Author: captious
Favorite games at age 8.75
I haven’t blogged Chickpea’s favorite games for a while! I blogged about good word games back in December 2021 (two years ago!) and math games in April 2022. A lot has changed since then! When Chickpea started school at age 6.5 she suddenly had much less interest in games. I think perhaps she had enough intellectual stimulation at school and at home she needed more rest and alone time. But over the last couple of months she suddenly started regularly asking us to play games again. We still play many of our old games but here are some of the new games we’ve been enjoying lately.Read More »
Protected: What did Chickpea learn this year (at 8 years old)?
Protected: Does knowing German help or hurt when learning English spelling?
Anne Sullivan’s Educational Philosophy
Chickpea and I were reading about Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller‘s teacher, and in learning more about Anne we came across some lovely speeches / letters she wrote about her educational philosophy.
Why you shouldn’t tell your kids to “Be careful!”
I was walking down the street in Manhattan today and a stranger said to me “be careful!”
I was very confused. I had no idea what she was talking about. Was she worried about the bicycles hitting us? The strange man wandering in front of us, mumbling and shouting? Something else entirely? And what did she want me to do differently? I wonder if that‘s how little kids feel when their parents tell them to be careful?
There are a million posts online explaining in detail why it’s so problematic to tell our kids to be careful, and offering numerous alternatives. Here are just a few pages that came up when I searched for “what to say to kids instead of be careful”:
https://www.happiestbaby.com/blogs/toddler/be-careful-alternatives-toddlers
Protected: Is speed important when doing math? And is arithmetic even really math?
What time do kids get out of school in Germany?
German elementary kids traditionally got out of school around 12 or 1pm, then went home to have lunch with their families. As more mothers started working, after-school care started to be offered. More recently, some schools started moving from “half-day schools” or Freiwillige Ganztagschule (i.e., “optional all-day schools”, which are really just school plus after-school care) to Gebundene Ganztagschule (i.e., “required all-day schools”). At these all-day schools instead of kids ending school at 12:30pm and then going to optional after-school care until 3pm or 4:30pm, school just goes to 3:30 or 4:30pm for everyone. The details vary, but either there are more breaks from academic work during the day, or the mornings are spent similarly to in half-day schools and the afternoons are spent on non-academic subjects.
Between 2003 and 2009 Germany invested more than four billion(!) euros to create more all-day schools. (The main goal seems to have been to make it easier for mother’s to work. Additionally, German schoolchildren performed very poorly on some international comparisons, and teachers and politicians thought that they would do better if they were in school for more hours a day.) As a result of this large investment program, the proportion of all-day schools went from 16% in 2002 to 68% in 2016! (I don’t know what percentage of these schools are optional vs. required.)
Chickpea’s elementary is a Frewillige Ganztagschule. She currently gets out every day at 12:30pm, but starting next year (in third grade), she will stay until 1:15pm one day a week. (And actually, the year after she finishes elementary her school is changing to an all-day school.) Then we pay extra (but a tiny amount, something like 60 euros a month) for after-school care. We can pick her up from after-school care at 3pm or 4:45/5pm.
I was wondering how her schedule will change when she starts secondary school in fifth grade. The local Montessori secondary school is a required all-day school, as is the local international school, but I think most of our local Gymnasium are still half-day schools. The number of hours kids are in school seems to depend on the grade. But what’s typical?Read More »
Protected: Why do you want your child to do chores? Are chores important? What are your goals?
How to get your kids to participate in problem-solving conversations
I have struggled to have effective problem-solving conversations with my kid, and I know I’m not the only one. So I’m always interested in more resources on problem solving. I listened to a podcast episode yesterday (Gentle Parents Unite S07E07: “Setting Collaborative Limits” and “Supporting kids through Bullying”) on problem-solving conversations (the host calls it “setting collaborative limits”) that I found super helpful, so I thought I would share it here, along with one tip of my own.
The host gives 10 bits of advice about how to effectively problem solve with our kids. He explains each of them and gives concrete examples in the podcast episode:
Pretentious Mama 