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Title: Raising Lifelong Learners: A Parents' Guide by Lucy McCormick Calkins, Lydia Bellino ISBN: 0-7382-0024-7 Publisher: Perseus Book Group Pub. Date: September, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Wonderful approach to helping kids explore the world
Comment: Calkins makes the case for embracing a child's natural curiosity and encouraging their interests into definable disciplines. She spends a lot of time on how to approach writing. She gently points out that it is not initially a fine motor skill to be mastered but an avenue for the child to record his or her own stories and experiences. Her constant message is how to encourage rather than perfect the child's ability which is refreshing in a world of standardize testing. Through sharing of her own experiences she provides ideas on how to help further develop a child's natural inventiveness into lessons on reading, writing, science and math. This is not a hard line method to expose a child to everything available but rather an encouragement based approach to explore ideas with your child.
Rating: 5
Summary: Creating a Rich Learning Environment
Comment: _Raising Lifelong Learners: A Parent's Guide_ is full of practical suggestions, many of which are helpful to teachers as well as to parents. The book's principal author, Lucy Calkins, is a teacher educator, yet she considers the teaching of her two young sons to be her most important work. Calkins relates many vivid examples from her own experience.
Although Calkins discusses things parents can do to maximize school success, _Raising Lifelong Learners_ is not a book about helping children with their homework. Instead it tells how to make the home a rich learning environment, how to arouse children's curiosity in all academic areas. Calkins says, " . . . the qualities that matter most in science and math, reading and writing -- initiative, thoughtfulness, curiosity, resourcefulness, perseverance, and imagination -- are best nurtured through the everydayness of our shared lives at home."
Calkins believes in leading children very gradually along the path of learning in all academic areas. She says, "My rule of thumb is to help the child do today what she will be able to do tomorrow. I don't want my assistance to be too far beyond the child's independent abilities or she will be put in a dependent position, always waiting for and wanting assistance."
Calkins places heavy emphasis on both work and play. The latter provides an opportunity for children to develop imagination, resourcefulness, and language skills. Calkins believes that parents, not schools, have the primary responsibility for developing a work ethic in children. This is cultivated through hobbies and projects as well as through chores.
After Calkins discusses the nurturing of language arts, math, science, and social studies as children progress from infancy through middle school, Lydia Bellino, a reading specialist and school principal, addresses school issues in half a dozen appendices. Most of these, such as curricular choices and various assessment methods, can also apply to the homeschool situation.
Rating: 3
Summary: Some very practical suggestions...
Comment: I was attracted to this book by the title and based on the previous recommendations I read on Amazon.
You have to give credit to somebody who draws from their experience to help others. What I really like about this book is that the author urges parents to become a proactive force in their child's education and provides various suggestions for doing just that. This is particularly true when the author addresses reading. As I researched about reading skills, it became apparent to me that many pre-reading skills (such as understanding symbols, sequencing, left-to-right, etc) should be developed 1 or 2 years before reading begins. One of the simplet ways (there are others that should be considered also) to encourage and strengthen these skills is to read aloud to kids. Don't wait until they are in kindergarten or preschool, do it now, as soon as birth and perhaps even during pregnancy. LMC articulates and underscores this point very well. Of course if you are considering this book you probably are already doing just that.
Why the three stars? First, I think LMC missed a big red flag when she invalidated her sons feelings at one point about going to school. She writes something to the effect that she told her son "its not normal" to not like school or something to that effect. Having read Roger Schank's radical "coloring outside the lines" in parallel with this book, I think its the most normal thing in the world for children to complain about being bored in school while adapting to it. How is it normal for a child to sit at a desk and not speak out of turn all the while being expected to absorb concepts that are new and thus foreign and perhaps even uninteresting to them? Anyhow, maybe its just a difference in philosophy, since I lean towards, non-coerced, student-led educational philosophy. Nonetheless, I think LMC has the best of intentions with this book and provides excellent suggestions with respect to creating an environment of learning at home, which is the aim of the book.
The second reason for the three stars is that I think the book's effectiveness could have been enhanced had LMC summarized a reading list as an appendix. The suggestions for read-alouds are great, except you may have to jump back and forth throughout the book to find them or otherwise keep a pencil handy so you can write them down as you come across them.
Overall, a good book and perhaps should be done as homework before one becomes a parent or at least when one is considering how a child's environment encourages learing.
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Title: The Essential 55: An Award-Winning Educator's Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child by Ron Clark ISBN: 1401300014 Publisher: Hyperion Press Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning by Deborah Stipek Ph.D., Kathy Seal ISBN: 0805063951 Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: April, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Seven Times Smarter: 50 Activities, Games, and Projects to Develop the Seven Intelligences of Your Child by Laurel J. Schmidt ISBN: 0609805096 Publisher: Three Rivers Press Pub. Date: 23 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Read to Me: Raising Kids Who Love to Read by Bernice E. Cullinan ISBN: 043908721X Publisher: Scholastic Pub. Date: August, 2000 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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Title: The Read-Aloud Handbook (Read-Aloud Handbook, 5th Ed) by Jim Trelease ISBN: 0141001615 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: August, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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