Special Announcement: New Book Building Cathedrals Not Walls

Dear Kids Talk Readers:

I am thrilled to let you know about my new book—Building Cathedrals Not Walls.

The phrase ''building cathedrals not walls'' comes from the following story:

An architect visited a construction site on his vacation. As he walked around he asked the brick masons what they were building.

''Mister,'' the first worker said as he slopped mud onto a brick, ''can't you see I'm building a wall?''

Every worker he chatted with, no matter if the chore was laying brick, shoveling or mixing cement, told the architect they were laying brick or stacking a wall.

One worker offered a different version of his labors. As he stood upright and smiled, the man said, ''Look. I'm building a cathedral.''

I think if asked what we were doing during our day-to-day toils and trials of parenting and teaching, most of us would probably answer, ''Can't you see I'm busy with the kids!''

I hope this book will help parents and teachers see that we are part of a group that is building humanity, task by task, day by day, generation by generation.When we have a plan and a vision, we understand that, indeed, we are building cathedrals, not walls. The mundane becomes the magnificent. And that can make all the difference.

The 90 Kids Talk™ essays in this book I hope will continue to inspire parents and teachers to see that we are working on something bigger than ourselves. Much bigger.

Building Cathedrals Not Walls is for sale for $9.95 at Amazon.com and BuildingCathedrals.net. Free shipping on orders over $25.00.

A perfect stocking stuffer for the cathedral builders in your life.

All the best,

Maren Schmidt,
Kids Talk

Have Maren speak at your school, church, or other organization. Email Maren_Schmidt@me.com.

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.

©2009 KIDS TALK™
25877 East Bright Avenue
Welches, OR 97067
503.622.6750
503.550.3143
maren@kidstalknews.com

Kids Talk is published in conjunction with Scribe Marketing

Help Me Help Myself

Children from about age three are asking us to help them learn independence. Children want to learn how to do things on their own without adult supervision or permission. Even though at times we feel we have to help children constantly, in reality, children are asking us to help them help themselves.

Much of what we classify as "misbehavior" in the three- to six-year-old, upon closer inspection, is children trying to do things by themselves, and not being successful. In our hurried world, it's easier to do it ourselves than to stop and show our children how to do a task, and patiently wait as they complete it. Do we really have 15 minutes every morning for our three-year-old to put on her shoes and socks?

Visiting friends a few years ago, I asked their nine-year-old if he'd like to help me cut apples for a pie. Jimmy's eyes widened. "Oh, no, I can't. Mom won't let me use a knife."

"Why is that? Were you irresponsible with a knife?"

"No. Mom's afraid I'll cut myself."

After getting an okay with Jimmy's mom, I began showing him how to cut the apples into chucks after I'd peeled and quartered them. Within half an hour, Jimmy had learned how to peel, quarter and cube apples. And not a mangled finger in sight. At dinner Jimmy was so proud of "our" pies. He thanked me for taking the time to show him how to use a paring knife. "I knew I could do it if someone just let me." Jimmy was saying, "Help me help myself."

We can begin to show our children how to use serious tools such as knives, scissors, hammers, and screwdrivers around age three, with 100-percent adult supervision. First, we need to feel confident that the child will listen and follow our direction. If not, he or she is not ready for these kinds of tasks.

Secondly, we need to find tools that are safe. For helping in the kitchen a small butter knife or canapé knife will cut bananas and apple slices, but won't cut small fingers. There are scissors available that will only cut paper, and not hair or clothes. Small hammers can be used to drive 16-penny-nails into a log end. For hammering, invest in a pair of child-sized safety goggles. A short, three-inch screwdriver and ratchet can be used to loosen and tighten screws and bolts on boards.

As a child's level of skill and responsibility grow, we can introduce new levels of difficulty with different tools and materials.

Giving our children "real" work with real tools will help them gain independence. Self-esteem is based on having skills, meaning you can act in ways that benefit yourself and others. Too often, adults think that just telling someone that they are wonderful develops a feeling of self worth. Self-esteem is based on the self-confidence of knowing how to do something, not on what someone says to you.

"Help me help myself," is the young child's cry for independence that leads to true confidence and self-esteem. Don't do for your child what they can do for themselves. Remember, any unnecessary help creates an obstacle to a person’s independence.

Next week: Bringing Something to the Table

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.

©2009 KIDS TALK™
25877 East Bright Avenue
Welches, OR 97067
503.622.6750
503.550.3143
maren@kidstalknews.com

Kids Talk is published in conjunction with Scribe Marketing

Raise a Child Who Loves the Earth

Close your eyes, and think back to a happy time and place in your childhood. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? What do you feel? What are you touching? What can you taste?

For most of us, these memories involve nature and our families.

My love of the outdoors began in my backyard, digging in the dirt with spoons, making mulberry mud pies, inspecting roly-polys and worms under rocks, catching bumblebees in baby food jars during the day and lightning bugs in the evening.

Love of the earth came by discovering the first pussy willow to bloom in the side yard, spotting the first hyacinth emerging from the cold flowerbed, helping cut a few branches of forsythia to force into bloom in the living room while the wind blew polar. Picking a plum warmed in the sun, the sweet juice dribbling down my chin. Spotting cocoons on milkweed plants in the field near my home.

There was so much life to explore in our backyard. Our block was the world, each yard being a new country to discover.

Today our children's time seems programmed with events that disconnect them from the natural discovery and exploration of living things.

It only takes a bit of earth.

Give your child time to play in the yard. Have one area that doesn’t have to be pristine and is available for digging and looking under rocks.

Working in your yard seems a lot like playing in the yard to your child. Child-sized rakes, shovels, hoes, trowels, and gardening gloves are readily available in home improvement or gardening stores. Safety always comes first, so make sure you have a place to store tools and give lessons on how to use them safely. Remember, no running with tools! A three-year-old loves to rake grass and leaves into a circle made by a hula-hoop, which defines where to deposit raked leaves.

Introduce one tool at a time. Helping keep a clean yard is a first step for our children to learn to keep a clean Earth. Ecology? The word comes from the Greek word oikos, for house. Ecology begins at home.

Grow something. It doesn't take acreage to grow plants. Start a potato in a jar of water on your kitchen cabinet. Sprout an avocado seed. Make alfalfa or bean sprouts. Plant cherry tomatoes in a pot on your porch. Let your children polish the leaves of a rubber tree plant. My favorite book to inspire gardening with children is Roots, Shoots, Buckets, and Boots: Gardening Together by Sharon Lovejoy.

Walk every day. Walk in your yard. Walk in your neighborhood or nearby parks. Work up to take longer hikes at state parks or preserves. Remember to take water, snacks, sunscreen and insect repellent. Do a scavenger-type hunt as you walk for three types of plants or animals. For example: a black oak, a sycamore and a blackberry vine, OR a bluebird, a monarch butterfly and a worm.

Enjoy the weather. Get out in the rain. Of course, there is always the danger of thunderstorms and lightning, but a warm summer rain invites the senses. To walk in the rain, without a raincoat, galoshes, or umbrella, is a wonderful experience for a child. Ask: Does the air smell different when it is raining? What does the rain sound like? How does mud feel between your toes?

Have towels and dry clothes ready for your return from a walk in the rain. Let yourself be a kid again.

Learning to love the earth begins early. It begins in our backyards as we play, work, walk, discover, explore and enjoy this wonderful world.

Next week: Help Me Help Myself

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.

©2009 KIDS TALK™
25877 East Bright Avenue
Welches, OR 97067
503.622.6750
503.550.3143
maren@kidstalknews.com

Kids Talk is published in conjunction with Scribe Marketing

Slaying the Scary Green Monster

Green. Everything today is green. Cars are green. Food is green. Sports equipment is green. Kermit the Frog should be happy because he crooned that "it's not easy being green."

Kermit was right, though. It isn't easy being green, or even hearing about it, especially for our children.

They are bombarded with images and advertising messages that our world is a horrible mess and that if our children don't do something about it--convince their parents to buy the right car, etc.--our planet will flood, and all the polar bears and penguins will die. These messages convey to our children that they have a bleak future, or perhaps no future at all.

How powerless a child must feel against these messages that insinuate that they are the last great hope to stop global warming, pollution, deforestation, energy shortages, world hunger and more.

Here's the news, folks. The world's problems are not our children's problem. They are our problems.

It is our responsibility to protect our children from a world view that lacks optimism, hope and compassion. It is our responsibility to show our children the potential, excitement and joy of life.

Each of us only can control our personal actions and attitudes. We assist our children when we help them develop skills to take care of themselves from a young age. Saving the world can wait until they are adults.

Children report feelings of helplessness against the frightening green forces that our media deliver. I imagine these children feel much like I did when we went through nuclear attack drills and training that included how to set up an indoor latrine, how to open 55-gallon drums, and how to disinfect close quarters against a myriad of deadly diseases, so we could live underground for a year. Not a vision of hope for this 12-year-old.

For our children we start by helping them develop personal power by learning how to care of themselves. If everyone on this planet knew how to take care of him- or herself, then we'd all be positioned to help each other.

Sounds like a paradox, but interdependency relies on the independent skills of individuals. You can't truly help others until you know how to take care of yourself.

We can show our three-year-old how to be careful with shared resources from turning off the water and lights to turning the pages in a book carefully. Small actions of loving intent make the world a better place.

As we are able to take care of ourselves, we learn to take care of our homes and the people, animals, plants and objects around us. Stephen Covey, in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, calls this process of learning as enlarging our sphere of influence.

As we master skill-building activities, we gain competence and confidence. These qualities allow us to continue to enlarge our sphere of influence, little by little, until one day we are adults who can stare down Green Scary Monsters.

Until that moment, our children's job is to learn to take care of themselves, then others, in a world that is full of love of all living things, and life itself.

For in our heart of hearts, we know. We know that we can only solve our problems with love. The only way to rid the world of Scary Green Monsters is to love them to oblivion, one self-sufficient task at a time.

Next week: Raise a Child Who Loves the Earth

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.

©2009 KIDS TALK™
25877 East Bright Avenue
Welches, OR 97067
503.622.6750
503.550.3143
maren@kidstalknews.com

Kids Talk is published in conjunction with Scribe Marketing

John 15:13

The idea of selfless service was the theme of a story from my kindergarten days. The Sunday School lesson told of a firefighter who died saving families from a burning building. The Bible verse to memorize for the week was John 15:13, which reads, "God hath no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for a friend."

Early on the concept of having to die to show the greatest love burned in my brain. During my elementary years, I woke up sweating from nightmares, not from warm summer nights, but wondering whether I could pass the ultimate test if called to give that "last full measure of devotion," words from the Gettysburg address that echoed through the cicada-filled darkness.

Today, with a half a century of thought and experience, John 15:13 begs a different interpretation of the phrase, "to lay down his life for a friend."

To lay down your life. To put it down. To forget about your life, whatever you are doing or plan to do, to help a friend.

To lay down doesn't mean to discard, or die. An implication of "to lay down" includes the opposite action, to be able to pick up what has been laid down.

How wonderful it is when we have a friend who will stop whatever he or she is doing to spend time with us--be it a minute phone call, a lunch hour, a day in the park, or a year on a project. Time spent might be a fun activity or a visit, an emergency, or a caretaking situation. But what great love we feel when our friend is with us, his or her own life put aside for a moment to join us on our own journey.

As parents we lay down our lives for our children. We put aside our lives in order to focus on our children, to help them grow, to nourish them, and to help them become the unique individuals only they can become. As our children become older and gain independence, we will pick up our lives again.

That a man should lay down his life for a friend. It takes courage to put aside your dreams and find new dreams with a friend.

Laying down your life varies in form and experience. It may be as extreme as giving that "last full measure," or it may be as simple as laying down your cell phone, the computer mouse, or the newspaper, to truly see and experience the person, the child, next to you. A friend waiting to be discovered.

God hath no greater love than this.

Next week: Slaying the Scary Green Monster

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.

©2009 KIDS TALK™
25877 East Bright Avenue
Welches, OR 97067
503.622.6750
503.550.3143
maren@kidstalknews.com

Kids Talk is published in conjunction with Scribe Marketing

What Teaches Wish Parents Knew

At a teachers' conference a couple of years ago we broke into groups to answer the following question: What are the most important ideas you'd like to communicate to parents of the children you teach?

Here are the thoughts from over one hundred teachers and school administrators.

Respect the work of your child. Children are involved in a huge task of trying to build an adult to live in a world that we cannot begin to imagine.

Be a help to life. When we assist children by creating a place where children can grow to be unique individuals, we not only help that particular child, but we help all life on our planet.

Any unnecessary help is a hindrance. Use it, or lose it. When we offer to do for our children anything they can do for themselves, we slow down their progress of building strong independent people.

You don't have to react to popular culture. Step back, and think about what your child really needs. Does the pop world of toys, movies and teen celebrities support the developmental needs or personality of your child and your family? For example, are cartoons the best way to spend Saturday morning? Is a certain video game important to your family's long-term goals?

Parents need to be the adult in the relationship. Parenting is not about being your child's best buddy. It's about leadership and guiding your child to adulthood.

Don't be afraid to set boundaries. Sometimes we have to be the bad guy by calling our children back to a safe path. Setting firm expectations for behavior helps our children learn to be responsible and to understand the relationship between freedom and responsibility.

Have children take responsibility. Our children are much more capable than for what we give them credit. Give your children responsibility and the freedom to make mistakes within the boundaries that you've set.

Let kids be kids. On the other hand, children aren't little adults. Their needs are much different. Understand developmentally what your child needs, and let your children be kids, not miniature grown-ups.

Understand sleep and nutrition for children. Children need more than eight hours of sleep per night, more so in the range of 10 to 14 hours. Children's diets require complex carbohydrates versus simple sugars. Invest some time to understand dietary and sleep needs of children and how they differ from adults.

Kids need quiet and transition times. Modern-day children seem to have their days, weeks, months and years programmed from getting up to bedtime. "Do nothing" time and adequate time to move from one activity to another helps make for a happier healthier child.

Give your child your quality time. And lots of it. Children require one-on-one adult time to thrive and survive. Today our children have to compete with cell phones, computers, jobs, etc., for parental attention. Block off time each day to focus only on your child's and your relationship. Amazingly, ten minutes of focused time per day can make a huge difference in both your lives.

Teachers have an outside window into the parent/child relationship. As parents, we should think about these points and change our thinking and behavior to help our children become the unique human beings they are working hard to build, minute by minute, activity by activity, day by day.

Next week: John 15:13

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.

©2009 KIDS TALK™
25877 East Bright Avenue
Welches, OR 97067
503.622.6750
503.550.3143
maren@kidstalknews.com

Kids Talk is published in conjunction with Scribe Marketing