Got the Winter Blues? Time to Plan a New Project!

January 25, 2012

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D., is the Senior Advisor on Child Development and Education at Families and Work Institute. She is a developmental psychologist and the director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School at Vassar College.

This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal by Gannett Publications on January 22, 2012.

Two years ago, my son started a “365” project. He wanted to improve his skills as a photographer and made a pledge to himself to take at least one picture a day for the calendar year. On New Year’s Eve,  2010, we watched them as a slide show on our TV. We had had many sneak previews, including following along on his Facebook photo album. Yet the whole show, a year in pictures, was poignant in a new way.

There were some obvious things that made us smile, such as family blowing out birthday cake candles or the annual posed picture at our family’s summer vacation spot. Surprisingly, the more salient photos for me were the unexpected moments in daily life. There was the light switch in a darkened room at 11:59 p.m. (determination to keep the project afloat on a day he forgot to take a picture). There was the half full glass of water on a nightstand, from when he was sick in bed. There was a photo of a train window and another of car tail lights, as he traveled to interviews for graduate school.

Research on children’s memories, including interviews with children, often highlight the snapshots of our daily lives more than the center stage events. Memorable moments come in all shapes and sizes, yet the details sometimes tell the story better than the canvas. It isn’t as much about the trip to Disney World as discovering the little chocolate on a hotel pillow. It isn’t as much about a new bicycle as the moment a parent let go and you didn’t fall.

As we live inside more in the darker days of winter, taking on a project or a hobby can be re-energizing as an individual or a family. Adding a sequencing and goal element to it can be rewarding and full of learning or teachable moments.  The day-by-day nature of a counting project can help capture the snapshots that will become the album. Here are some ideas for starting a new project adventure with your child(ren) this winter.

·      Pick a number as your target. For young children, a project that is as short as 1-2-3 is a big step!  7 days, 10 days, 30 days are all reasonable possibilities with elementary school age children, as long as they are excited about the experience.

·      Remember that your number doesn’t have to correspond to counting days. It could be counting events, objects added to a collection, etc. The target number and what you are counting should be meaningful to the child’s current level of understanding.

·      Pick a project! Though the possibilities are endless, here are some jump starter ideas.

o   Pick a new hobby and agree to work on it every day for a few minutes. This might be building a model car, collecting nature objects, painting in a bound journal, or baking!

o   Help your child pick an activity that he or she wants to get better at. This might be something like board games, a sport, or a challenge (building the highest house of cards). Remember to keep the focus on your child’s interest and motivation.

o   Pick a family activity that involves adding pieces to the whole.  For example, keep a notebook (or a recording device) at the dinner table and have everyone add one sentence to a story each night for 7 nights. Or give everyone in the family a disposable camera and have each person take a picture of their day for 24 days. Print them and try to put them in a sequence together. Better yet, have each photographer create a story from the photographs. This is a great way to practice perspective taking and enjoy different viewpoints and ideas.

o   Plan a family adventure. This is a fun way to get ready for a family trip or just a day at the museum or the movies. Make a list of questions and work on one question each day. Where do we want to go? What will we need to bring?  What will we need to pack that day (everything from a backpack to a suitcase works!)  What might we do when we get there?

In each of these examples, the parts work toward creating the whole. It involves planning and counting skills, patience and perseverance, group cooperation and problem-solving, accepting mistakes and celebrating success. Most important, it provides focused time with each other, building memories moment by moment that last a lifetime.

UPDATE: Ellen Galinsky on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams

January 19, 2012

 Update: The segment on 24-7 child care has been postponed. Check back here for updates on an air date.

Modern ECE Professional Learning Communities Webinar with Ellen Galinsky. Join us!

January 18, 2012

On February 1, 2012 at 2pm EST Ellen will be doing a webinar called Modern ECE Professional Learning Communities hosted by Early Childhood Investigations. The presentation draws in part upon lessons learned from Mind in the Making learning communities work. 
Here is the link for more information and to register.

1. Bring new players together.
2. Seek to reach the most “in need” among us.
3. Focus on learning from and with each other and share a belief that there is expertise among us all.
4. Focus on active learning that is experiential  and engages participants in self-reflection and self-discovery.
5. Use new media to connect in creative ways.
6. Actively create new curricula based on sound principles of child and adult learning and development.
7. Focus on assessment, but tie assessment to child development.
8. Reframe teaching as teaching AND learning together.
9. Connect policy to practice.
10. “Play it forward.”
     

Learning Communities: An Emerging Phenomenon by Ellen Galinsky

The current edition of NAEYC's Young Children, pages 20-27, has an article by Ellen called Learning Communities: An Emerging Phenomenon. Here is a link to the issue.

Raising a Puppy: A refresher course in Basic Parenting 101

January 09, 2012

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D., is the Senior Advisor on Child Development and Education at Families and Work Institute. She is a developmental psychologist and the director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School at Vassar College.

This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal by Gannett Publications on January 8, 2012.

On December 11, 2011, our family life changed forever: we adopted a 13 week old puppy.   Like classic expectant parents, we were excited and a little bit nervous.  What would we name him? How would our lives change?  Were we ready? 

As a veteran parent of three children, I was most focused on impending sleepless nights or at the very best, interrupted sleep. Coping with being sleep deprived has never been one of my strengths as a parent.  I was confident that expecting to be sleep deprived was half of the adjustment.

We are now at day 22 and I’ve only been awakened once during the night. Chai Latte sleeps through the night like a perfect puppy. My biggest worry turned out to be no worry at all. Hum, I thought, this is just like when I became a parent for the first time 25 years ago; nothing was what I expected.

Pretty soon I realized that having a new puppy in the house was a lot like having an infant. Raising Chai has been a refresher course in basic parenting 101, regardless whether your baby is human or canine.

#1 Sleep when the puppy sleeps. Although Chai is our first “baby” to sleep through the night, he requires nearly constant vigilance during his waking hours. It is this intensity of focus which dramatically shifts one’s energy reserves, making napping with the puppy an essential survival strategy.

#2 Routines are essential. Having a baby in the house is almost the opposite of having a routine. Chai’s rapid growth makes the rhythm of meeting his needs a moving target. Yet routines provide predictability and repetition.  Early learning requires as much consistent repetition as one can muster (e.g. never before have I longed for puppy diapers!)

#3 Work on self-regulation and self-soothing. Building routines helps to build self-regulation skills. In essence, the routine creates the platform for success, and success creates the learning platform to build self-regulation. One of the consistent early mistakes I made with my children as infants was to immediately meet their every need instead of giving them tools to learn to self-regulate. With Chai, I learned to start by giving him constant attention and then slowly building in other signals, including pauses to build up his ability to wait.

#4 Tag team. Raising a baby is inherently frustrating. It means rearranging every aspect of your life to revolve around the baby’s needs. One of the most valuable tools in your survival kit is learning how to tag team. When you get frustrated, do you have a plan in place to take a break?  My husband and I used to say, “you’re it!” or “I’ll do the dishes now and you can play!”  Remember a tag team can have many players with different strategies and strengths; the trick is you have to be willing to share the playbook.

#5 Cute is worth a lot. It is no accident of Mother Nature that babies and puppies are irresistibly cute. Baby features attract adults and elicit caregiving behaviors. Enjoying those cute moments is invaluable for all.

#6 You can buy out the toy store but nothing replaces playful interaction.  Fatigue from my constant vigilance of Chai’s every move, motivated me to find good puppy toys. I loaded up at the puppy toy store, and eagerly tossed him the newest doggie distractors. That lasted about 2 minutes. At first I couldn’t believe it, but then I laughed at myself. Puppies need to learn how to play, too, and they do that best in playful interactions, just like babies.

#7 Perspective taking is an essential skill.  Although there are many similarities in having an infant and a puppy in the house, there are important (but not always obvious) differences.  In our culture, we tend to treat our puppies like babies, but we need to also be responsible to learn about their canine perspective or ways of learning about the world. This is one of the joys of having a well-matched pet in a family household. Do your homework before you adopt a dog and talk frequently with your children about similarities and differences in perspectives. Anticipate problems and how you might work on solutions. Check out a book at the library or your local bookstore and share in the preparation with all members of your household.  

In the two hours that it took me to write this, I have let Chai outside 6 times, fed him lunch, played with him, and had him on my lap while typing. Thankfully, it is naptime and soon we will be enjoying puppy dreams together.