Tuesday, September 30, 2014

"LAST WEEK I STARTED MY PARENTING BUSINESS ON-LINE"

This is the beautiful photo I have used as the background for my website for my parenting business. 
It's a track I have walked for over 18 years that leads from the road along the Tutukaka Coast down to the spectacular little beach at Whale Bay. It's a gentle sloping walk to go down to the beach and a demanding return journey. 
I first walked it when I was 8 months pregnant, along with my husband and 5 kids aged less than 2 1/2 up to 12years. That was the first year we camped at Woolleys Bay in Mr Woolley's front farm paddock, February 1996. We have gone back virtually every year since.
This track has lots of memories for me
- it's where one of our boys fell off the edge and slid down the sheer cliff about 50mt grabbing onto scrub as he went, bleating out my name.
- it's close-by to where one of our girls was proposed to by her  husband - she's now days away from giving birth to her second child.
- it's where I first read the text from my Mum telling me she had killed a snake in her kitchen the evening before by spraying fly spray in its face then pounding it till dead with her meat mallet - she was 88!
- it's where conversations about the unknown of the coming year have taken place with our kids, as they have gone to school for the first time at age 16.
- it's where we have stopped most years, climbed down the slope to the lookout and taken family photographs.
- it's where I have been lost in thought about a whole manner of things - thinking about the past, thinking about the future. It's a pretty and picturesque track to walk to get lost on.
In three months time we will be there again, having the same conversations with my last son about starting school, taking another family photo - hard to get everyone there at the same time these days, and lots of thinking for me as my home schooling career will be finished and new routines opening up.
You are welcome to have a look at my website ~
A WAY TO PARENT - www.awaytoparent.com
Cathy

Thursday, September 18, 2014

"SCHOOL-AGED CHILDREN UNABLE TO SPEAK PROPERLY, FUTURE LEARNING AFFECTED"

"Fewer children starting school can speak in sentences, prompting an investigation by education chiefs. ..Schools around the country have noted a decline in the spoken language abilities of new entrants from all backgrounds.. School leaders and a specialist in linguistics suspect the problem could be down to children using gadgets too often and parents not talking to them enough. 
The ability of youngsters to express themselves in the classroom is essential to their cognitive development and future learning. ..
New starters could have the spoken-language ability of 2- or 3-year-olds, and even those whom teachers viewed as "average" often came in at levels below a 5-year-old. ..
Julie Cowan, deputy principal at Willowbank School in Auckland, believed there were many causes:'Maybe the fact that children are spending more time on devices and watching television is part of it. Talking as a parent, you are so busy and you have to get to work and drop the kids off.. we spend a lot of time talking at our kids, not necessarily talking with them.'..
Dr Jannie van Hees of the University of Auckland completed her doctoral study on oral language in the classroom for 5-and 6-year-olds. .. 'Children are spending too much time in front of the digital devices and hurrying from one place to the other. It is simple, free and easy to have conversations with your children. But increasingly, I think, families aren't...You can't take for granted, just because you are educated parents, that you talk effectively with children.
The best growing linguistic time...is just those simple times of doing plain things with children but doing lots of conversational exchanges.'"
Nicholas Jones: NZ Pupils Struggling to Speak. Weekend Herald. The New Zealand Herald. Saturday September 6, 2014.

"He may have been dubbed 'the master evangelist of the digital age', but even the late Steve Jobs worried about the effect technology has on children.
While he persuaded millions that Apple's chic but pricey gadgets were a must-buy,..he prevented his own children from using iPads and limited their access to the internet generally.
..the Jobs' children would instead sit around a long dinner table in the kitchen and actually talk to one another. ...
Walter Isaacson, the author of the biography called simply Steve Jobs, told him later that 'every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things.'...
Chris Anderson, ex-editor of technology magazine Wired, who has five children aged 6 to 17, agreed with the Jobs family approach.
'My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and openly concerned about tech, and they say that none of their friends have the same rules' ..'That's because we have seen the dangers of technology first-hand. I don't want to see that happen to my kids.'"
Ian Johnston: Apple Guru Kept His Kids Away from iPads. Weekend Herald. The New Zealand Herald. Saturday September 13, 2014.

More newspaper excerpts this week, sounding an alarm for parents to take stock of home life. 
Again, over use or inappropriate use of technology is being painted as the cause that is thwarting children's development.
THISWEEKWITHTHEKIDS ~ no matter if your child is 5 or 17years old, how is their speaking ability? Are they relaxed in speech and involve themselves voluntarily in conversations (I don't mean  arguments and criticisms)? If your answer is an honest 'yes', then they are  obviously doing well and you can assume that their technology use is appropriate. If you are unsure or they are not communicating, are recluse.. then the suggestion has been given for you to intentionally start today to talk with your child and not at them, during the simple, plain times of the day. You could also take up the Jobs' example at the mealtime table. 
If you know right now that this is a problem at your house, you are the only people who can change the situation, so you need to make a plan, or there will be no change.
Cathy

Monday, September 8, 2014

"IS IT BETTER FOR A CHILD TO HAND WRITE OR TYPE?"

Tonight at tea the comment was made that handwritten information  has many benefits over typed. My son had popped in for dinner, and on seeing his book diary on the table I had asked if he intended to buy a 2015 diary or just use his phone next year. He said he loved to write in a book diary, and that he had been told by his acting teacher that handwriting had many benefits over typing. I checked online(typing), and found this thought provoking article ~ 
"Psych 101 was about to start, and Pam Mueller had forgotten her laptop at home. This meant more than lost Facebook time. A psychology grad student at Princeton, Mueller was one of the class teaching assistants. It was important she have good notes on the lecture. Normally she used her laptop to take notes, but, without it, she’d have to rely on a more traditional approach. 
So she put pen to paper—and found something surprising. 
Class just seemed better. “I felt like I had gotten so much more out of the lecture that day,” she said. So she shared the story with Daniel Oppenheimer, the professor teaching the class.
“‘I had a similar experience in a faculty meeting the other day,’” Mueller remembers him saying. “And we both sort of had that intuition that there might be something different about writing stuff down.”
It turns out there is.
A new study—conducted by Mueller and Oppenheimer—finds that people remember lectures better when they’ve taken handwritten notes, rather than typed ones. 
What's more, knowing how and why typed notes can be bad doesn't seem to improve their quality. Even if you warn laptop-notetakers ahead of time, it doesn't make a difference. For some tasks, it seems, handwriting’s just better.
The study comes at a ripe time for questions about laptop use in class. Educators still debate whether to allow students to bring their laptops into the classroom. And while researchers have found that laptop use during class-time tends to be distracting—not only do laptop-using students not perform as well academically, but also they’re less happy with their education—Mueller and Oppenheimer’s research seems to be the first quantitative attempt to compare laptops disconnected from the Internet with plain-old pencil and paper.
The study was conducted in three parts. At the beginning of each, students watched video of a lecture or a TED talk, and took notes on it either longhand or on laptops. 
Students watched the video, completed difficult mental tasks for 30 minutes, then took a quiz on the content. In this group, longhand-notetakers outperformed laptop-notetakers on the quiz. Analysis of student notes showed that laptop-notetakers tended to transcribe a lot of the speaker’s words verbatim. Mueller and Oppenheimer suspected that this was because those who typed notes were inclined to transcribe lectures, rather than process them. This makes sense: If you can type quickly enough, word-for-word transcription is possible, whereas writing by hand usually rules out capturing every word.
So students in the second group were given a warning. Before the laptop-users watched the lecture or took any notes on it, the study administrator told some of them:
People who take class notes on laptops when they expect to be tested on the material later tend to transcribe what they’re hearing without thinking about it much. Please try not to do this as you take notes today. Take notes in your own words and don’t just write down word-for-word what the speaker is saying.
The warning seemed to have no effect. The quiz showed that longhand-notetakers still remembered lecture content better than laptop-notetakers. And analyzing the notes that laptop-using students took, the two authors admit: “The instruction to not take verbatim notes was completely ineffective at reducing verbatim content.”
The final group of students took the quiz a full week after watching a recorded lecture. Some of these students were allowed to study their notes for 10 minutes before taking the quiz. In this last group, longhand-notetakers who had time to study outperformed everyone else. Longhand-notetakers of any sort, in fact, did better on the quiz than laptop-notetakers.
What’s more, if someone took verbatim notes on their laptop, then studying seemed more likely to hinder their performance on the quiz. 
In other words, taking notes on a laptop seems to lead to verbatim notes, which make it tough to study well. And you can’t successfully warn someone to keep them from taking verbatim notes if they’re using a laptop.
“We don’t write longhand as fast as we type these days, but people who were typing just tended to transcribe large parts of lecture content verbatim,” Mueller told me. “The people who were taking notes on the laptops don’t have to be judicious in what they write down.”
She thinks this might be the key to their findings: Take notes by hand, and you have to process information as well as write it down. That initial selectivity leads to long-term comprehension.
“I don’t think we’re gonna get more people to go back to notebooks necessarily,” Mueller said. “Tablets might be the best of both worlds—you have to choose what to write down, but then you have the electronic copy.” 
Incidentally, the two researchers might look at tablet use next. (They didn’t include them in this study.) But they have busy scientific dockets outside this work, as neither of them specialize in educational psychology. Mueller researches questions of law and morality, and Oppenheimer tends to focus on decision-making and the psychology of democracy.
But the two say they've appreciated their foray into note-taking research, which stemmed from a real-life problem. “I think,” Mueller said, “that’s where the best research comes from, because the questions resonate with other people.”"
TO REMEMBER A LECTURE BETTER TAKE NOTES BY HAND: Students Do Worse on Quizzes When They Use Keyboards in Class. Robinson Meyer. May 1 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/to-remember-a-lecture-better-take-notes-by-hand/361478/
THISWEEKWITHTHEKIDS ~ What will you do with this? Does it affect what your kids do at home or your attitude to the increasing move to have children work on laptops in class? It seems sensible to resurrect handwriting as a skill, once more.
Cathy

Monday, September 1, 2014

"FATHERS DAY - 2014"

        Hans Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein, Eduard "Tete" Einstein

“In 1915, aged thirty-six, Einstein was living in wartorn Berlin, while his estranged wife, Mileva, and their two sons, Hans Albert Einstein and Eduard “Tete” Einstein, lived in comparatively safe Vienna. On November 4 of that year, having just completed the two-page masterpiece that would catapult him into international celebrity and historical glory, his theory of general relativity, Einstein sent 11-year-old Hans Albert the following letter - ”
The Secret of Learning Anything: Albert Einstein’s Advice to His Son: Maria Popova  http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/14/einstein-letter-to-son/
My dear Albert,
Yesterday I received your dear letter and was very happy with it. I was already afraid you wouldn’t write to me at all any more. You told me when I was in Zurich, that it is awkward for you when I come to Zurich. Therefore I think it is better if we get together in a different place, where nobody will interfere with our comfort. I will in any case urge that each year we spend a whole month together, so that you see that you have a father who is fond of you and who loves you. You can also learn many good and beautiful things from me, something another cannot as easily offer you. What I have achieved through such a lot of strenuous work shall not only be there for strangers but especially for my own boys. These days I have completed one of the most beautiful works of my life, when you are bigger, I will tell you about it.
I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal. . . .
Be with Tete kissed by your
Papa.

Regards to Mama.
The idea of writing a letter to a child is incredibly rare these days, and possibly even more rare for a father to choose to write to his child. But as Albert Einstein's letter to his son, written nearly 100 years ago, indicates, things that are important and dear can be communicated meaningfully in written form. There are several hints that this letter gives us which are worth practicing ~
 * This father has heard his son's thoughts of the difficulty he feels when his father returns home 
 * In a gentle fatherly manner he suggests a better way to meet in future 
 * He persuasively speaks of the importance of time together so that he can prove his fondness and love for his son 
 * He wants to teach him "good and beautiful things" which only a father can pass on to his child 
 * He speaks of his intention in the future to share with his son what has been of deep interest to him in his work
 * Then he discusses the things that interest his son and we sense Albert knows his son's interests and gifting, and advises not for 'success' but from a basis of love
 * His farewell is affectionate, respectful of the whole family but still expressing high value for this son.
THISWEEKWITHTHEKIDS ~ with Fathers Day approaching this weekend, it would be great if the fathers took the opportunity to write to one child or a short note/email to all their children to communicate their fondness and interest in their own child's lives. 
HAVE A HAPPY FATHERS DAY !!!!!!!!!
Cathy