Inspired Teaching Moment

Re-posted from Exchange Everyday
October 12, 2012

One of the healthiest ways to gamble is with a spade and a package of garden seeds.
-Dan Bennett

Great moments in early childhood classrooms are seldom scripted in advance.  In her motivating new book, Heart-Centered Teaching, Nancy Rosenow captures one such moment from her own childhood:

"When I was in 'nursery school,' my teacher was an exceptionally warm and supportive person.  She would often read to us from Robert Louis Stevenson's classic book, A Child's Garden of Verses.  On most days she would stop reading after she'd come to a page about something in nature, and say: 'Let's go outside to have our own adventure.'  We had plenty of green space around our school, and I remember often searching under bushes and plants, looking for 'treasures.'  One day, to my horror, I found a dead baby bird under a leaf.  I remember being stunned and running to my teacher's side. Her response has stuck with me to this day.  She gently walked back with me, knelt down by the dead bird and put her arm around my shoulder.  'Yes,' she said to me, 'It's very sad to find a dead baby bird.  It hurts us when things die.'  Then she lifted me up to peer into a bird's nest above our heads.  There I saw a circle of tiny birds... all very much alive.  'We must never let the fear of death keep us from enjoying the wonders of life,' she told me.  I am grateful even now for the sensitive way she handled the situation.  She didn't deny my feelings, and yet at the same time she helped me learn to cope with them.  My ability to define myself as a 'realistic optimist' was strengthened early on because my teacher used a lesson from nature to teach me a lesson about life."

Screen Time in the Early Years

ExchangeEveryday - Repost
 
September 25, 2012

"Many kids use and understand media devices and platforms better than we do.  But their technological abilities are often ahead of their emotional maturity and judgment," advises James Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media, in Work & Family Life (September 2012; workandfamilylife.com).  Steyer shares research results the impact of screen time on preschool children:

• A landmark study at the University of Washington showed that for every hour per day that preschool boys spent watching violent TV shows, they had three times the risk of developing behavioral problems at age 7.  This was true even when they were watching cartoons on commercial channels, which often have more violence than adult shows.
  
• For each hour of TV young kids watch, they have a 10 percent higher chance of attention problems at age 7, including restlessness, trouble concentrating, and impulsive behavior.
  
• Visual images may over stimulate and rewire preschoolers' developing brains.  Learning to read and write takes time and patience. Kids who are used to the fast pace and instant gratification of screen media may easily get bored.
  
• More than two hours daily of screen time also increases the odds that kids will be overweight.  They are exposed to a barrage of ads for high-caloric, sugary foods — and when they are sitting in front of a screen, they are not running, jumping, and moving around.

ExchangeEveryDay - RePost on Nature

The Importance of Nature
September 19, 2012

The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely to be the one who dropped it.
-Lou Holtz

"A growing body of research attests to the importance of access to nature -- even if only a small patch of trees on marginal urban land -- for human health and well-being,"writes Louise Chawla in the Bernard van Leer publication, Living Conditions:  The Influence on Young Children's Health (www.bernardvanleer.org).  Some research findings cited by Chawla:

• Studies show links between access to nature and ability to sustain concentration, delay gratification and cope with stressors.
   
• Ethnographic observations of children's play show that games are more imaginative and creative in natural habitats.
   
• Play in nature has been found to promote physical agility and social confidence.
   
• Natural environments tend to encourage play that is gender-neutral or that brings boys and girls together.
   
• Natural play fosters a deep sense of connectedness to the larger universe of living things.

 

First Geothermally heated and cooled child care in Richmond

City unveils new $4.8-million geothermal system

Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie and other city officials tour the inside of a new district energy facility in West Cambie Thursday.

City of Richmond photo

By Staff Writer - Richmond Review
Published: September 07, 2012 7:00 AM
Updated: September 07, 2012 8:02 AM

City officials cut the ribbon Thursday on Richmond's first district energy utility, which will harness geothermal energy to heat and cool more than 500 homes in its first phase.
The new $4.8-million utility is powering apartments in the city's redeveloping West Cambie neighbourhood of Alexandra.
“Richmond is committed to being a sustainable community and that requires finding new ways to meet our energy needs, while also reducing our greenhouse gas emissions,” said Mayor Malcolm Brodie, in a news release.
The city owns and operates the Odlin Road facility, which is set to offer energy to three major new housing developments in the area.
The utility is already supplying the energy that will be needed to heat and cool the new Remy and Mayfair developments, which, when occupied, will include more than 500 new homes and a major new daycare.
Construction is expected to begin soon on the new Omega development, which will also be a client of the new utility. The utility is designed to be expanded as needed to service other clients in the neighbourhood.
The facility costs $80,000 to operate annually at full capacity. According to the city, this cost—along with the construction cost—will be recovered over time through user rates, making the utility self-financing.
This utility uses technology to extract heat from the ground through an underground network of vertical pipe loops and more than 350 wells. Water is pumped though this network where it's naturally heated by the earth. The water is then re-circulated into the utility, where pumps distribute it to heat exchangers inside the residential buildings.
At full capacity, the utility will avoid the production of 200 to 600 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the city.
Officials are now looking at developing more district energy utilities for redeveloping areas of City Centre. Such projects aim to make a dent in city council's goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 33 per cent by 2020, and by 80 per cent by 2050 from 2007 levels.

Art Auction 2012

After many delays and venue challenges the 2012 Art Auction is now confirmed for October 27th at the Signature Sandman Hotel on St.Edwards Drive in Richmond. We are excited about this new venue and the art projects are in full swing..... we are also planning a little surprise so make sure you bring your chequebooks or credit cards!!  

Tickets will be available next week at $15/ticket - only 200 available so get yours soon!

Some previous Art Auction Items:

Prediciting Obesity not just about food

The Atlantic Home

Brian Fung - Brian Fung is an associate editor at The Atlantic. He has written previously for Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, and Talking Points Memo.

Study: A Childhood Need for Immediate Gratification Predicts Adult Obesity

By Brian Fung

inShare2 Aug 17 2012, 7:43 AM ET 21 Mastering self-control at an early age correlates with decreased obesity as an adult.
YouTube
PROBLEM: In what has become known as "the marshmallow test" of delayed gratification, researchers in the 1960s developed a novel way to measure self-control among children. Having recruited preschoolers from a university daycare, scientists presented each child with one marshmallow. They were then told they could either eat the one they had or wait an unspecified amount of time and be rewarded with an additional marshmallow. Various follow-up studies on delayed gratification have been performed on the results since the project's conclusion. This particular study attempted to determine what correlation, if any, existed between the self-control of the children at age 4 and the rate of obesity among the now adult participants.

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METHODOLOGY: Researchers sent surveys to 306 participants in the original gratification study in two follow-up mailings. Of those, 164 responded with a report about their own height and weight. The average age of all respondents was 39. More than 94 percent had graduated from college or held advanced degrees. Slightly more than half of respondents were women.
RESULTS: According to the self reports (which should naturally be treated with some skepticism), researchers detected a correlation between a child's level of self-control 30 years ago and lower body-mass index among the respondents today. Women generally reported a lower BMI than men, but how long the children were able to hold off gratification had an even stronger link to weight than did sex. For every minute that a child postponed gratification, the researchers noticed a 0.2-point decrease in BMI among the grown participants.
CONCLUSION: Those who were most able to resist instant gratification as children had the best likelihood of maintaining a healthy weight as adults, even 30 years separated from their experience.
IMPLICATION: The dietary choices we make as adults have an acute impact on our waistlines, but our propensity for delayed gratification appears to stem at least in part from our character as youths.
SOURCE: The full study, "Preschoolers' Delay of Gratification Predicts Their Body Mass 30 Years Later," is published in the journal Pediatrics.

Unneeded Toys

I am reposting this article from Exchange Today......it's a hot topic in our centres right now as we become more and more convinced that we need less "stuff" less plastic, pre-determined toys and more real items and fewer of them so that children use their own imaginations.  What do you think?
 




"The United States has 3.1 percent of the world’s children, but buys 40 percent of all toys sold worldwide.  Obviously, American kids can’t possibly extract all the play-value out of that many toys, most of which end up piled somewhere."

This was the insight of Carlo Rotella in his Boston Globe article, "Clear the clutter; get rid of unneeded toys." shared with by World Forum team member Jean Dugan.  Rotella continued...

"That got me thinking about how drastically a family could cut back on its toys.  So, an exercise: You’re marooned indefinitely on a desert island with your kids, who are under 12.  You can bring five toys.  There are trees to climb, waves to swim in, so there’s no need for specialized sports equipment — and nothing that requires electricity, since there won’t be any.  What to bring?  I consulted with my in-house experts, who are 9 and 11, and we came up with the following:

1. A medium-size ball.  You can make up an infinite number of games to play with it, and it’s useful for all ages.
   
2. A board game.  We considered Monopoly, which would assuage our homesickness for city life, and chess, which would provide a perpetually escalating challenge as the kids grew older.  But we chose The Settlers of Catan, a cousin of Monopoly that goes beyond real estate into agriculture, herding, mining, and town-building, and features more trading and negotiation.
   
3. Legos.  Not one of those kits they sell now — the ones that come with assembly instructions for achieving a single preconceived outcome — but a freestyle assortment you can use to make whatever you want in the older spirit of the toy.
   
4. Playing cards.  You can play all sorts of games with cards, but my daughters are partial to poker.
   
5. A stuffed animal.  The girls insisted on bringing their number-one bears.  And the bears are versatile toys, providing comfort, sociability (they have their own personalities, which adds to the size of our island community), and opportunities for imaginative play....

"So, five toys for a desert island.  I don’t think that reducing to just these five would really cause much of a hardship.  And if it’s this easy to imagine cutting back on toys, why is it so hard in the real world?"