Understanding Self-Discipline

It has been said that the only true discipline is self-discipline. With self-discipline we take ownership of our own behavior. We take responsibility for our lives.

As we discipline our children we might consider that our goals should include these objectives of helping our children take ownership of their behavior and responsibility for their lives.

Too often discipline is delivered as punishment that creates feelings of intimidation, humiliation or embarrassment. If we want our children to learn to own their behavior and take responsibility we need to find a way to encourage our children, not discourage our children.

The word discipline has its roots in the word ''disciple,'' meaning ''pupil'' in Latin. As parents we are the teachers, and our children are our students.

The relationship of teacher/student, parent/child and leader/disciple must be based on respect and trust. Our children must know that they can learn from us in a safe, secure and consistent environment, free from intimidation, humiliation and embarrassment. When we react in a crisis-oriented manner trying to help our children learn to be responsible, respectful and resourceful, we often display the very behaviors that we wish to stop in our children.

If we are harsh in our reactions to situations, belittle our children or set arbitrary or inconsistent standards, our teaching can create an angry and frustrated response in our children, leading to distrust and disrespect.

Our challenge as leaders of our young disciples is to guide the whole child--body, mind, heart and spirit. We must model the self-discipline, the vision, the passion and the conscience we wish our children to develop.

Any worthy challenge requires mindfulness and compassion for a successful end. We need to be mindful of our thoughts and our actions. Do our ideas and deeds lead our children to take ownership of their behavior and responsibility for their lives?

Can we bring our passion and our love to every aspect of this essential work of guiding our children?

Take a few minutes to think of the strengths of character you wish to instill in your children. How can you lead to those ends with self-discipline, vision, passion and conscience?

Positive psychologists have identified six types of core virtues that appear in all cultures--wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence--comprised of twenty-four character strengths:

1. Wisdom and Knowledge: creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning and perspective.

2. Courage: bravery, persistence, integrity and vitality.

3. Humanity: love, kindness and social intelligence.

4. Justice: citizenship, fairness and leadership.

5. Temperance: forgiveness and mercy, humility and modesty, prudence and self-regulation.

6. Transcendence: appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor and spirituality.

I encourage you to make a list of these twenty-four character strengths and brainstorm how you can help your children use these strengths to become responsible for their own behavior and their own lives using body, mind, heart and spirit. That is the nature of true self-discipline.

Next week: Stuck with a Problem? SOAR

Kids Talk™ is a column dealing with early childhood development issues written by Maren Stark Schmidt. Mrs. Schmidt founded a Montessori school and holds a Masters of Education from Loyola College in Maryland.

She has over 25 years experience working with young children and holds teaching credentials from the Association Montessori Internationale. She is also Creative Director for a video-based reading series for children ages three to six, The Shining Light Reading Series. Contact her via e-mail at maren@shininglightreading.com.

Complete Collection of the Shining Light Reading Series Now Available on DVD
Visit www.shininglightreading.com for more information.

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©2008 KIDS TALK™
25877 East Bright Avenue
Welches, OR 97067
503.550.3143
maren@kidstalknews.com

Kids Talk is published in conjunction with Scribe Marketing

Current Ideas on Teaching Reading

Over one-third of the fourth graders in America can't read.

This number hasn't changed in the past 10 years. You might ask, ''What is the problem?''

Reading instruction for the most part hasn't been based on science, but instead has been based on ideas such as whole language or phonics, without systematic testing of hypotheses or observations and retesting of methods that seem to be working.

Research being done by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development is showing that when an instructional method includes phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension, the failure rate of our fourth-graders drops from 38% to between 2-7%.

Reading research is developing hard evidence that skills that lead to reading success are acquired before the age of six years. Vital skills include phonemic awareness (hearing individual sounds in a word), phonics (associating sounds with a letter symbol), visual patterning, vocabulary and the ability to relate information to your personal experiences.

Many preschools avoid academics, believing that teaching reading and math pushes children needlessly. If skill building is presented in a developmentally inappropriate way, such as drilling and worksheets, the child is hurried through the natural process of acquiring written language.

Preschoolers love to sing, talk, count, build and manipulate learning materials, and in the process learn critical skills without drills, tests or worksheets.

Sadly, almost 9 out of 10 of children who were poor readers at the end of first grade are still struggling at the end of fourth grade. Later as adults, 75% of these 9-year-olds continue to wrestle with reading.

Current research shows if a child hasn't become a fluent reader by the age of 9 years, he or she will need 2 hours of intensive reading instruction per day for a year to catch up with peers.

These five skills will help your child, whatever age, learn to read successfully:

Phonemic Awareness: This is the ability to hear the individual sounds in a word. For example the word dog has three distinct sounds: duh, aw and guh.

Phonics Skills: This is the ability to take those letter sounds and connect the sounds to letter symbols, so you can sound out words.

In my experience with working with non-readers older than 9 years of age is this: These children can connect 6 or less letter sounds to their symbols. Once these older children learned to identify letter sounds and letters, reading moved along rapidly, with one student going from a first-grade level reader to an eighth-grade level in less than a semester.

Reading Fluency: Beginning readers sound out words letter by letter. After multiple reading experiences with a word, the new reader memorizes that three symbols form a pattern to represent the word ''dog'' and no longer needs to sound out each letter. Beginning readers need the practice of reading a single word at a time, gradually building to a few words on a page while developing memory and speed to create reading fluency. Many young readers want to jump to difficult books before they have the visual and memory skills necessary for fast and flowing reading.

Vocabulary: If a word is not in our spoken vocabulary we will have difficulty reading and comprehending the word. For many of our children their small spoken vocabulary prevents them from understanding the written word. We might compare their problem with reading, as if we had picked up a book on nuclear physics. We might be able to sound out the words, but we wouldn't understand much.

Reading Comprehension: This skill is tied closely with vocabulary and with the skill of being able to relate information in the context of your life experiences. If a child is reading about a chrysanthemum and has never seen one or heard the word, odds are that the child will not understand what he or she is reading.

Current reading research suggest that we give our children under the age of six years learning opportunities in the following areas:

• To hear the distinct sounds or our language
• To connect sounds to letter symbols
• To build visual memory of patterns
• To have a language rich environment full of stories, songs and adult conversations
• To have hands-on experiences to enrich vocabulary

Research indicates that with these opportunities 95% or more of our fourth graders should read fluently. It's time for a change.

Next week: Understanding Self-Discipline

Kids Talk™ is a column dealing with early childhood development issues written by Maren Stark Schmidt. Mrs. Schmidt founded a Montessori school and holds a Masters of Education from Loyola College in Maryland.

She has over 25 years experience working with young children and holds teaching credentials from the Association Montessori Internationale. She is also Creative Director for a video-based reading series for children ages three to six, The Shining Light Reading Series. Contact her via e-mail at maren@shininglightreading.com.

Complete Collection of the Shining Light Reading Series Now Available on DVD
Visit www.shininglightreading.com for more information.

Ask your local newspaper to carry Kids Talk. Call, write or e-mail your local newspaper editor and recommend Kids Talk.

Would you like to send Kids Talk to friends and family or receive Kids Talk e-mail updates in your own inbox? Sign up for FREE here:
Click here for a FREE subscription.

©2008 KIDS TALK™
25877 East Bright Avenue
Welches, OR 97067
503.550.3143
maren@kidstalknews.com

Kids Talk is published in conjunction with Scribe Marketing

You Can't Say You Can't Play

Exclusion begins early in life, and it can be observed even in pre-school settings. In days a class divides up into three main groups--leaders who say who gets to play in their games, the children excluded from the games and the children in the middle who live in fear of being rejected.

For the kindergartner who finds social skills a challenge, the exclusion of the playground becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: a child isn't included in a game because he plays too rough, wears different clothes or has a speech impediment. The list of deficiencies is long. Once the ''in'' group rejects this child, the exclusion isolates the outcast child from the other children in all three groups.

The child is in quarantine from the group leaders, since it was the leaders saying, “You can't play,” that created the exclusion in the first place. The rejected child is segregated from the other rejected children who are afraid of being further ostracized by the leaders. The third group forms with the children in the middle who are disinclined to play with the excluded children in case the leaders also tell them that they can't play.

Preschoolers create a caste system, and change can be an impossible task.

Vivian Gussin Paley, nearing her 60^th birthday and 40 years of working with preschoolers and kindergartners, decided to test for herself whether this caste system she had observed for so many years, and at that point considered inevitable, could in fact be broken.

Paley begins by putting a sign on the wall--You Can't Say You Can't Play (also the title of her book)--and starts discussions with her kindergartners about her proposed rule. ''Is it fair?'' Paley asks. Paley knows she needs these five-year-olds to buy into the change.

Paley talks with her students to help the children figure out ''who is sadder, the one who isn't allowed to play or the one who has to play with someone he or she doesn't want to play with?''

An outcast child, Clara, says it's sadder if you can't play.

Lisa, an excluding leader, says, ''The other one is the same sadder.''

Angelo, a loner, helps Lisa and the rest of the class understand. ''It has to be Clara, because she puts herself away in her cubby. And Lisa can still play every time.''

Inspired by a bird that followed Paley on a morning run, Paley uses the adventures of Magpie to weave a serial story, a journey of loneliness and exclusion with a cast of princes, princesses and animals that parallels events in the classroom.

Paley talks to the older grades about the rule. Older children think it is a good idea, but they tell Paley that they are perhaps too old for the rule to be effective because they are already too hurt to trust others.

When Paley moves to institute the rule in her classroom after weeks of discussing the implications of the rule and the unfolding of the Magpie story, Paley is amazed at how quickly the culture changes in her room, from exclusion to inclusion.

With her rule Paley uncovers a fundamental truth: ''We must be told, when we are young, what rules to live by. The grown-ups must tell children early in life so that that myth and morality proclaim the same message while the children are still listening.''

Paley begins her book with Leviticus 19:34:

The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Each of us is born a stranger into a strange land. If I could be Queen for a Day, I'd ask parents and teachers around the world to read Paley's You Can't Say You Can't Play.

As Paley tells us, ''Each time a cause for sadness is removed for even one child…we all rise in stature....''

We all could stand a little taller.

Next week: Current Ideas on Teaching Reading

Kids Talk™ is a column dealing with early childhood development issues written by Maren Stark Schmidt. Mrs. Schmidt founded a Montessori school and holds a Masters of Education from Loyola College in Maryland.

She has over 25 years experience working with young children and holds teaching credentials from the Association Montessori Internationale. She is also Creative Director for a video-based reading series for children ages three to six, The Shining Light Reading Series. Contact her via e-mail at maren@shininglightreading.com.

Complete Collection of the Shining Light Reading Series Now Available on DVD
Visit www.shininglightreading.com for more information.

Ask your local newspaper to carry Kids Talk. Call, write or e-mail your local newspaper editor and recommend Kids Talk.

Would you like to send Kids Talk to friends and family or receive Kids Talk e-mail updates in your own inbox? Sign up for FREE here:
Click here for a FREE subscription.

©2008 KIDS TALK™
25877 East Bright Avenue
Welches, OR 97067
503.550.3143
maren@kidstalknews.com

Kids Talk is published in conjunction with Scribe Marketing

Characteristics of the Adolescent

For centuries the Judeo-Christian tradition has held a coming of age ritual for thirteen-year-olds. The Jewish Bar and Bat Mitzvahs and the Christian confirmation announce an adolescent's provisional membership in his or her religious adult communities.

With changing legislation over the past 50 years young people's official entry into the adult world occurs eight years later, on one's 21st birthday. Perhaps the generation who grew up in the Depression and World War II did not want to force responsibilities prematurely on their children, as had been the case during those challenging times.

Young people around age 12, despite legalities, begin the journey into adulthood and enter a phase of development with distinct needs to enhance the following characteristics over the next six years or so:

The adolescent begins to focus on belonging to a self-organized group of peers, classmates, teammates and friends, becoming the ''we'' generation. Watching a group of several hundred junior high school students move from a gymnasium across to the main building, I was amazed at the similarities in hairstyles and clothing. Young teens change rapidly to adapt to this need to belong to their time and place, to become contemporaries. This is one reason we can look at old high school pictures and pinpoint the year based on the fashions at the time.

This age is a time for adventure, personal challenge and self-discovery. We observe the young teenager of 12-15 years setting goals, sometimes quite lofty, and working to achieve these goals. The young teenager seeks adventure, perhaps desiring to travel to new places and to meet new people. At this time, the teen works to figure out who he or she is in the larger context of his or her community and the world.

The young teen needs to argue, disagree and oppose others, especially parents, teachers and other authority figures. These teens push the envelope, testing what is acceptable in our culture and what behavior or ideas are negotiable or flexible.

Young teens enjoy working with their hands--in the dirt--to learn how to make things grow, as well as to learn craft and artistic skills. Playing music, painting, sculpting and wood building are activities to which young teenagers are drawn. Consider the age of budding graffiti artists. When self-expression is denied appropriate venues, graffiti speaks to the young teens' predilections for adventure, challenge, opposing adults, creating new groups and developing artistic skills.

Poetry is a strong interest for this age person. Often the only time in our lives that we read or write poetry is in our early teens. Finding powerful words for self-expression occupies the young teen.

The teen is in a time for developing caring and human compassion. Because of the other five qualities emerging in the young teen--adventure, opposing adults, group orientation, love of poetry and using the hands to learn to make a living--we might overlook this quality in the young teen. Learning how to become a caring, warm-hearted human being characterizes the young teen's development.

The young teen needs opportunities for the following:

• To strengthen self-identity
• To develop the intellect through critical analysis and debate
• To build community within a peer setting
• To serve others
• To understand societal methods and norms
• To express new and powerful emotions
• To understand the ways of the natural world

When these possibilities for growth are not met in the young teen's environment, we may see rebellious, angry expressions of these unfulfilled needs, or conversely, we may encounter depressed and directionless young people.

Make a list of activities you see young teenagers do, and consider how those actions relate to the developmental needs of the adolescent.

The young teen is trying to build a person who will be a strong adult. Let's give our teens as many chances to do so as possible, in our homes, in our schools, in our churches and in our communities.

Next week: You Can't Say You Can't Play

Kids Talk™ is a column dealing with early childhood development issues written by Maren Stark Schmidt. Mrs. Schmidt founded a Montessori school and holds a Masters of Education from Loyola College in Maryland.

She has over 25 years experience working with young children and holds teaching credentials from the Association Montessori Internationale. She is also Creative Director for a video-based reading series for children ages three to six, The Shining Light Reading Series. Contact her via e-mail at maren@shininglightreading.com.

Complete Collection of the Shining Light Reading Series Now Available on DVD
Visit www.shininglightreading.com for more information.

Ask your local newspaper to carry Kids Talk. Call, write or e-mail your local newspaper editor and recommend Kids Talk.

Would you like to send Kids Talk to friends and family or receive Kids Talk e-mail updates in your own inbox? Sign up for FREE here:
Click here for a FREE subscription.

©2008 KIDS TALK™
25877 East Bright Avenue
Welches, OR 97067
503.550.3143
maren@kidstalknews.com

Kids Talk is published in conjunction with Scribe Marketing