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Kids’ Skills

by Ben Furman

Author, psychiatrist and psychotherapist Ben Furman, shows us “how to convert a child’s problem into a skill to be learned and used, without blaming others or fault finding.” Sounds interesting? It is! This is a really helpful and easy to read book. I wanted to just skim read it but I found myself underlining and taking notes!

In summary Ben outlines 15 Steps for us to use on page 10. They all have great visual images to prompt us too. Some of these steps include:

                Converting problems into skills

                Naming the skill

                Building confidence

                Going public

                Practicing the skill

                Creating reminders

                Celebrating success

                Moving onto the next skill

He equips us with the right questions to ask, including:

   * What does the child need to learn for the problem to disappear?

   * And what do you need to learn in order not to do that?

   * It seems that your mum wants you to learn to do your homework on your own. Do you agree that this would be a good skill for you to learn?

Ben Furman provides heaps of ‘typical’ and ‘familiar’ scenarios to which we can all relate and works and re-works the situation for positive outcomes. He provides loads of examples and great illustrations, to show us “how to focus on what the child needs to learn rather than what is not working.”  

Soon you will recognise that you have new thinking and new words to use: “rather than saying my child has lots of problems to overcome” you will hear yourself saying “my child has several skills to learn or my child has several skills to improve upon.”

Ben’s book “Kids Skills” is a must have for parents, teachers, grandparents and carers of children from tiny tots to adolescents. He uses solution focused psychology to empower us all - the adults and the children. Emphasis is placed on the learner doing the right thing rather than stopping doing the wrong thing.

Sherrin Gugenberger is the director of Fruition Tuition and author of You Are Not Raising Children, You Are Raising Adults.

No one should underestimate the damage that traditional and cyber bullying can do. Bullying can be described as aggressive behaviour that is intentional and that involves an imbalance of power or strength. 

The forward of the book Cyber Bullying outlines the suicide of a 13 year old boy as a result of cyber bullying and it is just chilling. One can only but imagine the agony the boy’s father continues to suffer; his writing and story act as a severe wake up call to us all. We need to watch out for our young and protect them.

This book helps us understand traditional and cyber bullying, the similarities and the differences. It sets out some guidelines for schools and details a variety of different ways mobile phones, text messages and social networking sites can be used to bully others. The book helps us as parents to understand how cyber bullying can work through threats, images, set-ups, fabrication, derogatory comments and trickery with devastating effects. Information is power in this instance, and the more we know about ‘how’ young people use technology, the more we will understand how to avoid the pitfalls. There is both a degree in invisibility for the children who bully others and a devastating degree of magnification to many others for the children who are being bullied. In other words, bullying is no longer contained to a certain place in a playground or near a bus stop, children’s homes are now being invaded through cyber communications - so there is nowhere to hide.

Chapter 5 “What Parents Can Do” provides some good information and even has a section where students share advice with parents. It is clear from the children’s comments that parents have an important role to play in supervising and protecting their children:

     *   ”tell kids not to put revealing information on their blogs and stuff”

     *   ”… they (a parent) need to be a parent and take charge of what their kids do”

     *   ”I think parents need to talk with their kids more”

     *   ”some parents don’t even know how much time their kids spend on the computer”

     *   ” they (parents) should at least ask what you are doing on the computer”

There is preventative things too like how to watch for warning signs and how to take a more active role in communicating the need for personal safety. There is a list of links for parents to connect with resources that can help them protect their children online.

Chapter 6 is dedicated to “What Educators Can Do”.

It is very clear that the internet is here to stay and that youth spend significant amounts of time online with the overwhelming majority, 90% of preteens and teens, having internet access. So knowing this, we need to question specific usage and set up rules around what is approved and what is not.

While the book goes on to talk about relevant issues of media literacy, I believe that cyber bullying is effective because children have access to it. I ask you this, who pays for the computer, the electricity, the internet connections and the house that stores all of this? Don’t parents have rights to control the environment in which they raise their children?

There is nothing wrong with limiting usage, regulating and filtering sites that can be accessed, storing passwords, and continuing to monitor the ’safety’ aspects of your child’s use of technology. By not giving out passwords, personal details, by not reading Facebook and other social networks every day, we can limit the dependence our children have on the internet.

Cyber Bullying is a must read book for parents and educators, to help raise awareness of our responsibilities and necessity to protect our children against predators and bullies alike and to promote the appropriate uses of technology.

Sherrin Gugenberger is the director of Fruition Tuition and author of You Are Not Raising Children, You Are Raising Adults.

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Talking about feelings is one of the cornerstones of emotional literacy. How do we teach children the meanings of words about feelings? Are we conscious of the need to build their emotional vocabularies as we attempt to develop their ‘emotional intelligence’?

At times we all struggle to find the right words to talk about what we are feeling. Often it is the simplest images, symbols and metaphors that are the most powerful. A major benefit of using imagery to describe feelings is that literacy barriers (either because the children are too young or because they have learning difficulties) don’t have any impact on their ability to communicate how they feel.

The Bears are a wonderful tool for helping children communicate how they feel. This card pack contains 48 high quality cards, each depicting a colourful, loveable cartoon bear which could be  happy, sad, confident, afraid, shy, energetic, tired, noisy, caring, grumpy - you decide!  There are lots of differents uses (many are described in the booklet included in the card pack and you are also encouraged to be creative and come up with your own), but here are a few suggestions to get you started:

At home (these are great for ‘dinner table’ conversation):

Ask your child to:

* Select a card that best describes their day, and then ask them why.

* Select three bears that represent the best, worst and funniest thing that happened either today or this week and then get them to describe the events.

* Select a bear that represents each member of your family most of the time.  This can be an incredibly insightful exercise, as you suddenly discover how even your very small children view themselves, other family members and even relationships.

For example, a 3 year old in one family picked a very stressed bear for Mum, and a cranky bear for Dad. This gave the parents the opportunity to stand in their child’s shoes and see themselves how their child was seeing them. It allowed them to identify that the stress they were experiencing (which they may have thought was being successfully kept from the children) was impacting the whole family, and they needed to do something about it. While this 3 year old didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate her view in words, she didn’t hesitate at all using the Bears and those parents gained important information that helped them to implement healthy changes in their family.

In the classroom

* Use the bears to create a story. Pick a bear and get someone to describe the event that led the bear to this feeling. Now select another bear and continue the story - what happened next? Add bears as new characters along the way and in no time you will have your story.

* Select a bear that represents something that happened over the weekend/holidays - tell the class about it, write it down, draw a picture of the event.

* If you were going into space, select the bears that describe the team you would take with you.

* Randomly hand out bear cards. Get students to act like the bear they got charades style and then try guessing the feeling from the card.

There are many more ways you can use the Bears. Whichever way you choose to use them, the important thing is to get children talking about their feelings. For adults, emotional intelligence has been identified as one of the key determing factors of success in the workplace (and in life). These simple tools can help you develop emotional intelligence in children from very early on, which will help them to have better relationships, both during their childhood and as they journey into adult life.

We invite you to share your ideas on how to use the Bears by commenting on this blog post.

CLICK HERE to see The Bears Card Pack in our store.

Children need free, creative playtime.  Play is ‘life-learning’ because it helps children come to terms with their personal experience of the world, and their knowledge of it.  As parents and teachers, we have the ability to destroy the value of play by observing it too closely and taking notes on skills that are being mastered. This turns playtime into an activity with objectives and measureable results rather than a time to be enjoyed thoroughly with no goals in mind.

There is no denying that play has the potential to be a powerful learning and teaching medium as it allows kids to demonstrate not only their knowledge, understanding, and skills but also their values and attitudes but we need to find the balance. Superhero play, for example, is often a target for criticism amongst parents and educators because it’s seen as contradictory to the skills that kids should be acquiring during the age that this type of play is most popular.

From an adult perspective superhero stories are all about winning, violence and superiority but having observed children deeply involved in playground superhero scenarios the reality is much different. A child’s focus is on the hero, who most kids are begging to play, saving the day and to me, learning about helping out a person in need is an appropriate and beneficial lesson. This type of play is natural for kids and allows ‘life learning’ without our interference.

Allowing kids to enjoy free, creative playtime supports their natural rhythm of development and encourages curiosity and creativity. Let kids be kids and give them back some time and space for free creative play.

Download a copy of our latest catalogue full of new and best-selling books and educational toys HERE

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Parenting expert Dr. Michele Borba tackles the most common bad behaviours that kids ages 3 to 12 repeat over and over: behaviours that drive parents crazy. the top 38 bad behaviors and how to change them, step-by-step, are confronted and solved in this enormously useful, simple-to-use book.

Click on the cover image to see No More Misbehavin’ on our store.

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164 ready-to-use lessons–complete with reproducible worksheets–to help children become aware of acceptable social behavior and develop proficiency in acquiring basic social skills. The book is organized around three core areas crucial to social development in the primary grades: Accepting Rules and Authority at School (covering skills such as paying attention to tasks and complying with rules); Relating to Peers (being cooperative, helping others, being a good listener, etc.); and Developing Positive Social Skills (determining the moods of others, being considerate of others in public places, etc.).

Click on the cover image to see Social Skills for Special Children on our store.

It is going to be a busy weekend here at Grow Your Kids. If you are in Brisbane, you can catch us at the Education Show being held at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre on Friday & Saturday 11 and 12 September 2009 from 10am to 3pm. There are free seminars and free entry for all visitors, so it is well worth dropping in!

Also on Friday & Saturday, we will be at the QLD Parents & Citizens conference in Brisbane so there is definitely plenty going on!

Make sure you come and say hi if you are at either of these great events.

*Available In Store*

Click here to download your free excerpt!

***Available in Store***

Click here to download your free excerpt!

This book shows how any parent can tune into a childs unique core personality, hard wiring, temperament, and genetic predisposition in order to help that child flourish and thrive. Nurture the Nature provides the tools to understand your childs nature and nourish it depending on their one-of-a-kind genetic predisposition, biological hard-wiring, and stage of development.

Click on the cover image to see Nurture the Nature on our store.