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Parenting Press®News for Parents — September
Dear Friends of Parenting Press,
Welcome to the September issue of our electronic newsletter for parents. Our goal is to provide you with interesting and useful information in a format that’s quick and easy to read—and FREE. We welcome your comments, both about the newsletter content and its format. To get the newsletter delivered, you can sign up for an e-mail subscription.
September 2007
IN THIS ISSUE
- WHAT’S NEW?
- FEATURES
- POTPOURRI
- COMING ATTRACTIONS
Return in October for dozens of great ideas, including:- Places to Go, Things to See
- Feeding Babies and Toddlers
- Quick! Costumes in 60 Minutes or Less
I. WHAT’S NEW?
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Preview Susie Weller’s New Book
Do you like the “Thought of the day” calendars? Then we bet you’ll love “Pages of the week.” That’s right, we’re presenting a new book, Solving the Parenting Puzzle: Four Thinking Styles to Unlock the Secret of Family Harmony, in several installments. Each will help you understand and work with the different thinking styles in your family. Solving the Parenting Puzzle goes far beyond “left brain” and “right brain.” Author Susie Leonard Weller explains “logical,” “practical,” “creative” and “relational” and what benefits—and challenges—each presents at home, work and school.
The first preview installment of Solving the Parenting Puzzle is available free through the middle of September. New installments will be available after a free registration (to appear on our What’s New page). (Of course, once we’re past beta testing Mrs. Weller’s book, your favorite bookstore and our web site will have copies of a traditional printed edition. The preview edition is available now.)
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Back-to-School Tips for Stay-at-Home Sibs
Your oldest is going off to school and your younger child is already suffering from separation anxiety? You’re wondering how to keep that younger sibling happy when the built-in playmate is gone? Here’s some suggestions for making “Stay-at-Home” special:
Plan a new or favorite activity for immediately after the big kid leaves each day. Schedule a play date with someone else who’s now alone, find a new playground or try a new craft. Walk to the grocery for a roll of refrigerated cookie dough and make the after-school snack or tonight’s dessert.
Create an activity jar. On slips of paper, use pictures or a few words to suggest activities: library story hour, building a sand castle, cutting paper dolls, calling Grandma, sponge painting, and visiting your local children’s museum. Draw out one suggestion every morning (or at bedtime the night before, if your schedule requires planning ahead).
Select a theme for each week: start with a bike or trike ride somewhere each day, and the next week, weed the flower bed for 15 or 30 minutes each day. Kick off the third week by gathering and pressing fall leaves, or trying kid-style yoga.
If all of your children are out of the house most of the day, with school or preschool and then an afternoon child care program, make sure that everyone has a chance to talk about their day when you’re all together again. If necessary, set a timer to ensure that no child dominates the discussion and rotate who starts.
Schedule “homework time” for everyone in the evening: while your new student hits the books, younger kids can do pre-kindergarten worksheets or sit quietly with picture books. This may also give Mom and Dad an opportunity to do their own homework—paying bills, balancing the checkbook, reading teachers’ notes and filling out permission slips.
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Rainy Day Ideas
For a future “News for Parents” article, we’d love to know how you handle rainy days. What do you do when bad weather spoils whatever the kids were planning to do? What activities does your family use to combat cabin fever? Please send your tips to marketing@ParentingPress.com; put “Rainy Days” in the subject line. (P.S. We welcome suggestions for snowy, icy, windy and other icky weather days, too.)
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Leading a Group
Whether you’re an experienced speaker or a novice, you’re likely to have an occasional surprise when presenting, especially when the audience is kids. Regardless of the setting—a school for career day or a demonstration, youth group meeting, camp counseling, Sunday school—you’re apt to have someone who wants to dominate the discussion. Or there may be someone who wants to turn the session into a how-to class on a completely different project, or see how long you can be distracted from the announced topic. A few suggestions from Parenting Press readers and authors:
Know your venue. If you’re not familiar with the meeting room, ask detailed questions when you’re arranging your appearance and arrive early, so that you may be able to handle unexpected problems.
Write out or carefully outline your presentation. Time your talk when you rehearse it. Highlight what can be skipped if you run late.
Know your audience. Especially with older kids, have class participants introduce each other as an ice-breaker and explain why they’re attending. This helps you personalize your presentation and tips you off to possible sources of confusion regarding the purpose of the meeting. To prevent introductions from taking the entire meeting, give children a time limit and enforce it strictly.
Make class objectives explicit. After you’ve heard participants’ expectations, outline what the session will cover and what will have to be handled during Q & A.
Establish boundaries gently. Control kids who want to tell their life stories or reveal personal family information.
Learn physical and verbal techniques to keep the group on task. To cut someone off, use eye contact and body language with a phrase like, “We’ll discuss that point later.” Move around in the classroom. Use your body language to get the focus away from someone who wants to dominate the discussion. Get class participants moving, too: a quick exercise can wake them up and create a transition.
If you anticipate problems during Q & A, have questions submitted on index cards. This allows you to determine which to answer and in what order. It’s usually a more effective use of time because only you are speaking. It ensures a variety of issues can be discussed and it eases transitions. You can say, “This is a tough question and I only have time to suggest . . . [and then later say] Now, I have several more cards I want to address before our time runs out.”
What else can you say?
“I want to bring us back to our topic of the [day/discussion/moment]. Later we can come back to the issue you’ve identified.”
“Please don’t put down others or express your opinion in a way that makes it difficult for others to express their perspectives or values.”
“I’m interrupting to see if the group is ready to move on. You’ve contributed to this at length and I think it’s time we get to . . . “
These are also techniques your kids can use when making oral presentations or speeches for school offices. Most work well with the kind of heckling that often occurs in middle and high schools.
How to transition to Q & A. Concluding a presentation is sometimes challenging. However, it can be as simple as saying, “That’s the information I wanted us to start with. Now, what do you want me to explain more completely?” If no one responds, introduce another fact or two with, “One of the most common questions kids want me to answer is. . .” or “Whenever I speak, what everyone seems to want to know—but is scared to ask me—is. . .”
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 September are:
September 1 — Limiting Children’s “Screen Use”
September 8 — Thoughts on Limits
September 15 — Gardening with Children as Grief Therapy
September 22 — Role-Playing Self-Calming Skills
September 29 — Problem Solving Schoolyard Troubles
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Family Fun Ideas — Map Your Neighborhood
While the weather’s still warm and dusk comes late, here’s a project that encourages you to explore your neighborhood and learn a little about its history.
Mapping where you live can be as simple as walking around the block, counting how many houses there are, and having preschoolers draw a square for each home and then crayon in the distinctive features of each one: the treehouse or yard swing, the apartment house with its bricks, the dutch door, goldfish pond, garden gate or rose bushes fragrant with blossoms.
With older kids, you can go farther afield and they can map what’s important to them: the school, pool, library, ice cream shop and pet store. Variation: create an oversize map on which the kids post photos of family members in appropriate poses, such as Mom and Dad squeezed into tiny chairs in the kindergarten, everyone going down the pool slide, peeking over books at the library or licking favorite flavors of ice cream.
Another option: look for a community history at your library or an online archive so you can do a “then and now” comparison of both houses and businesses. You’ll probably all smile at the 30- or 40-year-old photos of the dry cleaners that’s been replaced by the espresso shop, the bowling alley that stood where the bank is now, and the theater that showed double features in what’s now a gift shop. Grand opening photos of your family’s favorite playground may show kids in rompers and pinafores that your children consider historic garb! It’s also fun to see how houses have been remodeled and landscaping has grown up in residential areas. Old maps will show your community before today’s roads were all built, although name changes sometimes make it difficult to determine which street was which 50 or 60 years ago. (That’s where long-time residents can help out.)
If you have history buffs or a child doing a local history as a school project, additional help can be found in city directories and gazetteers, which usually recorded the street addresses of businesses and public buildings; newspaper archives, often open to the public at university libraries; and photo collections at public and university libraries, and city, county and state archives. Samples of some photo collections are online and so are many maps. You may also be able to visit (sometimes by appointment) school district and business archives, museum photo collections and genealogical societies.
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Community Service: Birthday Festivities as Fund-raisers
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 other 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.
This month, plan a birthday celebration for your favorite cause. If it’s your birthday, ask guests to bring a gift for a favorite charity (say, toy trucks for the playground at a school for the homeless) or a contribution for a money tree (imagine a tree branch anchored in a pot and hung with quarters and half-dollar pieces that can go to the nonprofit).
It’s not your birthday? Honor someone—or something—connected with your cause. Raise funds for art supplies or a contribution to the local art museum with a party celebrating Grandma Moses’s birthday on the 7th (duplicate one of her paintings on the top of the cake and create your own folk art); gather anything but chocolate for the food bank when you serve brownies and chocolate milk for Milton Hershey’s birthday on the 13th; or volunteer for a therapeutic riding program on Gene Autry’s birthday, the 29th. (If you’re not old enough to ride, your help in the office or doing clean-up will be welcome.)
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“Reader Rewards” Program Recognizes Reviewers
Tell us how you use your favorite Parenting Press publications and we’ll send you much more than a thank-you note. In fact, we’ll send you an entire book—your choice of anything Parenting Press publishes!
If you have a favorite Parenting Press publication you’d like to tell us about, please send us your comments and contact information. If we use your comment, you will receive a gift certificate redeemable on your choice of Parenting Press publication.
Please note that all submissions become the property of Parenting Press for use in promotional literature and activities and that we reserve the right to identify you by name, title and city of residence/place of business. However, you will be contacted for written permission prior to the use of your submission. All “Reader Rewards” submissions should be received by Parenting Press prior to Dec. 31, 2007.
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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. We have posted 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—Happy Birthday, Parenting Press!
This special has expired.
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Does the newsletter work properly?
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We welcome your comments on the format and content on the feedback form. Thank you!
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