School Bell: Celebrate Struggles: But...

The last two Mondays I explained two reasons to celebrate the struggles of schoolwork, particularly in middle school years :

1- Students hit that wall they are in a time when the grades matter far less than later in school or life.  [April 23]

2- Students who struggle learn strategies for overcoming challenges.  [April 30]

Today... the "but." Yes, celebrate Struggles BUT:

Be your child's best learning coach.

If you are a parent who does NOT have to help their child with homework:
It is essential that you find ways to challenge your children intellectually during these growth years. It is healthy for a child, while still surrounded by supportive parents, to experience challenge, frustration, even the occasional panic.  Those are opportunities to teach them ways to respond that will help them respond to other challenges, frustrations and panicked moments long beyond their academic years.

If you are a parent who DOES  have to help their child with homework:

When you are about to pull your hair at one more flash card drill, one more Venn diagram, etc., hold onto the thought that you are helping them develop systems for dealing with learning that will be in their personal learning baskets for the rest of their lives.  BUT: Touch base with your child's teacher about exploring learning assessments if you feel your child may have underlying challenges to learning or may need extra interventions to succeed.

Everyone: 
Gather up all the tips, tricks, and strategies you can and pass them on to your children through your teaching and through your example.  If they don't need them now, they will someday.

Parents play a pivotal role in their children's attitudes toward school and learning, their awareness of learning, and their opportunities to learn and grow. Coach your child every day!

Image credit and thanks to: inclusiveeducationpdresources.ca

Caring Heart: Backsliding

I hope none of you are in the middle of this, but if you are I hope this helps.

Backsliding

Oh God, how can it be that whenever I just am beginning to feel like things are getter better and maybe, just maybe I am making headway with him, he just turns around and goes back to the old ways?  I have worked so hard, prayed so often, given so much.  Shouldn't it show results?  Shouldn't they last longer? Why can't what I am doing be enough to help him change?
Give me the energy to reach down and find somewhere within me another scrap of patience to hold onto, to work some more, pray some more, and give some more.  Help him to change.  Help me lead him to desire to change. Help me give him the tools that will enable him to change.   Help me enable him to see the differences, to feel the pride.  Through your will and your strength. And, despite the backsliding that brings such waves of discouragement, help me remember to celebrate the times that he DOES succeed, that he DOES change, DOES try... however short, to celebrate and honor those times.

Excerpted from "The Caring Heart Speaks: Meditations for foster, kinship, and adoptive parents" by Gail Underwood Parker   Artwork by Anna Parker David from the book cover.

Quick Takes: Super Moon Tonight

Don't forget to go outside tonight at moonrise with your kids and wonder at the moon. Make some memories... make an adventure of it!

Tonight is a once a year "Super Moon" when the moon comes closest to the earth. It will be 14% larger and 30% brighter according to scientists. This is particularly noticeable when the moon is near the horizon.

I've been told that it is an optical illusion that the moon seems so much larger when it is near the horizon than when it is full up and high in the sky.  My logical mind understands, but my eyes are still fooled!


For a video about tonight's Super Moon check out science.com You have to wait through a commercial first, but it has some beautiful photographs of previous super moons and explanation of super moons.



Images credit and thanks to: space.com, stefanoderosa.com, americandigest.org

Anything Can Happen: Super Moon & Moon Games

The local news ran a story about this weekend's "Super Moon" caused when the moon is closest to the earth.  It made me remember some amazing, creative photos that I had seen a long time ago by a French photographer.  It took me quite a while [and made this post a bit late] but with the help of today's internettechnology, I finally found them. Photos of stars, of eclipses, of new moons, harvest moons, and more.

I love when someone's creativity and skill creates something wonderful as in full of wonder. Here are just a few of Laurent Laveder's stunning efforts.  When you can, visit the website with several photo galleries of his work.  Bookmark it.  Go back and visit it again and again.  Show your children.  Celebrate the creativity and imagination on Anything Can Happen Day of someone who thought "What would happen if...." and created such images! Maybe you too can learn to play with the stars and, this weekend, with a Super Moon!

Maybe a game of catch




Or  hula hoop?


Or perhaps you can catch the moon and balance it on your finger...

Or move it around for a better view.


Be inspired!  Anything Can Happen! !


Image credit, thanks and awe to Laurent Laveder

Parenting Tips: A Prayer for Children

After talking in Soapbox this week about Dr Patch Adams' challenge in support of children I remembered this prayer by Mariah Wright Edelman.  It's not my usual style of post on a Parenting Tip Thursday... but it speaks volumes about raising children.  Edelman founded the Children's Defense Fund in 1973 and has been a supporter of children and children's rights ever since. 


I commend to all of you four of her writings in particular:
--The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours (1992)
--Guide My Feet: Meditations and Prayers on Loving and Working for Children (1995)
--I'm Your Child, God: Prayers for Children and Teenagers.
--I Can Make a Difference: A Treasury to Inspire Our Children,

Here is a small sample of her wonderful writing and thinking...

A Prayer for Our Children
             By Marian Wright Edelman

We pray for children
Who sneak popsicles before supper,
Who erase holes in math workbooks,
Who can never find their shoes.

And we pray for those
Who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire,
Who can't bound down the street in a new pair of sneakers,
Who never "counted potatoes,"
Who are born in places we wouldn't be caught dead,
Who never go to the circus,
Who live in an X-rated world.

We pray for children
Who bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions,
Who hug us in a hurry and forget their lunch money.

And we pray for those
Who never get dessert,
Who have no safe blanket to drag behind them,
Who watch their parents watch them die,
Who can't find any bread to steal,
Who don't have any rooms to clean up,
Whose pictures aren't on anybody's dresser,
Whose monsters are real.

We pray for children
Who spend all their allowance before Tuesday,
Who throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food,
Who like ghost stories,
Who shove dirty clothes under the bed and never rinse out the tub,
Who get visits from the tooth fairy,
Who don't like to be kissed in front of the carpool,
Who squirm in church or temple and scream in the phone,
Whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose smiles can make us cry.

And we pray for those
Whose nightmares come in the daytime,
Who will eat anything,
Who have never seen a dentist,
Who aren't spoiled by anybody,
Who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep,
Who live and move, but have no being.

We pray for children who want to be carried and for those who must,
For those we never give up on and for those who don't get a second chance.
For those we smother ... and for those who will grab the hand of anybody kind enough to offer it.

Soapbox: A Child in Need

This week's question from Dr. Patch Adams is an intriguing one for me and all foster parents.  It is:

2. Could you choose at least one child you're not related to and give them the time and care they need?

At this very moment there are approximately half a million children who are without a permanent family and home. They desperately need time and care and love. They also need stability. These are not starving children crammed together in cribs in some foreign orphanage.  These are children in our own country.  They are children of neglect. They are children who have been abused and traumatized.  They are children of desperation and hopelessness. And they are the future!

They are the children who are learning not to trust. They are learning that people who love you, hurt you or abandon you or fail to care for you. They are in your community, no matter where you live.  They are in your schools, and all too often, they are on your streets. I am deeply pained to admit that some of them are in the care of people whose job is to protect them but who may not be protecting them. [I believe that is a small minority unlike what the media would like to imply!] But most of them are just guarding themselves as they shift from place to place, from person to person, as their hope in the future gets more and more dim, more and more deeply buried. 

They are not just small ones either.  Some of these "children" who so desperately need someone to help them, someone to be there, someone to care, have passed the cuddly cute baby and toddler stage.  They are grown to the point that even they realize their chances for a family home are racing out of the hourglass faster than grains of sand. They are boys and girls at an age when biology and development make them struggle and fight for independence they are not prepared to sustain.

Patch Adams doesn't say foster care or adoption specifically. Although I believe that is the most crucial need, if you can't make that leap, don't be stopped. Maybe it is a child in a good, loving family who just needs a mentor, an outside champion?  How many children do you know?  In your church? In your neighborhood?  At the grocery store?  Do you show them you care about them?   How often do you speak to them?  Do they look forward to and receive a smile from you every time you see them? Start by learning their name. Make a conscious point to smile and meet their eyes.  It is a place to start.  

Image credits: seattletimes.nwsource.com, ericsblog.org, more4kids.info, newsinjuryboard.com

Focus on Fostering: Personal Game Pieces

If your house is like mine.. you have enough plastic medicine vials and caps to build a model of the Empire State Building or perhaps a full size replica of the local DHHS building! Here is one of my favorite ways to up-cycle the plastic caps!  I talked about this idea once before, but I keep getting requests to repeat it, so here goes....

Take the caps off old medicine vials. Take some extra school pictures or old snapshots of your kids.  Cut the face of each child in a circle matched to the size of the cap. Glue the picture to the cap.  Voila... personal playing pieces!

For games like Monopoly you will only need one picture playing piece for each child.  For games like Parcheesi, Sorry etc. you will need a set of playing pieces for each child. Use matching pictures or a mix of pictures of each child. 

No more arguing over who gets to be the top hat or thimble in Monopoly or to play red in Sorry. No problem remembering who is what color or what symbol. Kids love moving "themselves" around the game board.  Plus, for kids with attachment or self-esteem issues, the personalizing is a real plus.

And don't let the kids have all the fun...make them for the parents too!  For an extra kick make some for frequent playmates of your children. My kiddos' friends are always excited when they discover I have made a playing person just for them out of an old snapshot.  Try it!  Let me know how it works for you.

Image credits: moderngent.com