An Apple a Day - How a kitchen timer can improve family life

Best practices for the pursuit of excellence - ideas for the kitchen timer in family motivation:

If you or your child is having a hard time getting motivated to do school work or chores, set the kitchen timer for 15 minutes and have a challenge to see how much you can accomplish before the timer bell dings. 

It’s great fun to beat the timer and work as fast as possible for a sprint of effort. Now that you’re into the activity, you can continue if you want, or take a short break then reset the timer and try again.

I also like to use a portable kitchen timer (you know the white ones with the dial that turns in a circle, or whatever timer you want) to have “five-minute time” with my children at bedtime. 

Each child has a different night of the week that is just his or hers. 

I sit on my child’s bed and give him or her my undivided attention for 5 full minutes. 

My child can say anything s/he wants with no repercussions. 

I try to keep quiet and let the child lead the conversation.

It’s amazing what 5 minutes of special time does for our parent-child bond, as well as my child’s self-esteem! 

If the conversation is going well, we can go past the 5 minutes, if desired. 

This is a life-saver for a family, making sure each child gets special attention. 

Even as an exhausted mother, I could muster up 5 minutes a night to create a special moment one-on-one.

It really works!

http://thegodfreymethod.com

An Apple a Day - How to raise secure and intelligent children

How to raise secure and intelligent children - Putting baby first

Studies by Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson have shown that the early developmental stages of children are crucial to how the brain is wired, and that the environment provided by parents and caregivers affects their sense of security, how they view the world, and their intellectual development.

               As a biological parent, foster parent, and adoptive parent, I have seen first-hand how true this is. The very first building block to a healthy child, intellectually, socially, and emotionally is for baby to feel that his or her needs are being met. 

This is why the currently popular doctrine of “self-soothing” is so damaging and wrong. I have found that children who are held often are much more secure and independent as they get older than children who are not. You cannot spoil a child with too much holding. That is nonsense. Nothing seems to make up for damage done in the first two years.

               Even as a working mother, my main priority when I got home was to nurse and hold my babies. The house could wait. All other activities could wait. Even though I had excellent childcare from a provider who parented similar to me, my main goal was to make sure my babies felt loved and secure. Next came helping the older children with homework and attending their activities, but taking the babies with me wherever possible.

               It is also wrong to make a hungry baby wait to be fed. The doctrine of forcing a child to wait four hours to be fed is wrong. It creates children who do not trust and may later self-soothe with food. What about overweight babies, you ask? This is much more a risk with bottle-fed babies than breast-fed babies. A nursing baby should eat every 1.5 to 2 hours, as desired. A chubby, breast-fed baby is healthy with brown fat, which goes away as the child learns to walk and run around.

               I am not talking about over-feeding a baby, just common sense. Use some wisdom. I also do not agree with putting baby to bed with a bottle. Never do that. But a forced schedule, where baby feels hungry a lot, is pure evil. Hunger is a real pain to a child. Abuse and neglect rewire a child’s brain.

               Even a bottle-fed baby should be held while being fed. This is key to a child’s emotional development and self-esteem. Do not prop the bottle up and walk away. No one was busier than me with a large family, so no excuses. Take the time. Make the time.

As far as bottle-fed babies getting too fat, use a pacifier between feedings to appease a baby’s natural need to suck. Pacifiers are easier to throw away later (about 2 years) than a thumb. Formula digests slower than breast-milk, so maybe put 3 hours between feedings, but never 4 hours. If the child is truly hungry, feed him or her on demand. Be wise. There is a balance between meeting the child’s needs and over-feeding. If the baby’s emotional needs are being met, he or she will have less need for comfort from a bottle when not truly hungry.

http://thegodfreymethod.com

An Apple a Day - How to teach children to think

Do you know how to enhance your child's mind? Give your child a mental apple a day? (Some of this info is found in Vol. 6 of my It's Not Rocket Surgery!)

Read on to learn more about:

• The best practice for learning is adult-led, direct instruction with an inquiry-based approach. 
• Parents should start their children’s learning at home, long before school age. 
• For their child’s continued development, they need to advocate for these best practices, especially for math and reading, at public, private, or home school. 
• I’d also like to add that if they use a preschool, parents should choose one that believes in adult-led education, not self-discovery. 
• The less time in preschool, and the more time with mom or dad, the better – for learning, for development, for bonding, for emotional and mental health.

To maximize your child’s window of learning, she or he needs adult-led direct instruction. Unfortunately, as is commonly the case, teachers (and parents) leave good students to fend for themselves on the mistaken assumption that they don’t need help. Mom and Dad can and should do things at home to enhance their child’s learning and intelligence. Start with early reading the right way.

What is the difference between student-led and adult-led education? In its truest form, student-led learning is where students only learn what they want to learn, wherever their curiosity takes them, if anywhere. Groups of students theoretically lead each other into the discovery of all knowledge at their own pace. Teacher-led learning is where the teacher uses a structured lesson plan to present knowledge in a specific sequence. You, as parents, are your child’s first teacher and best advocate.

There are problems with both sides, but clearly the unguided student-led learning leads to failure. Whole Language learning is a prime example of this. (Student-led math instruction is also a fiasco. Such faulty ideas are rampant in Common Core philosophy.)

One teacher, Pavel Ryzlovsky, of Canada, wrote to me: “With the whole population's silent participation, we have already accumulated several obstacles to good-quality language teaching. The other one that needs to be tackled is our adherence to student-oriented learning.

“I remember reading of a study, unprecedented in its scope, which was conveyed to determine what sort of language-teaching system has been the most effective one. It found that teacher-oriented education has been consistently bringing the best results, in few aspects several times better than the student-oriented type.

“The outcome of the study was disseminated among the teaching districts throughout USA; however, only one tenth of their total number embraced the teacher-oriented system; in other districts both parents and teachers refused it as "too demanding" (for children and teachers).

“The sooner we recognize what's wrong at the roots of our approaches the better. We have a long way to go to get out of the trouble we put ourselves into.” ~ Pavel Ryzlovsky, Canada

It is true that when we ask questions we remember better than when we are just spoon fed facts. But waiting for children to be curious about every aspect of knowledge is not enough in the classroom. Children were not born knowing everything. They don’t know what they don’t know. If one wanted to learn to be a doctor, wouldn’t she want to go to the experts? Having to re-invent the wheel, or self-discover all medical knowledge, is not the best way to learn.

Leaving a child to his own discovery will not bring progress quickly. If children were able to learn all knowledge by self-discovery, there would be no reason to have colleges or degree programs. Someone has to cache all the centuries of learned knowledge for others to use, which falls to our universities, libraries and schools. If teacher-oriented learning wasn’t necessary, all the farmers in the last century would have become geniuses just by thinking while on their tractors or in their fields.

“To promote scientific literacy, one focus of science education is scientific discovery learning. However, its effectiveness is dubious, because students face some difficulties in dealing with the discovery processes, especially coordinating hypotheses with evidence. Students do not attempt to associate their hypotheses with the evidence. And even if they do, they are so strongly biased that they retain their current hypotheses and ignore or distort the evidence.” (Hiroko Kobayashi, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. The effects of "collaborative discovery learning with an association scheme" on the acquisition of scientific literacy.)

The above statement shows one reason why teacher-oriented learning is best – the immaturity of students. But teachers have to make learning interesting. As one social studies teacher put it:

“The content has to be first. So in a sense it has to be very teacher oriented, teacher centered. I am giving them information and I am expecting [them] to process it and do something with it. I give homework assignments.”

The best teacher-oriented education uses an inquiry-based approach, much like Socrates used. In this way, the questions are guided by an adult but help the children think and learn. Often, a question is answered with another question. This opens a child’s curiosity and leads the student to the knowledge. This may require longer class discussions, but is worth it. Cultures that use this kind of guided-question, teacher-oriented discovery produce more Nobel Prize nominees and winners than those that don’t.

There is one place where student-oriented learning does well, and that is when discovery is enhanced with computers. The computer asks the leading questions, so the student isn’t completely on his own, but feels like he is in control. Student discovery by computer works well with some [older] children, but they still need the human touch on occasion. Too much computer time has proven to be detrimental to emotional and social maturity. (McGlinn, M. (2007). Using the "Documenting the American South" Digital Library in the social studies: A case study of the experiences of teachers in the field. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education [Online serial], 7(1). http://www.citejournal.org/vol7/iss1/socialstudies/article1.cfm)

There you have it. 
The best practice for learning is adult-led, direct instruction with an inquiry-based approach. 
Parents should start their children’s learning at home, long before school age. 
For their child’s continued development, they need to advocate for these best practices, especially for math and reading, at public, private, or home school. 
I’d also like to add that if they use a preschool, parents should choose one that believes in adult-led education, not self-discovery. 
The less time in preschool, and the more time with mom or dad, the better – for learning, for development, for bonding, for emotional and mental health.

http://thegodfreymethod.com

An Apple a Day - Best practices for the pursuit of excellence in parenting

Best practices for the pursuit of excellence in parenting - tips from a mom of 15

“No other success can compensate for failure in the home.” ~ David O. McKay

               What? Not even rocket science or brain surgery? No, not for the children of the rocket scientist or brain surgeon, and not for any child. From whom do children, especially young children, learn best? Nature has shown us time and again that children usually learn best from their own parents. Many parents of gifted children have intrinsically understood this truth, which may be part of the reason their children advance ahead.

               Glynne Sutcliffe (M.A., Dip. Ed.) says, “Remember Suzuki and his violin lessons! Parents are the natural first teachers of young children. Children learn almost everything of significance by watching and absorbing what their parents (or parent substitutes) do, feel and think… Young children need a lot of one-to-one time with loving adults willing to open up the world to them. If they are in child care, they need that balancing every day one-on-one time with a parent even more.”

               Helping parents become their child’s first teacher is paramount to turning around the fiasco of the public education system and the key to raise thriving children. Glynne’s research can be found at http://www.earlyreadingplayschool.com.au/ 

               Public education’s answer to teaching children has been to remove them from their mothers earlier and earlier in order to give them a ‘head start’ in school. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked well. Of course, there are situations where abusive, neglectful, or ignorant parents are not preparing their child’s mind for learning, but these are the exceptions. Universal preschool for all is not the answer.

               Rather than merely placing children in preschool, parents must be directly involved in their child’s early education, especially for reading and math. And young children have the extra need of bonding and attachment time with parents, which enhances their learning ability further. Even working mothers like me can find time to help their children’s minds.

The art of continuous improvement is the road to excellence, line upon line, precept on precept, here a little, there a little. In fact, manufacturers are constantly looking for the best practices and improvements to their processes. Can the idea of “best practices” work at home? Certainly! However, continuous improvement does not mean throwing out tried-and-true best practices for new theories. Some new, untried ideas sound good on paper, but do not work in practice.

For example, phonics is the best reading method. Alternate methods that seemed brilliant on paper did more damage than good and greatly increased dyslexia. Another example is writing by cursive penmanship. Public schools have mostly done away with cursive, but maybe the newer methods aren’t always better. Maybe the old ways of learning have more value than meets the eye. The website, Mom.Think.org, posted this finding:

“Scientists are discovering that learning cursive is an important tool for cognitive development, particularly in training the brain to learn ‘functional specialization’ that is capacity for optimal efficiency.”

Whatever the factors, it is clear that parents must not let their children be left to themselves in school, whether that be public, private, or home school. Parents can follow the best practices with their children at home to ensure a great foundation for success. Remember the old saying, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Enhancing your children’s minds at home is like giving them a mental apple a day. Let’s discover what some of those best practices are. First, the why, then the what and how. See you next time...

http://thegodfreymethod.com

Sing a Song of Sixpence - why girls start falling behind in math

Why do smart girls play dumb with their peers?

I agree whole-heartedly with the recent study (June 1, 2009) at the University of Wisconsin- Madison- that definitely culture, not biology, accounts for the differences in math performance among men and women. Professors Mertz and Hyde say the data just do not support the stereotype. http://www.cardinal.wisc.edu/article/23150.

In fact in elementary school, girls are usually ahead of boys in math. It isn’t until middle school that girls start falling behind. And why, on average, do they fall behind?

Early teen years are when girls begin to realize the patriarchal order that exists in most societies. They begin to see that they are quickly approaching womanhood and what that means in relation to men. They also quickly understand that boys have sensitive egos about being ‘bested’ by girls. So they often downplay their intelligence and physical abilities to win the attention of the boys.

A woman named Joyce hosted a Japanese businessman’s visit at work, who brought his wife on the trip with him. It was obvious that the wife spoke better English than him, but she held her tongue in his presence. Many cultures subtly- or not so subtly- discourage a female from embarrassing a male in front of others. She has to hide her talents to be accepted. In the name of “respect”, the often better person has to play dumb. Isn’t that sad?

One woman says, “Lucky for me, my 8th-grade algebra teacher was a woman, Mrs. Barton, who was also a mother of 4 children. She became my role model. She taught math so well, so understandably, and juggled motherhood, too. From that moment on, I excelled in math, going all the way through calculus in high school.

“Doing well in math spilled over into doing well in physics and chemistry, too. College was the obvious next step. I realized that I didn’t have to give up using my brain to be a mother or give up motherhood to use my brain. Because of Mrs. Barton, I have always excelled at math and science and motherhood.

“And I was the older sister of several boys, so I was used to out-performing males. I had a bit of an ego myself. In fact, I liked to prove that I was smarter and better than most of the males around me. I figured a guy could like me and my intelligence, or I didn’t need him.”

Girls today have more social freedom to choose a professional career than the previous generation did when they were young. However, most of the magazines for girls and women still focus on hair, nails, clothes, and being sexy. So the messages that other women editors in society give to girls, still focus on traditional feminine interests.

This makes it harder for women of science and engineering to get their message heard. The narrow focus ‘to be attractive’ is stronger than ‘to be intelligent,’ even in these modern times. Society needs to blend the two. A smart woman can be attractive, and vice versa, and she usually attracts a better caliber of men.

In this way, it is the social messages that girls get at puberty, not necessarily the hormones, which draw them away from mathematics in the adolescent years.

Without these preventatives, the cracks in your child may be math dyslexia, being teased at school, rage, low self-esteem, insecurity, childhood depression, low self-confidence, lack of imagination, lower IQ, slower learning capacity, math incompetency, caught in the downward educational trend, and/or low-paying jobs. They all may be preventable or curable. You, mom and dad, are the key. It’s not rocket surgery!

http://thegodfreymethod.com

Sing a Song of Sixpence - the cause of the educational decline

No sight-words. No sight-math. No sight-music. Period. Why? Keep reading:

In an effort to wake parents up to the need for their involvement in raising math excellence for their children, I want all parents to be aware of how Reform mathematics curricula are deeply, fatally flawed. Reform math is basically sight-reading for math, often involving calculators without knowledge of basic math skills.

I received an email from a music teacher in Canada, which is making the same educational mistakes befalling all English-speaking countries -

Pavel Ryzlovsky, Vancouver, B.C. says:

“Dear Ms. Godfrey,

“I must say that, over years, I have been reading all those prizes for the "Whole Language method of reading" in disbelief, and I patiently waited for the moment someone would start debunking the myth it was constructed upon.

“I can tell you that the method you justifiably exposed has also been called to assist promotion of the same sort reading in instrumental music teaching, and so it's been doing considerable damage there, too.

“Thank you, and I sincerely hope that your article makes the whole mountain of wrong teaching and poor reading shake.

“All the best to you.”

Pavel later wrote:

“Thank you kindly for sharing this story with me, it's a really good satire [by Cathy Froggat*].

“I would like to add that, with the whole population's silent participation, we have already accumulated several obstacles to good-quality language teaching. The other one I see that will need to be tackled is our adherence to student-oriented learning.

“I remember reading of a study [Project Follow Through] which was conveyed to determine what sort of language-teaching system has been the most effective one. This study was unprecedented in its scope (and was done at an unprecedented cost of some $10mln). It found that teacher-oriented education has been consistently bringing the best results, in few aspects several times better than the student-oriented type.

“The outcome of the study was disseminated among the teaching districts throughout USA; however, only one tenth of their total number embraced the teacher-oriented system; in other districts both parents and teachers refused it as "too demanding" (for children and teachers).

“The sooner we recognize what's wrong at the roots of our approaches the better. We have a long way to go to get out of the trouble we put ourselves into.”

[*Whole Language at the Fork in the Road, Cathy Froggatt, Former NRRF North Carolina Director, Right to Read Report, February 1998.]

I whole-heartedly concur with Pavel! Have you or your children ever taken piano lessons? Students are taught each note’s name, sound, place on the piano and in the musical staff, individually before putting them together into chords, measures, and complete songs. Once those are mastered, they can move on to more complex pieces and learn to add nuances to the music with soft and loud, slow and fast, slurring or staccato, etc.

Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to learn piano the Whole Language way? The piano student would have to learn whole songs by sight, guess through context, cooperation, comprehension, and meaning-making. Yet that is how we are teaching now. How many whole songs can a child memorize by sight? Not many. But any student who has a foundation of individual notes can build up to any and every tune out there. It is the same with phonics and reading.

To continue quoting Laurie Rogers of the Safer Child organization http://www.saferchild.org/:

“American public-school math instruction is a blight upon the land. It’s a crater, a crime, a sin against the children…

“Across the country, school districts happily spent truckloads of taxpayer dollars chasing after every mangy, stray-dog program, and Texas Instruments (TI) and textbook publishers happily made enough money to wallpaper the moon at least twice in pretty thousand-dollar bills.

“TI continues to deliver fancy calculators to wee tots, and textbook publishers and the College Board pant and salivate at being in on the ground floor of new national curricula and assessments.” Hence the gleeful swallowing of the poison.

Music is another great way for children to learn spatial timing, which brain neuron mapping enhances mathematics as well. One thing I like to do to help my beginning musicians learn their treble clef and bass clef notes is to use their fingers and hands to represent the staff lines. The staffs are written vertically, yet they represent notes on the piano that run horizontally. So a pianist has to learn that when the notes on the staff are going up or down, the notes on the piano are going right or left.

Here is a fun mnemonic way to remember the staffs for each clef:

·        The fingers themselves represent the lines in each staff, the left hand for the Bass Clef and the right hand for the Treble Clef.

·        For the Bass Clef lines, GBDFA, use the mnemonic, “Good Boys Do Fine Always.” (Left hand.)

·        For the Treble Clef lines, EGBDF, use the mnemonic, “Every Good Boy Does Fine.” (Right hand.)

·        The spaces between the fingers represent the spaces in each staff.

·        For the Bass Clef spaces, use the mnemonic, “All Cows Eat Grass.” (Left hand.)

·        For the Treble Clef spaces, use the mnemonic, “Fast Apes Climb Easily.” Or say they spell FACE. (Right hand.)

·        Middle C is the short line between the two staffs; with its left neighbor B sitting in the space just above the Bass Clef, and with its right neighbor D sitting in the space just below the Treble Clef.

Such learning of the spatial relationships of musical notes, as well as the timing of the notes, helps children to excel not only in music but in reading and math as well.

http://thegodfreymethod.com

Sing a Song of Sixpence - why your child needs math

Why your child needs math

With more and more technology jobs, children really need a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education! Abstract thinking, so necessary to progress, comes from science and math education. Will your child be ready for the technology jobs of the future? Early math the right way is so important. It starts at home!

How often have we heard students say something like, “Why do I have to learn math? I’m never going to use it in when I’m grown up!” The answer to that is, “So that you can think well and solve problems better in all areas of your life!”

As I learned in college, psychologist Jean Piaget’s cognitive theory of development shows that a concrete thinker only sees the obvious, but an abstract thinker can see ‘what if?’ The ability to think abstractly is key to having an open mind and seeing many possible ways to solve a problem. For example, the answer given in the cartoon below is the concrete answer.

The abstract answer is the ability to solve the value of x, if the other sides were the given values. (A concrete thinker might say that side is not really 4-cm long, get the ruler. The abstract thinker can say, “but what if?” and solve the problem.)

The maths and sciences help people develop from concrete thinkers into abstract thinkers as they reach adulthood. The lessons learned while solving math problems make the brain more flexible in solving other problems in general. This gives children more self-confidence to meet challenges. If we want our children to be well-rounded in all areas, they need math and science.

Giving your child a head start in math – the right way – helps him to see patterns and connections in new ways. It helps her to see more possibilities and make wiser decisions as she grows. 

By the way, I use algebra on my grocery shopping list, to keep my costs + tax exactly to the penny, for the amount I want to spend. I love math!

(And stay away from Reform and/or Common Core math.)

http://thegodfreymethod.com