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Parenting Press®Welcome to the April 2010
“News for Parents”
This electronic newsletter has dozens of ideas that we at Parenting Press hope you’ll find helpful and interesting. To suggest a story topic or to comment on article content or format, please use the link after each article; we welcome your feedback.
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IN THIS ISSUE
- WHAT’S NEW?
- FEATURES
- POTPOURRI
- COMING ATTRACTIONS
- Container Gardens for Mother’s Day
- Tweens, Teens and Summer Break
- Visiting Factories and Offbeat Museums
I. WHAT’S NEW?
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Earth Day!
If the water’s clean enough in all your lakes and rivers for swimming, say thank you to the founders of Earth Day, who in 1970 created what we now know as the environmental movement, the emphasis on ecology, and such environmental legislation as the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts.
April 22, which is Earth Day, and the weekends before and after it, are a great time to participate in environmental education activities—or maybe even organize your own! Here’s a few ideas for helping out Mother Nature, and having fun, too.
Invite relatives, friends, neighbors and schoolmates to join you in a beach or trail clean-up walk or a graffiti paint-out. Celebrate afterwards with a potluck picnic.
Make Earth Day resolutions by writing pledges on a giant sheet of paper or on leaf-shaped paper cutouts that you use to “leaf out” a bare branch. You might pledge to turn off the lights every time you leave a room or turn off the water when you’re brushing your teeth.
Organize an “earth-smart” quiz game, with questions appropriate to the age of your participants. Young children can be asked how they can reduce automobile emissions (walk, bike, carpool, drive hybrid vehicles) and protect fish habitat (provide shade, avoid pouring contaminants into storm drains) while high school students might get questions such as: What percentage of greenhouse gas emissions is from cars and light trucks?
Plant trees and flowers appropriate for your area in parking strips, traffic medians and traffic circles.
Host a plant swap where community members can donate or trade unwanted seedlings from their yards.
Organize a compost drive if there’s a community garden in your area with a compost pile or worm bin. You could all meet at the garden entrance and parade through the plots with your coffee grounds and vegetable peelings before tossing them into the compost!
Ask your local parks department if it would like volunteers to yank out invasive species such as scotch broom.
Work with your garbage service for a hazardous waste collection where paint, solvents, used auto products like motor oil and batteries can be dropped off by people in your community and then removed by the commercial refuse collectors. Because of the risks involved, volunteers may do the organizing and publicizing, and let the professionals do all the handling of the waste.
Sponsor a dirty sock contest! Ask each participant to bring a clean white tube sock. To show what cars emit into the air, have each driver cover the car exhaust with the sock and then run the engine for 30 seconds. Ideally, you’ll be able to award an engine tune-up gift certificate to the owner of the dirtiest sock!
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Kids Use What About Me? in Anger Management Group
If you have or work with children who are learning to cope with strong feelings of anger, here’s a tip from a New Jersey school counselor.
Kathy Jensen, who works in the Lawrence Township School District, shared What About Me? 12 Ways to Get Your Parents’ Attention (Without Hitting Your Sister) with the elementary school kids who meet with her in an anger management group. They were so enthused about Eileen Kennedy-Moore’s book that they created their own version: 12 Ways to Get Your Teacher’s Attention (Without Hitting Your Classmate). The pages, which included such illustrated recommendations as “Give her a compliment” and “Be a classroom helper,” have been laminated and comb-bound—and now Jensen’s students are ready to read the book with their school’s kindergarten classes.
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Grief Resource Kit Available
Katie Couric joins the Sesame Street Muppets for an April 14 program on grief“When Families Grieve,” a Sesame Workshop special that will air April 14, is the basis for multi-media, bilingual English and Spanish grief resource kits that will be available starting in mid-month. Using the Sesame Street Muppets to tackle tough questions about death and grief, one kit is military-specific and the other is for all families.
The kits, which like the program will provide strategies for coping with grief, can be obtained from www.sesamestreet.org/grief beginning April 15.
Before age 15, one in 20 American children experiences the death of a parent whether it be from illness, suicide, accident or war, points out the Sesame Workshop web site, which goes on to state, ”The death of a parent is one of the most difficult things a child can face; but children are not the only ones that feel overwhelmed and experience change in their behavior. Grieving is a family experience and, thus, the entire family needs support during this most difficult time.”
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Waiting for the Premiere of Wimpy Kid?
Waiting to see the movie version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid? So are we! One of our books, Kids to the Rescue! First Aid Techniques for Kids, by Maribeth and Darwin Boelts, was purchased for use as a prop in the movie, and we’re excited to see if it shows on screen.
In the meantime, we invite you to practice some of the first aid techniques recommended by the Boeltses, and use the free downloadable activity plan to create skits or your own short films about accidents and how to treat injuries.
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Autism Awareness and The Way I Feel
April is Autism Awareness Month, a time to reflect on the special needs of an increasing number of people. Today one of every 150 children is diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. A difficulty in sensing others’ emotions is one of the symptoms of autism, and Janan Cain and Parenting Press are proud that our children’s book The Way I Feel and now its new Spanish edition, Así me siento yo, are so helpful to those dealing with autism.
As one mother wrote, “It’s not uncommon for children on the autism spectrum to struggle with interpreting facial expressions and body language. . . . ‘The Way I Feel’ worked. The illustrations (which are modeled on Cain’s family and friends) show young children. . .in situations where they are happy, angry, scared, thankful and the like. No detail has been left out from the image to the colors on the page, and even the font. The text speaks the truth and isn’t heavy handed: it speaks to how children feel when they are angry, or sad, or bored, or shy.”
If you’d like to know more about Cain and how she created The Way I Feel with two preschoolers, visit her online media kit.
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Use Books to Guide Your Child’s Emotional and Intellectual Development
Reading to children, reading with children, and helping children select books are important for many different reasons. Two of the reasons that educator Judith Wynn Halsted identifies in the latest edition of her Some of My Best Friends Are Books (Great Potential Press) are emotional and intellectual development.
These are significant considerations for those of us who are part of, or work with, families where children read at an advanced level, are intellectually gifted, or are intensely interested in a subject. These children may have needs not being met through school and the usual children’s activities. Halsted’s comments, however, have value for the parents of all children.
Feelings, values and decision-making can all be discussed in a non-threatening way by adults and children when the focus is characters in a book, she notes.
“Parents tell me that they find books to be wonderful bridges for communicating with their children.”
This might be about bullying, loneliness, sexually suggestive behavior or other issues that neither parent or child wants to address directly.
Both professionals and parents must be aware that even bright and avid readers are not always emotionally ready to understand the symbolism or the human relationships, despite being able to read and define the words. Halsted’s suggestion: guide children to fiction at their emotional level and to nonfiction at their reading level.
Bibliotherapy, which can be defined as “guidance in the solution of personal problems through directed reading,” can be valuable in helping children of all kinds through the developmental tasks that everyone must meet. For children and teenagers, these tasks are:
- Middle childhood: achieving a sense of initiative
- Late childhood: achieving a sense of industry
- Adolescence: developing a sense of identity
Guided reading can help all children anticipate difficulties and resist peer pressure.
Biography is the form of nonfiction most often used in bibliotherapy. Especially for girls, biographies of women can provide role models and career inspiration. Biographies of men can help boys understand struggles and how to overcome them.
Halsted emphasizes that bibliotherapy, even at the simplest level, is not simply handing a child a book: “A story is not a pill that will cure. To be most effective, the reading must be followed by discussion with a concerned adult who has also read the book.”
The questions that an adult can ask, questions that are designed to move the reader through the stages of the bibliotherapeutic process, include:
- What is the central character’s biggest problem?
- What strengths does he/she have that helps him/her cope?
- How has someone you know handled the same situation?
- What effect do the people in the book have on one another?
Halsted recommends four types of questions to ask about a story:
- Factual questions to measure comprehension
- Interpretative questions to develop understanding
- Divergent questions to extend the topic past the story, such as, “What if something else had happened?”
- Evaluative questions that challenge the child to make judgments, such as, “What do you think about what happened?”
When you encourage a child to discuss books with you, you provide an opportunity for ideas and opinions to be expressed without risk of criticism. Another way parents can help a child benefit from reading is by encouraging the use of new vocabulary and to avoid meaningless slang expressions. (For example, one book that Halsted recommends for 4-year-olds is Where Does the Trail Lead, by Burton Albert. This will introduce nouns such as “tide pools,” “ghost town” and “twilight,” as well as the names of plants and artifacts that can be used to describe what the reader will see on his or her own walks.)
II. FEATURES
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Tips for the month
Each Saturday, Parenting Press posts a new parenting tip and the previous week’s tip is moved to the archive. The topics planned for April are:
April 3 — Monitoring Your Child’s Cyber Safety
April 10 — Stress-Related Potty Training Regression
April 17 — Planning Family Vacations
April 24 — Dealing With Anniversaries After a Loss
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Family Fun Ideas — What’s Obsolete?
Shorthand, skate keys, Super 8 film, slide rules, pocket protectors, and pants stretchers: do your kids know what they are (or were)? Do you know? A new, easy-to-read book that describes itself as “an encyclopedia of once-common things passing us by,” Obsolete takes us from “adult bookstores” and “after-school specials” to “wristwatches” and “writing letters.” Author Anna Jane Grossman provides explanations, but they’re often tongue-in-cheek, and not all are obsolete on the West Coast where “News for Parents” is created. (Maybe in New York City, where Grossman says she’s spent her entire life.)
Still, this book will work well for starting conversations, especially of the “Oh, I remember when. . .” or possibly, “I remember when Grandpa. . .” When you look at your child’s school newspaper as a PDF, for example, someone in your family might remember how schools reproduced material before Xerox and computers. There were “ditto machines” and for business correspondence, carbon paper and multi-part forms printed on what we called “NCR paper.”
With a weak economy, some retailers re-introduced “layaway” plans last holiday season, but that’s probably the first that many of your families had heard of them. Same for banks’ Christmas clubs and “charge-a-plates.” Remember when lighthouses had keepers and stamps had to be licked? When cars came with handles to roll down windows and seat belts weren’t even an option? (Not to mention “gas wars,” when some of us paid 19 cents a gallon for regular!)
Use Grossman’s list as a starting point when you’re in a group, and as adults add to the list of nearly or now-obsolete items and jobs, you’ll probably end up smiling over the memories and amazing your children with the way life was not so very long ago.
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Community Service — Totally for Troops
Our goal with this column is to suggest ways that you can model the concept of sharing and giving back to your community. There are practical advantages to community service, too. Kids can use these projects to meet school or youth group requirements for community service and to start building resumes that they’ll use when applying for first jobs or college.
April is Month of the Military Child, and what could help our military overseas more than making it easy for them to communicate with family? That’s what the volunteer-run nonprofit Totally for Troops does. Because there are no Hallmark stores around the corner in war zones, it’s a challenge for troops to find greeting cards when they want to write “Congratulations,” “Happy Birthday,” “With Sympathy,” “Happy Anniversary,” “Thinking of You,” and, of course, “Happy Holidays.” That’s why Totally for Troops sends boxes of cards created by volunteers to military commanders. They make the cards available to the people in their units for mailing messages back to the U.S. By the end of 2009, Totally for Troops had provided 61,000 cards in three years for those in war zones.
Like so many things we send to Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait, there are specific requirements, especially regarding attachments (no metal, for example). You’ll find most of them at www.totally4troops.org. The most important are size (all cards must be A2-size, so that when folded closed, they measure 4.25 x 5.5 inches, and the card and envelope cannot exceed a quarter inch in thickness) and message: all text and images must be G-rated and positive. As the Totally for Troops web site points out, “These cards are not as much to soldiers as they are for them. Styles, themes, and sentiments should be appropriate for family and friends at home. Put yourself in a soldier’s boots and imagine what he or she might select if shopping for a particular greeting card. What might appeal to them? Who will be receiving this card?”
Because these are substitutes for professionally-printed cards, it’s important that cards be carefully crafted. This is a project for the very creative and very neat. (Other children and adults can join the card-making fun, drawing and stamping greetings that can be sent with Meals on Wheels deliveries or to a local adult day care center.)
Totally for Troops welcomes cards such as “Happy Birthday” year ‘round, and it needs to receive season-specific cards such as “Merry Christmas,” Valentines, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards about three months in advance of the holiday to allow time for shipping. It is not currently able to use commercially printed purchased cards.
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Raise funds with a Parenting Press Book Fair
Would your school or group like a new fund-raiser?
For years Parenting Press has been offering its carefully written books on child guidance, problem solving and dealing with feelings through preschool Book Fairs. Now our Book Fairs are being expanded to schools, churches, child-care programs, parenting groups—any organization that can use parenting and children’s books.
More information about our Book Fairs is posted online. You’ll find a copy of the brochure, an explanation of how much you can earn with a Book Fair, a step-by-step guide to make Book Fairs easy and fun to organize, and downloadable promotional materials.
III. POTPOURRI
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Special of the month — Celebrate with Jean Illsley Clarke
This special has expired.
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