A Collection of A Collection of Links

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

Creating a collection of resource links for the newly working from home with kids is helpful... creating a collection of those collections is meta-helpful.... It turns our my wife already made one as part of her job at a private school...

Here it is! 

Farm Tour Recommendation

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

Yesterday, we watched the Dutch Hollow Dairy Farm Tour. Our son loved it. It was prerecorded, so we couldn't ask questions. They answered questions in a way that was appropriate for his age and probably up to 6th grade or so. My wife grew up around dairy farmers, so she enjoyed a little taste of home.  This link has links to the Dutch Hollow farm tour as well as some for older kids.

Workbooks We Are Using

Fisher Price PreSchool Workbook Set. This is a nice set of books because it has numbers, letters, printing practice, and shapes.

The Never Bored Kid Book 4-5 is a nice book with activities like cut outs, matching, etc.

My First Lean to Write Workbook is similar to the others, with a little more direction on how to make shapes, lines, etc. There's a focus on pen control.

Our Covid19 Schedule

So lots of people are working from home and their kids are home from school. My wife and I are lucky because we both are able to work from home and trade off duties taking care of our 4 year old.

I thought our schedule would be helpful for other families as a model. YMMV.

7am Breakfast

8am Independent work like flash cards, practice writing, workbooks

9:30am Creative time like coloring, drawing, building toys (blocks, legos), crafts

11am Outdoor playtime. (So far we've mostly walked around the neighborhood)

12pm Lunch

1pm Rest time / Quiet Time / Possibly Nap

2pm More independent work

3:30pm Pick up / Chores appropriate for a 4 year old

4pm Free play, puzzles, reading to him, etc

5pm Dinner and normal nighttime routine

This is aspirational and subject to change. Any thoughts on what you're doing is welcome.

Enhancing Your Child's Memory (Lecture 10) updated

This lecture focus's on how humans remember things and then provides tips for parents to help teach kids these strategies.

1. If you practice using your working memory, you can enhance it. This is true for kids and adults.

2. At 4 or 5, you can work on mental rehearsal to improve memory.

3. At 8 or 9, you can teach children to use mental imagery to help with memory.

4. At 9 or 10, mnemonic strategies become helpful.

Interesting facts:
Neurons in the brain are interconnected. Most research is on primates and extrapolated to humans. All thoughts are based on patterns of activity on neurons, creating the physical structure of the brain. Toddlers create more synapses and connections than adults. At age 2, children can learn simple songs early.

Short term vs long term storage. We don't encode as much as people generally think we do. Our mind's eye only encodes what we focus on.

Processing things puts things into working memory. To remember for a long time, we need to move from working memory to long term memory.

Working memory expands until age 12.

The ability to remember digit sequences are predictors of success in school. Part of this is following directions and remembering them.

We are really bad at noticing changes in things, especially if we don't specifically focus on it.

One test for memory is the digit span task. ie How many digits can you remember?  A higher memory span is a predictor for school success. Some kids with low digit spans are diagnosed with ADHD.


How can you expand working memory?
There are computer games, similar to "Simon", that help kids with their memory. A simpler way of doing this is using a "matching" game like this one.  Another strategy is the progressive story game. (This is a game where each participant adds a phrase to what the last person said, until someone forgets a part of the story. "I went to China and...") Give a kid a sequence of instructions to get practice remembering.

How to improve long term memory?
Rehearsal - repeating information to yourself. Most children discover this at 7, but can be taught at 5 or 6. Kids tend to do it out loud. This is good for prolonging the memory of something. Can be used until you write it down or encode it long term.

The mind is good at remembering visual images. For adults converting something to a mental image is an effective strategy, like the mental image of a person's name. Consider the visualization strategy of connecting Mitten to Michigan because the state looks like a mitten.

Mnemonics to remember items. King Phillip Came Over for Good Soup. My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Now. This is part of a broader strategy of helping us expand the 7 chunks of information in our working memory.

Using visual imagery can be helpful. The book by Joshua Foer's "Moonwalking with Einstein" is a good read he recommends. I enjoyed "Prisoner of Trebekistan" on competing in Jeopardy.

IQ Hazards and Boosting Intelligence (Lecture 9)

My comments:
The lecturer is suspect of IQ students, as am I. My mom always said that it wasn't IQ but rather I DO. I think his tips are helpful dealing with the fact that IQ tests are here to stay and what you can do about it.

Recommendations:
Tip 1: Resist the temptation to have too much faith in the accuracy and importance of your IQ test.

Because IQ tests are here to stay, here are some tips to increase performance on IQ tests.
Tip 2: Get children blocks to play with. Lots of evidence points to blocks being correlated to high IQ scores. (Look for studies behind toys that claim to increase intelligence.)
Tip 3: Get kids daily exercise.
Tip 4: Learn to play a musical instrument.  (Some of the data may be correlation rather than causation. Others support the connection.)

And dealing with the stereotype effect.
Tip 5: Talk with children about intelligence as a changeable quality.
Tip 6: Praise children for effort instead of "smarts".  For great reading on this, read Carol Dweck's Mindset.

Other notes:
IQ generally has 100 is average. Every 15 points represents 1 standard deviation away from the mean. So if your IQ test shows 130, you are at 2 standard deviations above the average.

There are many variations of the test. Five are the most popular in the US.  IQ scores can vary widely by test (8 to 12 points).

As a parent, you want to know if and when your child is given an IQ test.

IQ tests can lead to the "stereotype" effect. The belief that you're good or bad at something can create that effect.

Current children taking older IQ tests tend to perform better than children at that time.

There was an interesting discussion of  Crystallized and Fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is intelligence with your current experience. Fluid intelligence has to do with the idea of your ability to confront new and novel problems.

The Joy of Reading and the Place of Phonics - Lecture 8

Scientific Secrets for Raising Kids Who Thrive

My comment: I agree with the lecturer on the importance of reading. I'm skeptical of his suggestion of transitioning to a "whole word" approach, especially if it happens too early. 

Our use of words is uniquely human and reading allows us to know people from different times and places. Reading is an "all access pass".

Tip 1. Read to your kids and let them hold the book as early as possible.

Tip 2. Start with phonics.

Tip 3. Move to a whole word approach. (?)

Tip 4. Get an alphabet book. (He like's Dr. Suess's.)


One study showed that pop up books are fun, but actually hamper learning.

Reading typically start reading between 5 and 7 years old.

Encourage children to be comfortable around books.

At some point, children will start learning words by context in the text of books.

Expert reading level starts around 11 or 12.

Some TV shows help children learn letters.  (Between the Lions on PBS.)

Phonics related songs and materials.

As adult readers, we start to recognize whole words that don't matter what order the letters are in, and we can decipher them. We fill in information with context.

Some issues in reading: dyslexia