Your Child’s Growing Mind: A Practical Guide to Brain Development and Learning from Birth to Adolescence
by Jane Healy
Author Jane Healy provides suggestions on how families can help their children analyze and solve problems, such as:
- Cooking - quantity, measuring, sequencing, following directions accurately, fractions, and testing hypotheses.
- Family games - numbers, visual organization, strategies, computation
- Shopping - compare prices, shapes, estimation
- Travel games - license plate bingo, keeping mileage records, computing gas mileage, map skills
- Measuring/weighing - diagram rooms in the house, mapping the yard and neighborhood, nonstandard measurement (How many daddy-shoe-lengths wide is the kitchen?)
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families by Stephen Covey
This book provides an array of suggestions families can use to effectively listen to one another, set and achieve goals, and solve day to day problems.
Thoughts to Inspire: Daily Messages for Young People by Edward P. Fiszer
Daily positive messages impact thoughts which in turn influence actions. An atmosphere emphasizing tenacity is possible through consistent discussions about the importance of never giving up. Brief, daily discussions of quotes or life stories of such successful figures as Thomas Edison and Walt Disney can combat the negative images seen through the media. This book contains passages which may be used as the basis for discussions about character traits.
Magic Trees of the Mind: How to Nurture Your Child’s Intelligence, Creativity, and Healthy Emotions by Marian Diamond
Reinforcing the fact that families impact how children think, brain researcher Marian Diamond states: “What’s at stake in early exposure to a rich language environment is clearly more than just a big vocabulary or articulateness or speed reading; it is the structuring of the brain’s entire cognitive mechanism and the levels at which the child, and later the adult, will interact with and understand the world.”
The following websites complement efforts to develop positive character traits:
Website of the national office of Character Counts www.charactercounts.org
International fables at www.wildgear.com/stories
Links to volunteer organizations www.americaspromise.org |
