"How to Eliminate Test Anxiety"
How to eliminate test anxiety In the February 11 issue of Time magazine, I have an article about test anxiety—the nervousness that many of us feel when confronted with an exam—and the techniques that psychologists have developed to get rid of it. Here, some insights adapted from that article:
As any parent or teacher knows, tests can create crippling anxiety in students–and anxious kids can perform below their true abilities. But new research in cognitive science and psychology is giving us a clearer understanding of the link between stress and performance, and allowing experts to develop specific strategies for helping kids manage their fears. These potential solutions are reasonably simple, inexpensive and, as recent studies show, effective. Some work for a broad range of students, while others target specific groups. Yet they’re unfamiliar to many teachers and parents, who remain unaware that test anxiety can be so easily relieved. Here, three such approaches:
1. Unload on paper. When students feel nervous, their capacity to think clearly and solve problems accurately is reduced, says Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist at the University of Chicago. Students taking an exam must draw on their working memory, the mental holding space where we manipulate facts and ideas. “When students are anxious, their worries use up some of their working memory, leaving fewer cognitive resources to devote to the test,” Beilock explains. One method recently tested successfully by Beilock and a colleague, Gerardo Ramirez, had students spend ten minutes writing about their thoughts and feelings immediately before taking a test. The practice, called “expressive writing,” is used by psychologists to reduce negative thoughts in people with depression. They tried the intervention on college students placed in a testing situation in Beilock’s lab, and in an actual Chicago school, where ninth-grade students engaged in the writing exercise before their first high school final. In both cases, students’ test scores “significantly improved,” according to an article they published last year in the journal Science.
While one might imagine writing about a looming exam would only heighten students’ anxiety, Beilock says the opposite was the case. “Writing about their worries had the effect of ‘offloading’ them onto the page, so that the students had more cognitive horsepower available to apply to solving problems on the test,” she explains. For both groups, Beilock and Ramirez reported in Science, “one short writing intervention that brings testing pressures to the forefront enhances the likelihood of excelling, rather than failing, under pressure.”
2. Affirm your values. Apprehension over tests can be especially common among minority and female students. That’s because the prospect of evaluation poses for them what psychologists call “stereotype threat”—the possibility that a poor performance will confirm negative assumptions about the group to which they belong (among the specious, anxiety-inducing tropes: girls can’t excel in math and science; blacks and Latinos aren’t college material). This additional layer of anxiety can lead such students to perform below the level they are capable of. “Girls, and black and Latino students, are often dealing with a double dose of test anxiety,” says Stanford University psychologist Gregory Walton. “The nervousness everyone feels when they’re being evaluated, plus the worry—conscious or not—that a poor performance will prove that the negative assumption about their group is correct.”
Walton’s colleague at Stanford, psychology professor Geoffrey Cohen, devised an intervention aimed at reducing stereotype threat. Like the exercise designed by Beilock and Ramirez, it asks students to write briefly, but in this case participants are instructed to choose something they value and write about why it matters to them. “Music is important to me because it gives me a way to express myself when I’m mad, happy, or sad,” one participant wrote. In one study, this “values affirmation” exercise was shown to shrink the performance gap between white and black students by 40 percent. In another, it erased the gap in test scores between women and men enrolled in a challenging college physics course, raising the women’s average grade from a C to a B (higher than the average male student’s grade).
3. Engage in relaxation exercises. Younger kids aren’t immune from test anxiety. As early as first and second grade, researchers see evidence of anxiety about testing. Their worries tend to manifest in non-verbal signs that adults may miss, says psychologist Heidi Larson: stomachaches, difficulty sleeping, and a persistent urge to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom. “I had one mother tell me that her son had no problem with tests,” recalls Larson, a professor of counseling and student development at Eastern Illinois University. “Then a week later she came back and said that her son had burst into tears the night before the big end-of-year exam, saying that he was afraid he wouldn’t be promoted to the next grade.”
Larson designed an intervention especially for younger students, involving breathing and relaxation exercises, and examined its effectiveness on a group of third-graders. “We had students lie on mats on the floor of their classrooms. They closed their eyes and we asked them to focus on their breathing, then on tensing and relaxing groups of muscles in their legs, arms, stomachs and so on,” Larson recounts. “Some of the kids became so relaxed they fell asleep!” A control group of students at another school received no such training. The study, which was published in the Journal of School Counseling in 2010, reported that the relaxation intervention had “a significant effect in reducing test anxiety.”
"Dealing with Digital Behavior Issues: A Parent Guide"
Dealing with Digital Behavior Issues: A Parent Guide
February 5, 2013
Photo credit: iStockPhoto
As Director of Technology at The Nueva School and a member of a working task force*, I helped to create this easy-to-remember parent strategy for handling children's computer-related incidents. I've reprinted it in its entirety below.
1. Practice P.O.I.S.E.
P = Pause
Pause before responding. Take a deep breath before getting excited or worried. Give yourself time to think objectively.O = Open
Be open-minded. During the above pause, open your mind to different possibilities. What your child claims to have happened is just one perspective on what happened; what you see and interpret is another perspective.I = Information Gathering
Find out and write down the facts.- Note the date and time of when you first found out.
- Note the date and time of when the incident was supposed to have happened. Write down any accounts involved.
- What exactly happened? Be as detailed as possible.
- Get screen shots.
- On a Mac: Command+Shift+4 to click and drag areas of the screen you want to take. They will automatically be saved onto your desktop as "Screenshot -- date/timestamp info." Hit the Esc button if you make a mistake and want to start again. Repeat for other relevant images.
- On a Windows machine: Hit the Prt Scn button. Sometimes this requires holding down the Fn key. The entire screen will be taken and saved into RAM memory. Open Word or PowerPoint, choose Edit > Paste to paste the screen shot into the application. Repeat if necessary.
- Do not delete any emails or chat sessions, or destroy any evidence. Instead, see if you can try to save the content, whether through File > Save As, or through screen shots.
- What were some of the other circumstances surrounding the incident? Was there an incident at school or elsewhere that may have prompted this action?
- Who else may have seen this incident? Were there any online bystanders or witnesses? Who? List them.
- List any suspected offenders along with reasons why s/he would be suspected.
- Are there any assumptions you or your student have made about the issue or incident? List them.
- Write down any other pieces of information and/or thoughts that might help an investigation.
S = Seek a Teachable Moment
Sometimes, the teachable moment is not right after the event has occurred. It might be sometime afterwards when emotions are not as high. Comfort, console, encourage and seek to find another, more appropriate moment.E = Educate and Encourage
Educate your student. Do not focus on just this one incident, but see if you can share other similar incidents or scenarios. Your student needs to learn about the ethical things to do if this situation or similar situations come up in the future. Remember to acknowledge, applaud and recognize all the good choices your student made throughout the incident -- whether that choice was telling you or not retaliating with further hurtful statements. Keep the lines of communication open and build those communication bridges. If you are at a loss for what to say or do, please feel free to ask your student’s teacher, advisor, principal or head of school, or technology director.2. Reporting to the School
If the incident involves another family within the school community, please email a brief summary or overview of the incident to your student's homeroom teacher and/or advisor. Include your findings from the information-gathering section of the P.O.I.S.E. model. Please also copy the appropriate school administrators and the technology director. If you believe the incident involves a student outside of your school community, copy that school's administration as well. Even if you believe this incident may not warrant school attention but might be significant in another context, it's important to send an email letting any appropriate parties know that the incident occurred.Once you report an incident, wait for the school to perform its investigation. Speaking as The Nueva School's Director of Technology, I can say that we really do appreciate your efforts and are keenly aware of your concerns. While waiting, please refrain from contacting any other families that might be involved. Schools take these incidents very seriously, but it does take us time to collect additional data and/or other insights from the community, and to decide on an appropriate course of action. Meanwhile, seek that teachable moment for your student, and educate and encourage appropriately.
"Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart?"
Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart?
Platon for The New York Times
Students at Shaker Heights
High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, on Jan. 25, the day before they
took the SAT or SAT math subject test. Clockwise from top left: Elana
Ross, Linda Fan, Aryanna Jones, Sasha Rae-Grant, Patrick Reed, Jeremy
McMillan. More Photos »
By PO BRONSON and ASHLEY MERRYMAN
Published: February 6, 2013 404 Comments
Noah Muthler took his first state standardized test in third grade at
the Spring Cove Elementary School in Roaring Spring, Pa. It was a
miserable experience, said his mother, Kathleen Muthler. He was a good
student in a program for gifted children. But, Muthler said, “he was
crying in my arms the night before the test, saying: ‘I’m not ready,
Mom. They didn’t teach us everything that will be on the test.’ ” In
fourth grade, he was upset the whole week before the exam. “He manifests
it physically,” his mother said. “He got headaches and stomachaches. He
would ask not to go to school.” Not a good sleeper anyway, Noah would
slip downstairs after an hour tossing in bed and ask his mom to lie down
with him until he fell asleep. In fifth grade, the anxiety lasted a
solid month before the test. “Even after the test, he couldn’t let it
go. He would wonder about questions he feared he misunderstood,” Muthler
said.
Multimedia
So this year, Muthler is opting Noah out of the Pennsylvania System of
School Assessment, using a broad religious and ethical exemption. Just
knowing he won’t be taking the tests in March has put Noah in a better
frame of mind about school. “The pressure is off his shoulders now,” his
mother said. When he doesn’t grasp a concept immediately, he can talk
it through without any panic. “He looks forward to science class and
math class again,” Muthler said. “He wants to be a chemical or nuclear
engineer.”
Muthler understands Noah’s distress; more mysterious is why her son
Jacob, who is in eighth grade, isn’t the least bit unnerved by the same
tests. He, too, is in the gifted program, but that seems to give him
breezy confidence, not fear. “You would think he doesn’t even care,”
Muthler marveled. “Noah has the panic and anxiety for both of them.”
Nevertheless, she will opt out Jacob from the tests, too, to be
consistent.
Never before has the pressure to perform on high-stakes tests been so
intense or meant so much for a child’s academic future. As more school
districts strive for accountability, standardized tests have
proliferated. The pressure to do well on achievement tests for college
is filtering its way down to lower grades, so that even third graders
feel as if they are on trial. Students get the message that class work
isn’t what counts, and that the standardized exam is the truer measure.
Sure, you did your homework and wrote a great history report — but this
test is going to find out how smart you really are. Critics argue that all this test-taking is churning out sleep-deprived, overworked, miserable children.
But some children actually do better under competitive, stressful
circumstances. Why can Jacob thrive under pressure, while it undoes
Noah? And how should that difference inform the way we think about
high-stakes testing? An emerging field of research — and a pioneering
study from Taiwan — has begun to offer some clues. Like any kind of
human behavior, our response to competitive pressure is derived from a
complex set of factors — how we were raised, our skills and experience,
the hormones that we marinated in as fetuses. There is also a genetic
component: One particular gene, referred to as the COMT gene, could to a
large degree explain why one child is more prone to be a worrier, while
another may be unflappable, or in the memorable phrasing of David
Goldman, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health, more of a
warrior.
Understanding their propensity to become stressed and how to deal with
it can help children compete. Stress turns out to be far more
complicated than we’ve assumed, and far more under our control than we
imagine. Unlike long-term stress, short-term stress can actually help
people perform, and viewing it that way changes its effect. Even for
those genetically predisposed to anxiety, the antidote isn’t necessarily
less competition — it’s more competition. It just needs to be the right kind.
Every May in Taiwan, more than 200,000 ninth-grade
children take the Basic Competency Test for Junior High School Students.
This is not just any test. The scores will determine which high school
the students are admitted to — or if they get into one at all. Only 39
percent of Taiwanese children make the cut, with the rest diverted to
vocational schools or backup private schools. The test, in essence,
determines the future for Taiwanese children.
The test is incredibly difficult; answering the multiple-choice
questions requires knowledge of chemistry, physics, advanced algebra and
geometry, and testing lasts for two days. “Many students go to cram
school almost every night to study all the subjects on the test,” says
Chun-Yen Chang, director of the Science Education Center at National
Taiwan Normal University. “Just one or two percentage points difference
will drag you from the No. 1 high school in the local region down to No.
3 or 4.”
"A Truce in the Bragging Wars"
This Life
A Truce in the Bragging Wars
David Flaherty
By BRUCE FEILER
Published: February 1, 2013
MOMMY BLOGGERS (and their daddy counterparts, too) agree about almost
nothing. Some favor co-sleeping; others do not. Some favor banning video
games; others do not. Similar disputes surround breast-feeding,
vaccines, cursing and whether it’s O.K. to force-feed your child
broccoli.
But a rare consensus has emerged on at least one topic. What subject
could possibly be so clear-cut it has elicited once-in-a-generation
unanimity?
That parents should stop bragging about their children.
That’s right, apparently the civil rights issue of our age is that you
have the right to remain silent — and I have the right not to hear about
— how your daughter learned to read at 16 months, your son scored 12
goals in the soccer game, and your darling got into Brown, his first
choice! (All these example were taken from actual, antibragging
diatribes.)
Consider these headlines from recent months. BabyCenter: “I Hate Hearing About Your Gifted Child.” Café Mom: “8 Most Ridiculous Things Moms Brag About.” WebMD: “How to Handle Parents Who Brag About Their Kids.” Yahoo! Voices: “Are You Sick of Being One-Upped by Fellow Moms?” Berkeley Parents Network: “My Friends’ Saintly Kids.”
Don’t get me wrong. I get the annoyance. A friend of my wife’s once
boasted about her daughter’s high Apgar score. But I’ve also heard
plenty of parental brags that seemed not only justified, but downright
heartwarming: the tone-deaf parent marveling at a child who can sing;
the parent who never went to college proud that a child got a
scholarship; the harried mother of three grateful that an older sibling
is acting sweet toward a newborn.
Parenting is tough enough; can’t you take a victory lap every now and then?
So why has this otherwise minor corner of family life elicited such
strong feelings? Part of it may be that we live in an era when many
children scurry from pottery class to gymnastics to the chess club. With
more activities come more chances for scores, ribbons and gold stars.
Also, with Facebook, Facetime, Twitter and the like, there are more
outlets for showing off. “Let me just snap a picture of that trophy you
got for taking your first poop!”
Whatever the reason, the time seems ripe for a truce in the bragging
wars. I set out to devise some guidelines for acceptable chest-thumping.
1. Brag about how good a child you have, not how good a parent you are. Adriana Trigiani,
the best-selling author of “Big Stone Gap” and “The Shoemaker’s Wife,”
says she’s most annoyed when parents trumpet their child-rearing skills
instead of their good fortune. “I’ve noticed when parents brag, it’s
usually a reflection of their wonderful parenting skills and not their
child’s natural abilities,” she said. “When I see people like Donald
Trump on TV taking full credit for how his children turned out, that’s
the kind of bragging that gets under people’s skin.”
2. Brag about effort, not accomplishment. One of the signature parenting ideas of the last few years — praise effort not achievement — applies equally well to boasting. Brad Meltzer,
who wrote “The Fifth Assassin” and two nonfiction books about children,
says he doesn’t mind if parents talk about their children’s passions.
“If you say, ‘My kid loves reading,’ that’s O.K.,” he said. “If you say,
‘My kid is the best reader in his grade,’ I start the hate machine.” He
added: “It’s the difference between murder and manslaughter. It’s all
in the intent.”
3. Brag in context. Mr. Meltzer says he generally
doesn’t mind if parents brag, as long as they don’t pretend they’re
Stepford parents and their children are little angels. “I want to hear
the bragging in the context of real, gritty, poopy life,” he said. “If
you’re trying to sell me your perfect life, the hate machine starts
humming again.”
4. Follow “the bragging formula.” Another common piece
of advice — each time you criticize someone, you should give multiple
compliments — applies equally well in reverse. Each boast about a child
should come surrounded by three negatives. My son is on the honor roll
(but still wets his bed).
Laura Zigman,
the best-selling author of “Animal Husbandry” and “Her,” says that she
welcomes such a bragging formula but is concerned that for braggy
parents, even the counternegative might end up being boastful. As she
wrote in an e-mail, “My son got an A+ in Sanskrit ... but he still can’t
write his name in Mandarin!! #dummy!” or “His room is so messy he’s
going to discover new particles of matter in it someday! #MIT-bound.”
"Language Learning on the Go"
Language Learning on the Go
Brushing up on French or diving into Mandarin? Graduate from truant to fluent with these apps
"The Boys at the Back"
The Boys at the Back
By CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS
Ben Javens 
The Great Divide is a series about inequality.
The study’s authors analyzed data from more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade and found that boys across all racial groups and in all major subject areas received lower grades than their test scores would have predicted.
The scholars attributed this “misalignment” to differences in “noncognitive skills”: attentiveness, persistence, eagerness to learn, the ability to sit still and work independently. As most parents know, girls tend to develop these skills earlier and more naturally than boys.
No previous study, to my knowledge, has demonstrated that the well-known gender gap in school grades begins so early and is almost entirely attributable to differences in behavior. The researchers found that teachers rated boys as less proficient even when the boys did just as well as the girls on tests of reading, math and science. (The teachers did not know the test scores in advance.) If the teachers had not accounted for classroom behavior, the boys’ grades, like the girls’, would have matched their test scores.
That boys struggle with school is hardly news. Think of Shakespeare’s “whining schoolboy with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school.” Over all, it’s likely that girls have long behaved better than boys at school (and earned better grades as a result), but their early academic success was not enough to overcome significant subsequent disadvantages: families’ favoring sons over daughters in allocating scarce resources for schooling; cultural norms that de-emphasized girls’ education, particularly past high school; an industrial economy that did not require a college degree to earn a living wage; and persistent discrimination toward women in the workplace.
Those disadvantages have lessened since about the 1970s. Parents, especially those of education and means, began to value their daughters’ human capital as much as their sons’. Universities that had been dominated by affluent white men embraced meritocratic values and diversity of gender, race and class. The shift from a labor-intensive, manufacturing-reliant economy to a knowledge-based service economy significantly increased the relative value of college and postgraduate degrees. And while workplace inequities persisted, changing attitudes, legislation and litigation began to level the occupational playing field.
As these shifts were occurring, girls began their advance in education. In 1985, boys and girls took Advanced Placement exams at nearly the same rate. Around 1990, girls moved ahead of boys, and have never looked back. Women now account for roughly 60 percent of associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees and have begun to outpace men in obtaining Ph.D.’s.
There are some who say, well, too bad for the boys. If they are inattentive, obstreperous and distracting to their teachers and peers, that’s their problem. After all, the ability to regulate one’s impulses, delay gratification, sit still and pay close attention are the cornerstones of success in school and in the work force. It’s long past time for women to claim their rightful share of the economic rewards that redound to those who do well in school.
A few decades ago, when we realized that girls languished behind boys in math and science, we mounted a concerted effort to give them more support, with significant success. Shouldn’t we do the same for boys?
When I made this argument in my book “The War Against Boys,” almost no one was talking about boys’ academic, social and vocational problems. Now, 12 years later, the press, books and academic journals are teeming with such accounts. Witness the crop of books in recent years: Leonard Sax’s “Boys Adrift,” Liza Mundy’s “The Richer Sex,” Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men.”
For a revised version of the book, due out this summer, I’ve changed the subtitle — to “How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men” from “How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men” — and moved away from criticizing feminism; instead I emphasized boy-averse trends like the decline of recess, zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, the tendency to criminalize minor juvenile misconduct and the turn away from single-sex schooling. As our schools have become more feelings-centered, risk-averse, collaboration-oriented and sedentary, they have moved further and further from boys’ characteristic sensibilities. Concerns about boys arose during a time of tech bubble prosperity; now, more than a decade later, there are major policy reasons — besides the stale “culture wars” of the 1990s — to focus on boys’ schooling.
One is the heightened attention to school achievement as the cornerstone of lifelong success. Grades determine entry into advanced classes, enrichment programs and honor societies. They open — or close — doors to higher education. “If grade disparities emerge this early on, it’s not surprising that by the time these children are ready to go to college, girls will be better positioned,” says Christopher M. Cornwell, an economist at the University of Georgia and an author of the new study, along with his colleague David B. Mustard and Jessica Van Parys of Columbia University.
A second reason is globalization. Richard Whitmire, an education writer, and William Brozo, a literacy expert, write that “the global economic race we read so much about — the marathon to produce the most educated work force, and therefore the most prosperous nation — really comes down to a calculation: whichever nation solves these ‘boy troubles’ wins the race.” That’s probably an overstatement, but we do know that the large-scale entry of women into the work force paid large economic dividends. It stands to reason that raising male academic achievement is essential to raising labor productivity and, ultimately, living standards.
A third reason: improving the performance of black, Latino and lower-income kids requires particular attention to boys. Black women are nearly twice as likely to earn a college degree as black men. At some historically black colleges, the gap is astounding: Fisk is now 64 female; Howard, 67 percent; Clark Atlanta, 75 percent. The economist Andrew M. Sum and his colleagues at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University examined the Boston Public Schools and found that for the graduating class of 2007, there were 191 black girls for every 100 boys going on to attend a four-year college or university. Among Hispanics, the ratio was 175 girls for every 100 boys; among whites, 153 for every 100.
Young men from middle-class or more comfortable backgrounds aren’t lagging quite as far behind, but the gender gap exists there, too. Judith Kleinfeld, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, analyzed the reading skills of white males from college-educated families. She showed that at the end of high school, 23 percent of the these boys scored “below basic,” compared with 7 percent of their female counterparts. “This means that almost one in four boys who have college-educated parents cannot read a newspaper with understanding,” she wrote.
WHAT might we do to help boys improve? For one thing, we can follow the example of the British, the Canadians and the Australians. They have openly addressed the problem of male underachievement. They are not indulging boys’ tendency to be inattentive. Instead, they are experimenting with programs to help them become more organized, focused and engaged. These include more boy-friendly reading assignments (science fiction, fantasy, sports, espionage, battles); more recess (where boys can engage in rough-and-tumble as a respite from classroom routine); campaigns to encourage male literacy; more single-sex classes; and more male teachers (and female teachers interested in the pedagogical challenges boys pose).
These efforts should start early, but even high school isn’t too late. Consider Aviation High School in New York City. A faded orange brick building with green aluminum trim, it fits comfortably with its gritty neighbors — a steelyard, a tool-supply outlet and a 24-hour gas station and convenience store — in Long Island City, Queens.
On a visit to Aviation I observed a classroom of 14- and 15-year-olds focused on constructing miniaturized, electrically wired airplane wings from mostly raw materials. In another class, students worked in teams — with a student foreman and crew chief — to take apart and then rebuild a small jet engine in just 20 days. In addition to pursuing a standard high school curriculum, Aviation students spend half of the day in hands-on classes on airframes, hydraulics and electrical systems. They put up with demanding English and history classes because unless they do well in them, they cannot spend their afternoons tinkering with the engine of a Cessna 411.
The school’s 2,200 pupils — mostly students of color, from low-income households — have a 95 percent attendance rate and a 90 percent graduation rate, with 80 percent going on to college. The school is coed; although girls make up only 16 percent of the student population, they appear to be flourishing. The New York City Department of Education has repeatedly awarded Aviation an “A” on its annual school progress reports. U.S. News & World Report has cited it as one of the best high schools in the nation.
“The school is all about structure,” an assistant principal, Ralph Santiago, told me. The faculty emphasizes organization, precision, workmanship and attention to detail. The students are kept so busy and are so fascinated with what they are doing that they have neither the time nor the desire for antics.
Not everyone of either sex is interested in airplanes. But vocational high schools with serious academic requirements are an important part of the solution to male disengagement from school.
I can sympathize with those who roll their eyes at the relatively recent alarm over boys’ achievement. Where was the indignation when men dominated higher education, decade after decade? Isn’t it time for women and girls to enjoy the advantages? The impulse is understandable but misguided. I became a feminist in the 1970s because I did not appreciate male chauvinism. I still don’t. But the proper corrective to chauvinism is not to reverse it and practice it against males, but rather basic fairness. And fairness today requires us to address the serious educational deficits of boys and young men. The rise of women, however long overdue, does not require the fall of men.
"Sacred Heart Summer Enrichment Program"
Sacred Heart Summer Enrichment Program
Our Summer Enrichment Program is offered to girls entering grades Preschool – Grade 12 in the fall. It provides students with engaging, hands-on learning experiences and offers a wide variety of options to choose from. Our goal is to stimulate curiosity and open young hearts and minds. Our learning sessions are all participatory and allow for creativity and collaborative work.
We offer programs in the following areas: music, dance, drama, athletics, arts & crafts, chess, vocabulary, creativity, yoga, fitness, Native American history, mosaics, clay, French language and culture, swimming, broadcast journalism, labyrinth design, computer programming, crochet, photography, journalism, field hockey, tennis, fun with DNA, canning and jam making, cooking, quilting, watercolors, robotics, soccer, basketball, astronomy, musical theater, lacrosse, volleyball, intro to the Middle School, creative writing, forensic DNA science, poverty – awareness and action, shadow a professional, non-fiction writing, service learning trip to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, online PSAT prep, online English.
Our Summer Enrichment Program is offered to girls entering grades Preschool – Grade 12 in the fall. It provides students with engaging, hands-on learning experiences and offers a wide variety of options to choose from. Our goal is to stimulate curiosity and open young hearts and minds. Our learning sessions are all participatory and allow for creativity and collaborative work.
We offer programs in the following areas: music, dance, drama, athletics, arts & crafts, chess, vocabulary, creativity, yoga, fitness, Native American history, mosaics, clay, French language and culture, swimming, broadcast journalism, labyrinth design, computer programming, crochet, photography, journalism, field hockey, tennis, fun with DNA, canning and jam making, cooking, quilting, watercolors, robotics, soccer, basketball, astronomy, musical theater, lacrosse, volleyball, intro to the Middle School, creative writing, forensic DNA science, poverty – awareness and action, shadow a professional, non-fiction writing, service learning trip to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, online PSAT prep, online English.
"Comfort in the Night"
Children's Books
Comfort in the Night
‘Charley’s First Night’ and ‘Lovabye Dragon’
From “Lovabye Dragon”
By PAMELA PAUL
The night can be a dark and lonely place. Not just for children, but for dragons and small dogs too.
CHARLEY'S FIRST NIGHT
By Amy Hest
Illustrated by Helen Oxenbury
32 pp. Candlewick Press. $15.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 6)
LOVABYE DRAGON
By Barbara Joosse
Illustrated by Randy Cecil
32 pp. Candlewick Press. $15.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 6)
From “Charley’s First Night”
In the endearing “Charley’s First Night,” by Amy Hest (“When Jessie Came
Across the Sea”), it is not Henry, a towheaded young boy, who grows
lonesome and fearful in the dark, but his tawny-colored new puppy,
Charley. Hest has Henry tell the story, which he does in perfectly
calibrated 6-year-old-boy diction. “ ‘This is home.’ That’s what I told
Charley when we got home, and I showed him all the rooms, including my
room.” He repeatedly tells Charley this so that Charley will get the
message.
But come evening, message received or not, Charley doesn’t want to
spend the night in the kitchen, where Henry’s parents have said he must
sleep. Truth be told, Henry doesn’t want him to sleep there either.
Whatever his personal preferences, Henry makes a good-faith effort to
help Charley stay put, a sweet reversal of roles as he plays parent to
Charley’s sleepless baby. He gives Charley a clock; he gives him his old
bear, Bobo; he lies next to Charley to help soothe him into slumber.
“Charley’s First Night” is one of those stories that are delicious
precisely because they are not something new, but something familiar.
Hest understands the way small boys think and what tugs at their
heartstrings. She’s got a pretty good feel for puppies, too, as does
Oxenbury (“We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”), who uses soft brush strokes and
muted colors to give the book a warm, intimate, bedtime glow. There’s
really no question that these two companions will end up sleeping in the
same bed. The sweetness is in how they find themselves there and how
readers will recognize themselves in the story.
Loneliness in the night is also the subject of the dreamy “Lovabye
Dragon,” one of a welcome wave of books that let girls play with beasts
that once kept company solely with boys. But why shouldn’t girls
appreciate fire-breathing dragons too, especially if they allow
themselves to be ridden into the night sky? What’s not to like? The
state of affairs in this story is understandably plaintive, as laid out
on the very first page: “Once there was a girl / an all-alone girl / in
her own little bed / in her own little room / in her own little castle /
who didn’t have a dragon for a friend.”
Barbara Joosse’s story then switches to the lair of an all-alone dragon,
and we go back-and-forth between their stories as the girl’s silver
tears of heartache and longing wend their way to the dragon, and then
back again to her castle chamber where the two fated friends finally
meet.
“I am here!” roared Dragon.
“You’re a dear!” whispered Girl.
“I found you!” roared Dragon.
“As I wished,” whispered Girl.
The book is bathed like a romance in moody lavenders and deep grayish
blues, and its bug-eyed dragon is more adorable than fearsome. Randy
Cecil ("Horsefly and Honeybee") knows how to make even scaly creatures
look winsome, and if his oddly coiffed princess is a bit on the homely
side, well, that's kind of a nice change of pace too.
"Music, Multivitamins and Other Modern Intelligence Myths"
Music, Multivitamins And Other Modern Intelligence Myths
Teacher Denise Severing leads a math lesson at a Head Start school in Woodbourne, New York.
Probably not. When it comes to media hype and intuitions about intelligence and early childhood, some skepticism is in order. A paper published just this month by John Protzko, Joshua Aronson and Clancy Blair at NYU reviews dozens of studies on a topic likely to be of interest to parents, educators, and policy-makers alike: what, if anything, one can do in the first five years of life to raise a child's intelligence.
The authors combed the research literature to identify studies of children's intelligence that met their strict criteria for inclusion. Among other things, the study had to be a randomized controlled trial (RCT), typically considered the gold standard for making causal claims about the efficacy of medical or educational interventions (but see Stuart Kauffman's discussion here). They also focused specifically on IQ and associated tests of intelligence, so more general conceptions of intelligence weren't considered, let alone emotional or social intelligence. This search yielded over 70 studies that the authors subsequently analyzed to better understand what does — and what doesn't — boost a young child's IQ.
The results are a little surprising. When it comes to nutrition, there's not much evidence that multivitamins do any good, but having pregnant and lactating moms and young kids take Omega-3 fatty acid supplements (particularly DHA) likely does. Just having books in the home might not help, but interactive reading with children under 4 could boost IQ by around 6 points.
As for music, the one study that met the criteria for inclusion didn't find a relationship between systematic exposure to music and IQ. However, other research suggests advantages to early music training when it comes to some cognitive skills, such as spatio-temporal reasoning, and correlational studies with older children do find an association between music lessons and IQ. So the jury is still out, but any music-lover will attest that developing a love of music is its own reward.
What about loving and supportive parents, a stable home? The paper couldn't analyze factors like these because practical and ethical considerations make an RCT virtually impossible to administer. One would have to randomly assign children to parents who are or aren't loving and supportive; to households that are or aren't stable. Parents aren't exactly lining up to hand over their newborns, and no ethical review board would allow children to be raised in a deliberately unsupportive environment.
What we do know is that certain interventions are only effective for children from low-income homes, presumably because they provide some source of environmental support or stimulation that children in wealthier homes are already getting. In particular, attending preschool and early educational interventions that teach parents how to scaffold cognitive and linguistic development can boost the IQ of children from low-income homes by as much as 7 points.
The take-home lessons for parents are relatively modest: consider some Omega-3 supplements and sit down with your toddler and a good book for some interactive reading.
But the implications for voters and policy-makers are profound. Teaching parents to engage in interactive reading and elaborative conversations with their little ones and improving access to high-quality preschool could go a long way towards eliminating economic disparities in intelligence test results in early childhood.
"Singapore Math Demystified"
Singapore Math Demystified!
Can It Help Solve Our Country's Math-phobia?
We
asked Bill to share his truly incredible (which is both humbling and
exhilarating) global journey into math education from Singapore to Japan
and back again to the United States in an original series for The Daily
Riff. His posts are becoming classics in the Singapore Math lexicon. - C.J. Westerberg
Editor's
Note: Due to the interest expressed over our previous posts about
Singapore Math and the non-Singaporean-specific classic, "Why Our Kids
Don't Get Math" here,
The Daily Riff is featuring an exclusive original four-part series by
Bill Jackson, Math Helping Teacher, Scarsdale, NY Public Schools, one of
the highest performing districts in the country.
How I Became Interested In Singapore Math
Part 1
Part 1
By Bill Jackson
In 1997, I attended a series of workshops on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). That study compared math achievement in over 40 countries in grades 4, 8 and 12. Singapore and a handful of East Asian countries performed extremely well, much better than the United States, which had a mediocre performance. I was an 8th grade teacher at Public School No. 2 in Paterson, New Jersey at the time.
At the workshop we watched videotapes of mathematics classrooms from Japan, Germany and the U.S. The U.S. lesson looked very familiar. The teacher showed his students how to do a procedure and then they practiced while the teacher helped individual students. The Japanese lesson looked very different, however. The teacher began the lesson by posing a rich problem. Then the students solved the problem based on what they had learned previously and shared different solution methods. Important mathematical points of the lesson were brought out through class discussion of the various methods. The students looked very engaged and they even clapped for each other. After watching the video, I felt that my students were getting shortchanged and I became determined to learn how to teach like that Japanese teacher!
Making this change, however, would not be easy. The lessons in the heavy 600+ page textbook we were using did not begin with problem solving. In fact, the word problems were the last thing on the page and often times we were so busy practicing procedures that we didn't even get to them. I decided to teach my lessons backwards by posing one of the word problems at the bottom of the page and then asking the students to solve it, share and discuss their methods. I explained to my students what I was trying to accomplish and even showed them the TIMSS videotapes. I was amazed at how quickly they adjusted to the new methodology and how engaged they were. They were actually starting to like math. They even began to clap for each other after they presented their solutions!
I soon realized, however, that there was much more to good math teaching than merely imitating the steps of the Japanese lesson. I got involved in a math study group begun by our principal to study the TIMSS data, read books and articles, and explore how to improve mathematics instruction. This led in 1999 to a partnership with researchers from Teachers College and a Japanese school in Greenwich, CT to conduct lesson study, a process where groups of teachers plan, observe and discuss actual classroom lessons. I also traveled to Japan to observe mathematics classes and learn about the Japanese school system.
When I began working with the Japanese teachers, I soon realized three important reasons why they were such good math teachers:
(1) They had a high level of math content knowledge. In fact, I felt that their first grade teachers knew more about math than I did as an 8th grade teacher!
(2) They used thin, lightweight paperback textbooks that were much more focused and coherent than our heavy hard cover books.
(3) They continually worked to improve their teaching throughout their careers by conducting lesson study.
We began conducting lesson study at our school but we found that it was difficult to develop engaging and focused lessons like the Japanese teachers taught because of our unfocused textbooks. This led us to the Primary Mathematics textbooks from Singapore. Like the Japanese textbooks they were thin and lightweight and addressed fewer topics per year with depth and coherence. They were also very kid friendly with simple cartoon drawings that highlighted important mathematical ideas. One of the things we liked the most about them was a very effective method to solve complex problems using pictorial diagrams called bar models.
In 2000, we decided to adopt Singapore's Primary Mathematics (Third Edition) textbooks in grades K-8. The books used British spellings and had strange foods like durians and rambutans, but these things did not impede students' understanding of the mathematics. Later we switched to the Primary Mathematics U.S. Edition, which used American English and included customary measures. For kindergarten we used Earlybird Kindergarten Mathematics and in grades 7 and 8 we used New Elementary Mathematics.
With the adoption of Singapore math textbooks combined with lesson study, math teaching began to improve at our school. But there were also challenges. We realized that in order to teach Singapore Math successfully we needed to improve our mathematical content knowledge so we invited knowledgeable others to conduct workshops for teachers. We also realized that our math content knowledge was improving just by teaching lessons from the textbooks and later found out that the textbooks were designed so teachers could acquire this knowledge since Singaporean elementary teachers are generally not math specialists. I also came out of the classroom to become the school's math facilitator. In small group meetings, we conducted lesson study, studied the textbooks, and solved problems together using bar models.
I'll never forget the time we were solving a difficult 6th grade problem with first grade teachers and one teacher jumped up a shouted excitedly, "I got it!" She was so excited that she was finally getting it after not having a good mathematics learning experience herself as a child. The lesson study process was instrumental in allowing us to study the materials together and discuss how to craft good lessons.
In 2008, I left the Paterson school district and was hired by Scarsdale Public Schools as one of three district wide Math Helping Teachers to help facilitate the adoption of Singapore Math. Scarsdale is using the Primary Mathematics Standards Edition textbooks. It is interesting to me that Scarsdale, one of highest performing and most innovative school districts in the country, has adopted Singapore Math. Before making the decision, they spent time researching and piloting the program. They concluded that even though their students were doing well already in comparison to most students nationwide, they needed to continually improve mathematics instruction. This was a very wise decision in my opinion and the implementation has been very successful. Teachers, students and parents are enthusiastic about the program and many groups of teachers have also conducted lesson study. One Scarsdale fifth grade teacher said, "Primary Mathematics has given me the opportunity to love teaching math. In turn, my students love math and impress me everyday as they become incredible mathematicians."
That's all for now. In future posts I will discuss Singapore Math in more detail, including the philosophy of the program, problem solving methods, and tips for successful implementation.
Bill Jackson
"Helicopter Parents Make Children Miss Milestones"
Helicopter Parents Make Children Miss Milestones
By KJ DELL'ANTONIA Yet another account of educators describing wild instances of helicopter parenting is making the rounds, this time from Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that two-thirds of school psychologists, counselors, teachers and mental health workers who responded to a survey by the Queensland University of Technology reported seeing some instances of “overparenting” while more than a quarter said they’d seen many.It’s all quite familiar. The necessary titillating anecdotes are there: the parent making a special plate of food for a picky teenager to take to a party, 10-year-olds at camp who don’t know how to dress themselves, parents requesting that their child be assigned to a “sports house” that matches their favorite color.
These anecdotes serve an unintended purpose: while they’re supposedly produced in support of the thesis (helicopter parents are ruining our youth), most readers get to give themselves a pat on the back. They would never do such crazy stuff! Therefore, they are not helicopter parents. Case closed — off to drive the kid to hockey practice as soon as I pack up his bag.
But amid all the things we have heard before about hovering parents was one line that gave me pause. The researcher who conducted the survey (which I have not seen) said that she’d drawn another conclusion from her results: many parents aren’t letting their child reach normal developmental milestones, such as traveling alone.
Milestones.
Milestones loom so large in the life of a young parent. When our children are infants, we’re constantly asking — when should they roll over? Sit up? Say their first word?
But as they grow up, those milestones begin to feel so much less clear. When should a child cross the street alone? Be able to enter a store and politely and successfully make a purchase? Advocate for herself with a teacher? Ride the subway? Take himself to the doctor or dentist, or for a haircut? Cook a meal, do a load of laundry?
Those are milestones, too. And those are the kind of milestones that it’s easy to forget your child isn’t hitting. Once we’ve set aside those books and charts— which provide remarkably little guidance on when a child should be capable of cooking a meal or doing a load of laundry — it’s too easy to forget to step aside and let those equally important moments happen. (The Motherlode contributor Kay Wyma‘s book “Cleaning House: A Mom’s 12-Month Experiment to Rid Her House of Youth Entitlement” has some thoughts to offer on the subject of when a child should be fending for himself in the kitchen and elsewhere, and other books I’m not familiar with may as well.)
All of which reminds me, again, of the wonderful checklist that the blogger Christine Whitley shared back in 2011, from the 1979 child-rearing manual “Your 6-Year-Old: Loving and Defiant.” Your child, the writer proposed, was ready for full-day first grade if, among other things, she can “travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home.”
That’s a milestone that not many of today’s 6-year-olds have met.
What other milestones are we parents overlooking, putting off or unintentionally letting our children skip entirely? (The college-age babysitter who arrived at my house completely unable to follow the instructions on the back of a box of mac-and-cheese springs to mind.) Do we need new guidelines for when our children should be able to do what?
"Kids' Hobbies Websites"
Kids' Hobbies Websites
Looking
for a way to spark your kids' creativity online or indulge their
favorite hobbies? From coloring and building robots to science
experiments and cooking, this list of great sites will help kids pursue
their interests and passions -- and maybe even find new ones.
-
Wonderful site with lots of rainy-day fun!
AGE -
Fanciful garden sim with an environmental message.AGEPlatforms: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
-
Create quirky projects in latest time management sim.
AGEPlatforms: Nintendo DS, Nintendo DSi -
Not flashy, but filled with good educational activities.
AGE -
Explore arts and crafts with young, animated Martha Stewart.
AGE -
Simple app lets kids craft their own books to read or share.
AGEPlatforms: iPad -
Unique physics puzzles require imaginative solutions.AGEPlatforms: Mac, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360
-
A bounty of fun crafts for kids, but some iffy ads.
AGE -
Healthy recipes and tips for would-be kid cooks.
AGE -
Logic puzzler great for a wide range of ages, skill levels.AGEPlatforms: Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
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Cheerful paper toys to print and assemble.
AGE -
Impressive activities for virtual explorers.
AGE -
Captivating site on everyday (and advanced) science topics.
AGE -
Realistic cheers must be practiced in order to do well.
AGE
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—Laura Moser
Duolingo
Far and away the best free language-learning app—and a good deal better than some of the pricey ones—Duolingo offers the most innovative and addictive exercises of all the apps I tested. Each lesson struck the perfect balance between grammar and vocabulary, and the quizzes made good use of the device's touch-screen interface (for example, by having you drag and drop jumbled words into the correct order to make a sentence).Duolingo's lessons are mostly text-based. Unlike other apps, it goes light on the stock photos and has minimal bells and whistles. But the exercises are so fun and briskly paced—short enough to complete on a quick train ride—that I hardly missed the frills. Although Duolingo doesn't take up much memory, it does require Web access; downloading lessons before a flight isn't an option. Courses in Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, Italian and German. Free, with no charge for additional lessons; available for iOS devices. duolingo.com
Busuu
Busuu downloads exercises to your device in advance, which makes the app ideal for studying when you lack reliable Internet access. This well-designed program alternates grammar and vocabulary lessons with listening-comprehension tests and short writing assignments that are corrected by fellow Busuu users who are native speakers. (Although in practice, only three of the eight writing exercises we submitted received a response from community members; a similar feature worked better on Livemocha, another online language service that as yet has no app.)Overall, I preferred Duolingo to Busuu, but the latter's photo-based lessons may have greater appeal to more visual learners, and its ability to work untethered from the Internet makes it the best option for learning on the go. Courses in 12 languages. Free, $5 for additional lessons; available for iOS and Android devices. busuu.com/mobile
TOTALe Online includes three mobile apps of varying quality. The oldest, TOTALe Companion (for iPhone, iPod Touch, Nook and certain Android devices), mostly involves listening to and repeating sentences ad nauseam. The far superior iPad- and Nook-only Rosetta COURSE, by contrast, offers lessons that are identical to what's offered in the computer-based Rosetta Stone program (except more convenient: no mouse necessary). And an iPad-only app, TOTALe Studio HD, lets you practice the language with native speakers during prescheduled video chats.
A caveat: Because voice recognition is a big component of the Rosetta Stone method, shyer learners might hesitate before using TOTALe in a crowded coffee shop. (Simply repeating the sentences in your head, no matter how flawless your imagined accent, deprives you of one of Rosetta Stone's best features.) Courses in 24 languages. $299 for 12 months of access. rosettastone.com