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Parenting Press®Welcome to the January 2012
“News for Parents”
Dear Friends of Parenting Press:
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Looking for a conference speaker? Check our list of authors available for speeches and interviews, and the online media kits. Books, info sheets, teaching plans, kids’ activities: we’re always in a whirl at Parenting Press with dozens of ideas that we hope you’ll enjoy and find helpful. Many are described in this issue; others will be published in later issues (see Coming Attractions).
IN THIS ISSUE
- WHAT’S NEW?
- FEATURES
- POTPOURRI
- COMING ATTRACTIONS
- Scrap Edutainment and Let Kids REALLY Play
- The Value of Play When Kids Are Troubled
- Listening and Following Directions
I. WHAT’S NEW?
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Think Small for New Year’s Fun
Odds and ends spell F-U-N in “Microcrafts: Tiny Treasures to Make and Share” (Quirk Books). Best for kids who are developing small motor skills, or for younger children working with someone older, these projects start with nutshell boats. Constructed with the shells of peanuts, walnuts and other nuts, these can be gently blown across a large bowl or cake pan if you add a gentle leaf (mint, perhaps) to a toothpick mast. Rowboats will be more stable if you trim toothpicks or matchsticks for oars.
Other projects include bottle-cap frames, to make into pendants, charms or earrings, temporary tattoos, felt dogs, cats, and teddy bears, greeting cards, macrame hangers for thimble-size plants, and matchbox beds for those tiny pets. Highly recommended if you need something for kids to enjoy at a family gathering. Fun for a youth group, too!
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How Books Are Created
Ever wonder how books are created? The web site Publishing Trendsetter illustrates “Life Cycle of a Book,” with brief videos from people at every step: writing, agenting, editing, design, etc.
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What’s Wrong with Your Child?
If your New Year’s resolutions include determining why a child is having difficulty in the classroom, the new edition of Diagnosing Learning Disorders by Bruce F. Pennington (Guilford) can help you understand such issues as dyslexia, autism, ADHD, mathematics disorder, and development coordination disorder.
It also reminds us that because brain development is a process that continues throughout life, a child with no genetic risk factors may develop a problem because of a disadvantaged environment—for example, one without enough spoken language. Similarly, an environment rich with what Pennington calls “protective factors” can compensate for certain genetic risk factors so well that the child’s disorder is hardly evident.
How can this book help you? If you’re suspicious of the diagnoses being offered by school personnel, the child’s pediatrician, counselors and other professionals, or if none of them have suggested that a disorder may be your child’s issue, you can use these descriptions of disorders and advice regarding which kind of specialist to consult about each one. It’s important to remember, as Pennington says, that many of the same symptoms show up in several different learning disorders, and that it is common for a child to have more than one disorder. (“Comorbidities” is the term you’ll see.) What this book also clarifies are the subtypes of disorders: that dyslexia, for example, often includes developmental dyslexia, or reading disability; speech sound disorder; and language impairment, the difficulty of expressing or comprehending spoken language.
The history of the identification of a disorder and the description of common symptoms also alerts us to the fact that we may be mistaken about what we expect in a disorder. Using dyslexia as our example again, we learn that the “reversal errors” such as spelling “bog” for “dog” are actually less common, and that many people with dyslexia do not make such mistakes.
Diagnosing Learning Disorders closes with “Controversial Therapies,” ranging from auditory integration to tinted lenses and special diets. There are also three appendices, with resources for parents and teachers and descriptions of the tests often used to help make diagnoses.
One warning: although we believe this book can be extremely valuable, especially if you’re uncomfortable with a professional’s diagnosis or are confronted with differing diagnoses, the language is quite technical, and requires careful reading.
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What Meds Make Sense?
If you have a child being prescribed psychiatric medicine, or you work with such children, take a look at Kids on Meds: Up-to-Date Information about the Most Commonly Prescribed Psychiatric Medications by Kevin T. Kalikow (W.W. Norton). Although this is not a book for the casual reader, it’s helpful for those familiar with medications for ADHD, depression, anxiety, psychosis and bipolar disorder. Besides defining each of these psychiatric conditions, the physician-author describes each class of medication, how it works, what side effects can occur, and how the medication can be taken. He also discusses how well medications have been studied with children.
If your child has just been diagnosed, or is trying a new medication, you may want to read this guide with a medical dictionary at your side and a scratch pad, for jotting down comments you’d like to discuss in lay language with health-care providers.
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Using Pictures to Help Kids
If you’ve seen the movie about Temple Grandin, read her web site or any of her books, you know that people with autism often think in pictures. That’s one reason Lights! Camera! Autism! Using Video Technology to Enhance Lives (Cambridge Book Review Press, cbrpress.com) was written by Kate McGinnity, Sharon Hammer and Lisa Ladson. But if you’re tempted to stop reading this article right now because you don’t know anyone with autism, please reconsider. This book is packed with practical advice for anyone working with unusually sensitive children or those who have difficulty with transitions.
The authors emphasize using pictures of any kind that move and change: your own videos, purchased videos, clips from television programs, web sites, social networking sites, Skype, PowerPoint, and anything that can be viewed on iPods, smart phones and other handhelds. They also cite examples of how story boards—pictures that illustrate each step of a process or route—can be useful. Video is more valuable than role-playing for two important reasons: it permits exact repetition of an event, and if used in training staff, it ensures that everyone receives exactly the same material.
Some of the processes the authors recommend:
Self-modeling, where the child performs a behavior correctly or at an advanced level, which allows the child to see that he can do something. This may be better social behavior, such as avoiding a tantrum, or controlling hyperactivity or improving classroom skills like reading fluency.
Feedforward, the very specific form of video self-modeling where an individual is filmed using skills she does not yet have independently. This may require hidden prompts or physical supports or editing together a series of actions after removing the prompts that were given in between.
Preparation video, which shows a child what will happen in an upcoming event, such as a doctor visit or new school schedule. Because a preparation video will include the sights and sounds of an activity, it can also be used to desensitize a child to distressing images or noises, such as the movement in a class or the sound of a microwave oven.
Skill-teaching videos, in which clips (from favorite television shows, for example) show people’s emotions, cause-and-effect situations or relaxation techniques.
Self-advocacy videos, which those with autism can use to explain to others how they perceive the world. Such videos allow kids to say things they may not be able to say in person, and to carefully script or rehearse what they want to communicate.
What is especially fascinating about this book are the brief descriptions of how to use video to teach the different skills and behaviors that we want to see in every child: behaving at circle time, logging on to a computer, working in groups, wearing a seat belt and so on. Some of these how-to’s include variations typical in family life: for example, “Birth of a sibling” suggests using similar images and actions to prepare children for a new pet or such transitions as a sibling leaving for college or a parent traveling for work.
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Best Sources for Term Papers
Now that your bigger kids are back in school (or back to the routine with home-schooling), you may be hearing rumors about term papers and research reports. One of the frustrations with these papers for parents and educators is the questionable nature of some of the sources kids use, especially online.
That’s why we were delighted to receive a teacher’s recommendation via LinkedIn for Google Scholar. This free feature of the search engine allows your students (and helpful parents) to search through articles published in reputable publications, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. When you start at scholar.google.com, you’ll see what’s been published on a topic, and if that information is not available online (as many books and journals are not), you can check your public or nearby college library for a copy. Or use the library search site WorldCat.org, which will show the closest library that has the material.
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.
Returning to routines after vacations and holiday events can be difficult for all of us. It’s easier to help kids adjust to these transitions if you’re tuned into their (and your) temperaments. Remember, temperament is inborn, not something we choose.
January 7 — Tips for Making Transitions Smoother
January 14 — Managing Toddlers’ Anger & Upsets
January 21 — The Child Who Always Says “No” to New Activities
January 28 — How Temperament Affects Emotional Learning
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Family Fun Ideas — Great Art Projects for Gloomy Days
Gray and chilly outside? Stuck inside with a sniffly kid? Or stuck inside with an entire sniffly family?
Whether you’ve chosen to be indoors, or you’re trapped there, everyone from toddlers to grandparents can have fun with the dozens of easy projects in Marion Deuchars’s new workbook, Let’s Make Some Great Art (Lawrence King). Although it looks as if it were created by a child (the text all appears handwritten), Deuchars says it’s intended to spark the creative imagination of artists (and us would-be artists) of all ages. Some projects are “fill-in-the-blanks,” like the page where readers can complete Mona Lisa’s smile; others suggest activities, like holding a page up to a mirror to read the kind of backward writing that Leonardo Da Vinci used. Then there are the challenges: “Upside-Down Drawing,” where we’re asked to copy an image while viewing it top down. “Try to draw it without thinking what it is,” encourages the author. A little easier: the how-to’s for drawing simple birds and creating images of critters and people with fingerprints.
Tucked in between projects are brief comments on such artists and their styles as Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Klee, Louise Bourgeois, and Magritte. Deuchars also sneaks in definitions of after-image, frottage, cross-hatching, perspective, mobius strips, tangrams and other terms common in art, geometry and science.
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Community Service — Diaper Drive
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.
Many of us participated in food drives during the holiday season. Something else that many food pantries and baby “boutiques” stock—when they can obtain them—are diapers. Like any other non-food item, these cannot be purchased with food stamps, and it’s hard to go without them. That’s why “News for Parents” is suggesting that you help your kids organize a diaper collection drive this month, perhaps as a competition between the youth groups in your neighborhood or the classes of your local school. First step: contact local charities, to determine which ones provide diapers, what size is needed most and whether they also want disposable training pants, diaper wipes and the creams and ointments that prevent diaper rash.
III. POTPOURRI
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Special of the month — You Choose the E-Book!
This special has expired.
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