Q and A: If my child is not flourishing in a traditional school, should we jump ship?

I was at ExpoMom last Saturday and bumped into an old friend. When we got to talk about what I do, she told me that her fourth grader who attends a traditional boys school is having a hard time — his grades were dropping, he wasn’t interested in the activities, etc.

Another friend texted me about the same situation with his 9-year-old daughter who studies in an exclusive girls school. She was bored and disinterested.

Because of this, they wanted to check out a progressive school for their children. Should they jump ship?

As a progressive school advocate, my automatic answer should have been, “Yes!” However, several factors need to be considered.

It is easy to think of jumping ship when there’s another ship to jump into. Years ago, parents did not have a choice but to go to traditional schools. If their children do not do well, then there’s the guidance counselor’s office or worse, they are tagged to be “slow” or “distracted” which then evolves to the tag “lazy.”

Going to a progressive school will not be the solution. It may only be part of it. The first step is find out what’s going on with your child.

The first factor to consider is age. When you check the ages of the children in my examples, they fall in that usually ignored gap called “Tween” or Between Childhood and Teenage years.  A study that I read showed that this age-range has the least amount of literature to read about. Mainly because, theorists don’t know what to do with them.

If you think about it, even when you enter the department stores, it’s also hard to buy clothes for them. Are they in the Children section or the Teens section? If you’re confused, imagine how confused they are!

This is the time when their hormones are about to rush into their brains, when they don’t understand what’s happening to their bodies and when they suddenly like the opposite sex but don’t know what to do about it. To use their language, they’re EMO (or emotional). Activities easily bore them. People easily bore them. And since they’re in school most of the time, school bores them. They want to get a rush from something they can’t put their finger on.

My suggestion is to give them an extra-curricular activity that they really like. My friend’s son was into origami and I suggested a class in the Nihongo Center.

Furthermore, if they’re in this age, it’s hard to transfer schools in the middle of elementary. So think about another factor before jumping ship..

Electronic Life. This is the stone in every teacher’s shoe. Believe me, teachers know when their students are too doped up with TV, PSP, Wii and all other abbreviations that need to be short because students can’t spell them anymore! How can school NOT be boring when the counterpart is playing computer games on a 4×6 console which has wifi capabilities and can be brought around anywhere?

How often is your child in front of an electronic gadget? It’s time to pull him out of cyberzone when the grades are slipping.

School Curriculum. What worried me when I was talking to my friend was when they had a school meeting, a lot of parents had the same problem with their children. There is strength in numbers. I suggested that they can meet with the school and inquire if there was any change in the curriculum. I strongly believe in voicing out your issues with the school because it cultivates a better parent-school relationship and it will definitely improve the school curriculum and services.I just pray that the school has open minds and hearts to listen and to realize that changes need to be made.

There’s nothing wrong in checking out progressive schools if you feel that your child is not happy in his present school. However, before doing that, check your child first. Talk to him. Then talk to the administrator of your present school. You may find out that the ship you’re in now just needs minor repairs.

After talking with your child and your child’s school, then you can check out progressive schools. Use this blog to ask questions. Then post your stories here. Talk to you soon!

5 Ways a School can handle a Calamity.. and L.A.R.O.!

It’s the calm after the storm. The Philippines has been ravaged by Storm Ondoy/Ketsana and Storm Pepeng/Parma. Statistics show that rainfall during the 2 storms even surpassed Hurrican Katrina. Over 500,000 people are affected and/or displaced from their homes.

How should Schools handle a Calamity like this?

1. Give. A school belongs to a community, to a country, and the world. Whatever happens around it, has a direct effect on the school, if not its students. After a tragedy like Ondoy strikes, a teaching moment rises to send an important point to the students.We encouraged all our families to bring in any relief goods they can bring.

2. Talk about it. During the meeting this morning, it was decided that Homeroom time for the Graders is Storm Talking time. Children sometimes hide their feelings during stressful moments. The teachers were tasked to encourage the children to either talk about or draw their experiences. After the activity, a lot of emotions and thought were unsurfaced from the students that even their parents weren’t expecting. Giving them a chance to air out their feelings, will make them cope faster and better.

3. Reach out to other schools. We are blessed that our school in the Quezon City area was not affected by the storm. However, a lot of public and private schools in the Marikina, Pasig and Cainta areas were either flooded, filled with mud or totally destroyed. Our local newspaper has reported that the storm damage on schools already reached 73 Million pesos. Also, reports are pouring in of students losing all their books and supplies to the flood.

Our school organized a relief effort called L.A.R.O. Laruan, Aklat at Regalo para sa mga batang nasalanta ni Ondoy (Toys, Books and Gifts for the children ravaged by Storm Ondoy/Ketsana). It started as an effort to give learning materials to child evacuees and has transformed to an effort to not only give children but also schools totally destroyed by the storm. If you’re interested to join, check out the Events Page in Facebook.

4. Prioritize. After a nationwide crisis like this, frilly events can be cancelled for more important ones. We decided to cancel our yearly Costume Day (or Halloween) to make way for a relief drive. Simpler is better in times like this.

5. Take care of your families. At the start of the storm, teachers reached out to their students by asking if they were directly affected by it. We were able to determine whose houses we can help in cleaning or whose notebooks and supplies we needed to replenish.

The most important thing that this calamity has proven is the resilience of the Filipino people. If your school was not a victim of the storm, be a blessing to the others who have bowed down to it destruction.

If your school needs help, contact  L.A.R.O. at info@nest.ph or at 0920-952-3825. You may bring your donations for the children and schools at 92 Matahimik St., Bgy. Malaya, Quezon City, Philippines. If you want to give through PayPal, please click the Donate button. Be a blessing!

The Pressures of going to Preschool

My youngest sister didn’t attend preschool. She was the youngest of 5 kids and my parents were, honestly, just too tired and old(er) to send her. So after 1 year (actually, I think it was only 1 semester) in the mandatory prep level, she entered the U.P. Integrated School for 1st grade. She totally enjoyed school because my parents just let her go through the everyday rigors of school without the pressure (as I said, they were too tired after 4 older kids!). We laughed through her funny mistakes in pronouncing words or when she would always fall from her chair because of being too playful at the dinner table.

Fast forward to her college graduation, she finished Magna Cum Laude in Business Administration at UP. She worked in prestigious marketing sectors. Now, she stopped worked to focus on another chapter of her life She’s getting married in December.

So you’re wondering why this story after a title like that?!

I just wanted to show you a glimpse of an unpressured preschooler, going on to live life with much enthusiasm and excellence even without the pounding of today’s pressure-cooker preschools. I got an e-mail from Child Care Exchange, which by the way, you should subscribe to, about Pressure-Cooker Kindergarten in the US. It may be based a thousand miles away, but America has its way of wheedling into our culture.

The article clearly admonishes the alarming pressure for children to be test-prepared rather educated. Or guidelines that truly are not developmentally appropriate to create a semblance of genius.

Take the example of a girl who was barely 5 when she entered Gerzon’s classroom. She didn’t know her ABCs, but one day in class she made up a song and taught it to the other children. But because of new requirements, “I had to send a letter to her parents saying that [she] is not proficient,” says Gerzon. “You tell me that [she] is not proficient in language skills!” The Concord resident, who usually exudes a gentle presence, bristles. “It’s destructive, even abusive. That’s a pretty strong word, but what do you call it when you take a group of children and you force them to do something that they are not developmentally ready to do? What do you call that? It’s abusive.”

David Elkind, author of The Hurried Child and The Power of Play, adds to the article with a statement that made me want to jump off my seat and give him a standing ovation..

When children are required to do academics too early, he says, they get the message that they are failures. “We are sending too many children to school to learn that they are dumb,” says Elkind, a professor emeritus at Tufts University. “They are not dumb. They are just not there developmentally.”

I can site a hundred similar stories. To read the whole article, click here.

Sometimes we fall in love with the Super Child that the world pictures rather than the Special Child that we already have. Much of it, I think, comes from the inner needs of parents to give their children what they didn’t get or Healing through Rearing.

Chill, parents! Learning is supposed to be fun. Don’t let the world and advertising tell you otherwise.

Protecting their hearts is more important than enlarging their brains. I’ve seen enough students with “undeveloped hearts and large brains” to say that the kids with huge hearts always finish first..

P.S. This is dedicated to my soon-t0-be-married sister Karla.. You have always been a loving sister and daughter.. Your being smart pales in comparison

Routines of the Progressive Preschool Class: Activity Time

Activity Time usually follows the first Circle Time. It is the climax of the temporal environment.

Activity Time is planned. When planning the class curriculum, the activities are planned as well. There should be varied types of activities. Activities should be mapped out to strengthen all the domains (and these are listed in no particular order of importance) :

• Physical – There should be activities to target Fine Motor Skills like painting, coloring, drawing, etc.

• Cognitive – The activities should strengthen the information that the teacher introduced so the children will understand and remember the concepts. Worksheets may fall in this domain.

• Language - The communication skills of the children can be improved in exposure trips like going to the Grocery where the children are encouraged to talk to the sales ladies to ask for what they need to buy. Activity Time is not limited inside the classroom!

• Socio-emotional – Activity Time can be small group time wherein the children accomplish the activity with a partner or group mates. This encourages friendship and cooperation. One of my favorite paired activity is where 2 students roll a can of milk lined with paper and contains golf balls dipped in paint. After rolling it towards each other several times, a nice painting comes out when you remove the paper lining.

• Creative – I love it when children are given a blank piece of paper to draw on. Their creativity is heightened and not restricted in coloring within the lines or a printed picture. I usually tell preschool teachers to avoid drawing stick figures to represent people because the children just copy this when their imagination can show much more!

Activity Time is flexible. I once planned a painting activity for my toddler class. I noticed that they were so engrossed in the manipulatives area, playing with wooden blocks. I extended their play in that area without fear that the blocks time was encroaching on my planned activity.

Also, there should always be a back-up activity. If the planned activity is “rejected” by the students, another activity can be done.

Activity Time is FUN! Not only is creativity of the students heightened, the creativity of the teachers increases as well. They have to think of not only appropriateness but also FUN-ness!

And the winner is..

Tanya! Congratulations on your new Moleskine Notebook!

Teaching children R-E-S-P-E-C-T .. and a contest!

I am again the guest of Sonshine Radio DZAR 1026 AM on Thursday, August 20, from 10-11 am. The topic is Teaching Children Respect. Can you help me out?

Cite an incident wherein you were able to teach your child or student how to respect

• possession (i.e. preschoolers grabbing each other things)
• territory (i.e. personal space, bullying)
• identity (i.e. appearance, SpEd needs, gender)
• authority (i.e. elders, teachers, parents, flag)

Submit your answer as a comment to this post. Don’t forget to put your name and e-mail address.

As a way to give back to the enormous response to this blog, I am giving a Moleskine Notebook to the lucky participant who will be drawn on the morning of August 20 and it will be announced on the air

I know there’s Online Live Streaming of the show. I’ll update this post once I find out the site.

Live Streaming for the show is at http://www.sonshinetvradyo.com/ or you can tune in DZAR 1026.

5 Reasons every Filipino child should be able to speak Filipino

I came across this article in Yahoo this morning that prompted me to write a new post after a month of managing the overwhelming response to this blog. Thanks to all the readers who have sent comments, e-mail messages and phone calls in support of this blog’s advocacy.

Last year, the school had a parent seminar about a hot topic — Dual Language. In the Philippines, it has become a problem of epic proportion that children DO NOT SPEAK the Filipino language well, if at all. For the purpose of this post, I only write about Tagalog (when in fact there are 200 dialects in the country that we can choose from!)

In my point of view, it is more of a parenting issue than anything else. In the country, speaking Tagalog is viewed as “baduy” or “inferior” by the middle- and upper-class. Parents would rather have their children speaking in English because they feel that their children would be more advanced in society. It’s really bragging rights, people. I’ve seen parents telling their children’s caregivers and teachers NOT to speak to their children in Tagalog. They have gone to the extreme in even questioning the celebration of Linggo ng Wika!

These parents (unless you’re one of them) do not know what their children are missing. Teacher Ani Almario of the Raya School, our speaker for last year’s event, discussed her study on Dual Language in children. Her study showed that children using the mother tongue and using 2 or more languages, had higher cognitive levels than their peers.

If you read Dina Ocampo’s study on the Mother Tongue Education, you will notice that she does not remove English in instruction all together but rather encourages that both languages be taught in the early years. What are we afraid of, parents? That our children will not succeed in life as well as their English-speaking counterparts? Promoting English as their main language now does not necessarily mean that they will be cognitively advanced.. they can just speak with a “twang” which boosts our ego as parents.

What are the effects of this parenting nuisance? I can name 5 ( but I’m sure there’s more)..

1. Children in this generation can hardly speak Filipino, much so READ it. I will bet my teaching profession that if we test middle- to upper- income elementary students in Filipino, they will fail. Why? Because they don’t speak it!

2. The recent death of former Corazon Aquino woke up dormant nationalism in our country. However, for parents, you may love the Philippines but you don’t love the country’s language. You may teach your children the value of nationalism but if you do not encourage the speaking of the national language then our value is half-baked. Practice what you preach!

3. If no one is reading in Filipino, how can our Filipino literature flourish? Our preschool students can easily listen to an English story but are having a hard time listening when an Adarna book is being read.

4. When you cannot listen in Filipino, most of what is happening around the child is not understood. I cannot stress this enough. CHILDREN WHO SPEAK IN ENGLISH AND FILIPINO, speak better and faster. I have seen preschool kids who learned how to speak earlier in their life because they can understand everything going on around them and they can respond to it.

5. Since progressive education is socio-culturally based, we progressive teachers would want to teach based on the culture that we belong to. We have a difficult time teaching Filipino and Sibika to students who do not care for the language. And if we want to avoid Filipino and Sibika all together then we should all enroll our children in international schools.

Why am I writing this post in English? Because admittedly, I will have a more difficult time writing it in Filipino.

And you have to admit that you will have a more difficult time reading it!!

To encourage you further.. how can your child be president if he/she can’t speak Filipino? Learn from Cory. She came from the upper class and was educated in Manila, the US and France. Yet, when she addresses the Filipino people, she speaks fluent Filipino. Can you say the same for yourself and your child?

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Children Full of Life

To make up for my absence, I’m posting this inspirational documentary about a 4th grade class in Japan. It focuses on their Notebook Letters where they can freely write about anything that they can share to the class. It moved me because I know that in Japan, schools are mostly very traditional however, this teacher was able to have activities that not only focus on the cognitive but at the socio-emotional as well..  Watch out for the reasons why I was gone for so long!

A break from your regularly featured programming..

I was invited to be a resource person by Sonshine Radio DZAR 1026 AM on the topic “How to choose the right television shows for children” on Tuesday, June 23 at 10-11 am. I was invited as a Family Life and Child Development Specialist, I guess. But I also wanted to invite the parents and teachers reading this blog because I’m sure it will give you more information on how to raise your children or students together with that big magic box in their homes. Hope you take a listen

Active Learning

I was browsing through Alfie Kohn’s article about Progressive Education and revisited the concept of Active Learning vs. Memorization. Read this conversation that he cited in his article. Check out the highlighted last paragraph.

“A friend of mine, who is a teacher-educator, had a daughter in fifth grade at the time of this story. She came home, he wrote me, with a worksheet on simple machines—ball bearings, inclined planes, pulleys, that sort of thing. As he came home from work, she said, “Dad, test me, test me!”

“Well,” my friend said, “Why don’t you just tell me what you’ve been learning about?”

“OK, but first ask me what these things are!”

“OK, if you insist. What is a ball bearing?”

“OK, easy dad! A ball bearing is blah blah blah.” A verbatim repetition of the definition she had learned from the teacher.

My friend said, “But Rachel, what is a ball bearing?”

“I told you, Dad. A ball bearing is a blah blah blah blah.”

To make a long story short, he continues, “I turned over the ottoman, which is on wheels, and showed her the ball bearings, and her eyes got wide.

“‘Cooool! That’s what a ball bearing is? How does it work? Can we take apart the ottoman? Oh, I get it. Why didn’t Mrs. Lambert just tell us this is what it was? Can you buy these at the store? Where do they sell these things anyway? Hey, wanna help me make something that rotates? Hey, cool, watch what happens if I hold one of these things and try to spin this thing. What would happen to this thing if the balls were really big? Would the wheels go faster?’”

A progressive school is not about memorizing the definition of ball bearings, or the date at which an event happened in history, or the difference between a simile and a metaphor. That’s not to say that these topics aren’t covered. It’s to say that questions that kids have drive the education.“