spatial skills, meaning the ability to translate 2-D sketches into 3-D forms, or rotate an object mentally, are weaker than boys' skills.
"It is one of the largest cognitive sex differences," says David Lubinski, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. Spatial ability has a direct connection with the likelihood of earning an advanced degree in science, technology, engineering or math, his research has found.
The spatial-skills gap between boys and girls is a function of biology but also how children play. "Parents reinforce gender-specific play. Very tiny brain differences get amplified by culture," says Lise Eliot, associate professor or neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine & Science.
Of course, toy stores stocked with girly building toys won't automatically translate to a new crop of engineers and inventors. "It's not just having the toy—it's doing the building or electronics with the toy," cautions Susan Levine, psychology department chair at University of Chicago.
But spatial skills can be improved with practice and use, scientists say. The argument is that the activities involved in these toys—orienting the motor for a spinning cupcake table or constructing a little elevator—exercise spatial skills.
Research has shown that the brain's circuitry is quite malleable, particularly in early life, Ms. Eliot says. "We know that the more you play, the better you get," she says.
Preschoolers who could arrange blocks into the most sophisticated towers scored best on standardized math tests as teenagers, according to a 2001 Florida State University study tracking 37 kids that was published in the journal of Research in Childhood Education.
A 2010 study with 116 Israeli first-graders conducted by professors at Bar-Ilan University found gender differences in spatial skills disappeared after eight training sessions on mental rotation tasks. The kids practiced reproducing images from memory, and then were guided in perceiving them from different angles.
When a spatial visualization course was given to Michigan middle school kids in a 2005 pilot study conducted by Sheryl Sorby, a professor at Michigan Technological University, participating girls subsequently took more upper-level math and science courses in high school.
Julia Keller, an education specialist from Monterey, Calif., found Roominate online while searching for "architectural toys." Her daughters, ages 9 and 11, like to design and build, she says.
"It blew my mind that both my girls probably put in a good 12 to 15 hours the first weekend. My younger one was very interested in all the electronics—the switches and the motors. She used her set to make a smoothie store—a Jamba Juice kind of thing," Ms. Keller says.

Learning to Read, With the Help of a Tablet

Learn With Homer, a free iPad app.

By KIT EATON

Published: August 21, 2013

I learned long ago that the iPad’s game and video apps cast a magical spell over my children, but this summer I’ve also been pleased by how much they have learned while using their tablets. This is important, as my 4-year-old is going to “real” school for the first time. His reading skills, in particular, have been helped by some great apps. These have helped him move from knowing shapes and sounds of letters to actually reading words.

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Booksy, a free app for iOS and Android.

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Montessori Crosswords, $3 on iOS.

One of the most comprehensive apps for teaching reading is a free iPad app called Learn With Homer (not the Greek one or Mr. Simpson, you’ll be pleased to hear). It’s a set of lessons and games presented with bright cartoon graphics and amusing sounds.

Using animations and spoken guidance, the app leads children to sound letters that appear on the screen and shows how letters make words, using examples like “alligator” and “ant.” The app’s learning sections are interspersed with game sections, and there is a listening section where children read and hear stories. Completing a lesson or story is rewarded with the chance to draw something on the screen or to record an answer to a question about the story. The app’s best feature is that it keeps these pictures and recordings, because it is fun to look back on them.

The app’s interface feels child-friendly and is easy to use thanks to on-screen cues and spoken instructions. Children could most likely use it on their own — though an adult may need to lend a hand with some controls, like the drawing interface. The app also has great attention to detail. For example, in the section that reinforces learning letter sounds there is a convincing animation of a child mouthing the sounds on the screen.

My main problems with Learn With Homer are that it moves too slowly in places and that younger children may lose interest. Buying extra lessons via in-app purchases could also be expensive, since they each cost $2 or more.

For a simpler reading app, the free Kids Reading (Preschool) app on Android is a great option. The app’s first section helps children learn to blend letter sounds into full words, through a cute game with a tortoise. The game animates the tortoise walking along slowly, sounding out each letter in a short word as he moves. The child can click on sneakers to make him move faster, which then sounds the word faster, or click on a skateboard to sound the word in real time.

A “try reading” section lets children practice reading and saying short words with a simple matching game. And the “make words” option has the child spotting the right-sounding letter to complete a word puzzle. This app has clear sounds, and many children will love its simplicity. But for more words you do need to pay $3 for the full Kids Learn To Read version.

Montessori Crosswords, $3 on iOS, is more sophisticated. This app’s main feature is a game in which children drag letters from an alphabet list onto a very simple crossword grid. Each word on the grid is accompanied by a picture hint. Tapping on this makes the app say the word aloud. Depending on the settings, words can be made of fewer or, if you choose, more sounds, which makes the puzzles more challenging. To keep children interested, getting words right delivers an interactive graphic, like one of shooting stars, that reacts to screen touches.

Compared with its peers, this app has a narrow range of activities, which may limit how long it remains useful. It also probably works best under adult supervision — particularly since the app’s main menu is a little confusing.

For children who have learned to recognize words by themselves, and yet would benefit from guided reading experiences, there’s Booksy. This free app, for iOS and Android, is best thought of as a traditional high-quality children’s reading book with added digital powers. For example, as well as displaying a page of text and well-drawn images, it reads the text aloud. Tapping on any word — even in the labels, for example in a drawing of a whale — will make the app say the word clearly. The app can also record a child reading aloud automatically, then e-mail the audio files directly to you so you can keep track of progress. This feature may seem a little creepy, but you can turn it off.

Booksy comes with two free books, and more are available through in-app purchases. There are about 30 titles for around $1 each. Each book has a different reading difficulty level, and many of them are also available in Spanish. You can lock the bookstore on iOS to prevent children from getting in, but smarter children may spot the parental controls and unlock it again. On Android there is a better “adult question” lock, but on this platform some of the app’s screen space is, unfortunately, taken up with navigation buttons.

Remember, your enthusiasm for reading can be an important example for your children — so why not play with these apps alongside them?

Quick Call

Dots is a simple game that has already had a lot of success on the iPhone — to play it is as easy as connecting the dots, yet it’s fiendishly addictive. Now it’s on Android, and free.

To Ensure Bone Health, Start Early

By JANE E. BRODY

 

Yvetta Fedorova

Personal Health

Jane Brody on health and aging.

Most people don’t start thinking about the health of their bones until midlife or later, by which time it can be too late to do very much to protect against serious bone loss and resulting fractures.
Researchers who study bone health say concern about the strength of one’s bones should start in childhood and continue through adolescence, when the body builds most of the bone that must sustain it for the remaining years of life.
Once peak bone mass has been reached, further gains are minimal, so childhood through adolescence is the best time to pay attention to bone development. By age 20, girls have gained between 90 and 96 percent of their peak bone mass. For boys, the peak occurs a few years later.
About 26 percent of total adult bone is accrued in two years around the time that bone mass increases the most — at age 12.5 in girls and 14.1 in boys. The amount of bone added during those two years is about the same as what is typically lost in the 30 years between ages 50 and 80.
Lifelong studies have not been done in people, but the best available evidence strongly indicates that increasing peak bone mass in childhood by just 10 percent could delay osteoporosis, especially in postmenopausal women, by about 13 years.
Although nothing can be done about the three factors with the greatest influence on bone mass — age, gender and genetics — two others under personal control can make the difference between suffering crippling fractures in midlife and escaping the effects of osteoporosis until after age 90. Those are physical activity and the bone-building nutrients, calcium and vitamin D.
While the focus here will be on the effects of exercise, it should be noted that calcium consumption by adolescent girls is often seriously inadequate, compromising their ability to build strong bones that will last a lifetime.
Exercise affects bone strength in two ways: in response to the pressure of gravitational forces like those experienced when walking, running or jumping, and in reaction to the stress exerted by muscle contraction.
You might think that any kind of exercise is good for bones, and the more active a child is, the better. That is largely, but not always, true. On average, as with adults, active children have higher bone mineral density and reduced risk of fractures compared with their inactive counterparts, Dr. Kirk L. Scofield noted last year in Current Sports Medicine Reports. But some types of activities are better than others. Studies have found that the bone mineral density of young endurance runners is consistently lower than that of sprinters, gymnasts or ball sports athletes. In fact, those engaged in endurance and non-weight-bearing activities sometimes have weaker bones and a greater risk of fractures, both while actively competing and later in life, than their inactive peers.
“Repetitive stress can tear down bone and is not the best for increasing bone strength,” Dr. Scofield said in an interview. “It’s not that running, walking, cycling or swimming are bad. They’re just not as good for bone strength as other types of athletic activities.”
Bones, he said, seem to respond best to a combination of stress, rest and variety, which suggests that youngsters engaged in endurance activities should also do cross-training to maximize bone strength.
Dr. Scofield, a sports medicine specialist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, said that the most effective form of stress on bones is that which works against gravity and starts and stops, as happens when playing soccer, basketball, or tennis; doing gymnastics or dancing; using resistance equipment; or lifting weights.
In a study of 99 college women who participated in NCAA Division 1 sports, runners had the lowest bone density values at every site measured except their legs. Swimmers and divers also showed bone deficits when compared with those who played soccer or field hockey, for example.
An earlier study of young female aerobic dancers, squash players and speed skaters found that sports training that involves “high strain rates in versatile movements and high peak forces is more effective in bone formation than training with a large number of low-force repetitions.”
A major bone-robbing issue for some young athletes, especially women, is what sports specialists call “energy availability” — the amount of energy they consume during exercise minus the amount they expend, divided by their lean body mass (muscle and bone). It represents the energy left to support all the body’s functions, including formation of new bone.
Low energy availability can result from insufficient calorie intake, excessive calorie expenditure during exercise, or a combination of the two, even if the athlete does not appear to be underweight and is not undernourished, Dr. Scofield said.
Runners, for example, may burn so many calories there’s not enough energy left to maintain normal bone health. He recommends a nutrition consultation for young athletes who suffer stress fractures, an indication of bone weakness that can be from low energy availability.
A related concern that can result from excessive training is a syndrome called “female athlete triad” — an interrelationship between energy availability, menstrual function and bone density. Girls who overexercise and don’t consume enough calories to support all bodily functions can suffer menstrual irregularity or lose their periods entirely, which can lead to muscle and bone injuries.
In a study of 249 females athletes at three high schools published in The Journal of Athletic Training last year, researchers in Provo, Utah, found that nearly 20 percent experienced menstrual irregularities and 63 percent developed musculoskeletal injuries, with the highest percentage of injuries among those with irregular or missing periods.
I asked Dr. Scofield what advice he would give to the parents of young children and adolescents. His response: “Get kids away from electronics and encourage them to play actively and do a lot of different activities. Equally important is to avoid pressuring them to be too thin.”
He also urged adequate consumption of calcium-rich foods, like dairy products and canned salmon and sardines with the bones. An assessment of calcium intake can be determined from a Web-based calcium calculator.
Children ages 4 through 8 should consume 800 milligrams of calcium daily and those 9 through 18, 1,300 milligrams. If children are not getting enough calcium from their diet, Dr. Scofield recommends that they take a calcium supplement with vitamin D.
Vitamin D is needed for the body to absorb and utilize dietary calcium, and children ages 1 through 18 need 800 International Units daily. Most vitamin D is obtained when skin is exposed to sunlight, but the widespread use of potent sunscreens has greatly reduced this source, so a supplement may be essential.

7 Foreign Films Kids will Love

7 Foreign Films Kids Will Love 

 

Don't let the subtitles scare you -- there's lots of fun to be had watching movies in other languages.

	Senior Editor, Books | Mom of two

I showed my son, Kyle, his first foreign film when he was 7: the Academy Award-winning 1957 French classic The Red Balloon. I had seen it when I was his age, and I still recall being fascinated by how different the French kids dressed and how different the Paris streets looked. The fable-like, nearly wordless story was universal, yet so utterly French. Kyle loved it, especially seeing kids at play in another era.
Fast-forward to his tween years, when I took him to his first foreign film at a movie theater, the dreamlike Chinese martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. He thought it was amazing, and it wasn't just the action sequences that wowed him. It was also the period detail, the artful cinematography, the heartbreaking romance -- everything that was nothing like anything he'd ever seen before. And he was able to follow the subtitles without a problem: "I barely noticed them after a while," he said," I was so caught up in the story."
Despite globalization and global pop culture, there are distinct perspectives, cultural differences, and approaches to filmmaking on display in films made in other countries. I suggest seeing them in their native tongue -- not dubbed -- so kids can hear the sound and rhythm of the language as it's spoken.
Exposing your kids to other cultures is also a great way to challenge prejudices and cultural stereotypes. Here are some of our favorite foreign films for kids:

• The Red Balloon (age 7+)  --  A boy and a balloon make friends on the streets of '50s Paris and run away from a gang of kids who want to hurt the balloon. The movie is wordless except for some background voices.
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (age 12+) -- This is a martial-arts fairy tale about two sets of star-crossed lovers and a magical sword. The fight scenes are balletic masterpieces.
• Au Revoir Les Enfants (age 12+) -- Amusing scenes of classmates at a Catholic boys' school in 1944 France mix with the threat of Nazi occupiers. The movie helps kids see war and bigotry through the eyes of children.
• Life Is Beautiful (age 13+) -- This Italian Oscar winner is full of humor and romance, but it also poignantly conveys the Holocaust's tragic toll on families.
• Cinema Paradiso (age 13+) -- A fatherless boy in a small Italian town finds solace at the movie theater -- and a mentor and friend in its older projectionist. It won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. 
• Amélie (age 16+) -- This offbeat, whimsical romance set in contemporary Paris has odd and memorable characters, chief among them Audrey Tautou's strange and isolated Amélie. My daughter was so taken with the title character that she started sporting the same coiffure.
• A Very Long Engagement (age 16+) -- This is a sweet, romantic World War I-era story of a woman (also played by Tautou) searching for her missing fiance. It offers searing views of life and fear in the trenches and bloody battles yet is fueled by the power of undying love.

For more suggestions, check out our Foreign Films for Kids list.

Nature and Nurture

Nature and Nurture

‘Wait! Wait!’ and ‘A Year Around the Great Oak’

From "Wait! Wait!"

By SARAH HARRISON SMITH

Published: July 24, 2013

One of summer’s great gifts is the chance to adapt ourselves to nature; to slow down in the heat, to swim when the tide comes in, and to find our place, at least briefly, in the wild. In “Wait! Wait!” and “A Year Around the Great Oak,” two beautifully illustrated but very different books, children engage with animals and the outdoors in ways that are unpredictable, stimulating and ultimately confidence-inducing.

WAIT! WAIT!

By Hatsue Nakawaki

Illustrated by Komako Sakai

24 pp. Enchanted Lion Books. $14.95. (Picture book; infant to age 3)

A YEAR AROUND THE GREAT OAK

Written and illustrated by Gerda Muller

32 pp. Floris Books. $17.95. (Picture book; ages 4 to 12)

Related

• Times Topic: Children's Books Reviews

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From "A Year Around the Great Oak"

Previously published in Japan, “Wait! Wait!” tells its story through acrylic and oil pencil illustrations. Hatsue Nakawaki’s very spare text, intended for lap reading, describes in the simplest terms a toddler’s encounters with the creatures he sees outside. “Wait! Wait!,” the child says, or perhaps thinks, as a butterfly swoops past. A page later, the butterfly has flown high up out of reach. Next a salamander pauses to exchange a quizzical look and then wiggles out of sight between rocks. Cats, found sunning themselves, run off as the child approaches with open arms.

None of the animals obey the child’s repeated wish that they “wait.” But the pictures, which have a very appealing 1970s look, and are mostly colored in black, grays and gold on a white ground, show a calm child whose wonder at each creature’s actions (leaping, wiggling, fluttering) outweighs frustration. In the end, it is the delighted child who is caught and hoisted onto the father’s shoulders for a better view. This is a lovely book for very young children: Komako Sakai’s illustrations convey tacit sympathy with the child’s perspective, and Nakawaki leaves so much unstated that there is plenty left to discuss.

Altogether more substantial and fact-filled, “A Year Around the Great Oak” was first published in Germany over two decades ago, and retains a slightly foreign feeling in this English translation. Benjamin and his younger sister, who appear to be about 9 and 7, visit relatives each season over the course of a year. Their uncle works as a forester, managing the land adjacent to the family’s home. On the children’s first, autumnal trip they explore the woods with their young cousin, who shows them his favorite tree, a huge old oak. “ ‘Three hundred years is a long time,’ he said, ‘People don’t ever live much longer than one hundred years. This tree has been growing for three times as long as that!’ ”

The oak becomes the locus for gathering mushrooms, cross-country skiing, measuring trunk growth and building a covert. There the cousins spy badgers, squirrels, hawks, foxes, deer and rabbits. Gerda Muller, whose work may be familiar from her other nature-imbued children’s books (“Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “Where Do They Go When It Rains?”), draws each activity and animal with great detail and attention. Leaf shapes are accurate, and the picture of the children making their hideout from sticks and leaves is as good as a scouting manual; for readers with access to woods this could prove to be a useful as well as a handsome book.

One evening, the children’s uncle takes them to watch the animals drinking from a pond, and Benjamin enjoys the experience so much he ventures out by himself the next night. “He knew it wasn’t safe to go into the forest on his own, but he really wanted to sit in the tree and think one more time.” A loud noise crashing through the forest confirms his fears, but the oak protects him until unexpected help arrives. The boy faces no punishment for his adventure, just a talk “about going out on his own,” and an invitation from his uncle to return again at the end of the summer. “ ‘The forest will still be here.’”

Benjamin’s nighttime adventure brings realistic drama to this otherwise quiet book, and deepens it into something like a growing-up story. Benjamin may not be as tall or as old as the oak, but under its boughs he has learned something about self-sufficiency and it limits. When the children celebrate the oak with a birthday party, it’s clearly a rite of passage for more than just the tree.