Star Wars Day

Today is Star Wars Day. Don't get it? Say the date. Out loud. With a "the" between "May" and "4th". Add a "be with you on the end."

My boys, like many others, are Star Wars buffs. (In fact, my very first blog post was about light sabers.) We learned about the holiday by accident last year -- and celebrated by taking the kids to the park so they could have an epic light saber battle with other homeschooled kids. To the untrained eye, our children might have looked like a bunch of Star Wars crazed kids running amok through the woods in the middle of a school day. But our kids were learning, really and truly learning.

They were learning cooperation and leadership. Their imaginations were completely engaged. On the spot, they were crafting an enormously complex storyline, complete with characters and plot twists. They were also definitely getting their fill of physical activity. Running through the woods, swinging a light saber, is hard work!

If your son is a Star Wars fanatic, consider sprinkling some Star Wars themed learning into his day today. I posted a couple ideas on Twitter today. (Find me @jlwf) You can also:

• Head to the library and check out Star Wars books. There is something for every age and interest, from Easy Readers to chapter books. You can also find books about the weaponry, spaceships, special effects, etc.
• Watch the movies. Start with Epidsode 1: The Phantom Menace, or Episode 4: A New Hope, the original 1977 movie that will forever remain "the first Star Wars movie" in my head. The order doesn't matter. Spending time with your kids, digging into their passion, is what matters.
• Discuss/write about the systems of government in Star Wars. The Federation, the Senate...there's a lot of Social Studies and politics in Star Wars. Compare and contrast the various systems of government in the the Stars Wars universe with those in your own backyard.
• Study the science. Cloning is big in Star Wars. (Clone troopers, anyone?) Dig into the science behind the science-fiction. Talk to your kids about Dolly, the cloned sheep. (Watch a fun video here.) Ask their opinions about the ethics involved.
• Draw/paint scenes from the movie. One of the best things about Star Wars is that it's boy AND girl friendly. Boys typically prefer to draw action; they love weapons and spacecraft. Girls may prefer to focus on characters or costumes. (Remember, these are just generalizations. Some boys prefer costumes and some girls are all about the light sabers.)
• Let Yoda teach grammar. Yoda, Luke's tiny yet powerful Jedi Master, can teach your kids a thing or two about the English language. Think not, do you? Check out this Analysis of Yodish.
  

Do you have any other fun, Star Wars-related learning ideas? I'd love to hear them! What are you doing for Star Wars Day?

Boy Energy

I'll be speaking at the Wisconsin Parents Association conference in Oshkosh this weekend, reprising last year's Homeschooling Boys session. I'll also be presenting a new session, Boundless Energy: Understanding (and Respecting) Boys' Need for Movement.

Boys, as you well know, are built for action. Staying still is not their strong suit; jumping off couches is more their speed. But that nearly constant craving for activity can wear out even the most tolerant mom. My boys get away with a lot of stuff (see picture), but at some point, even I want to turn around and yell, "Stop!"

How do you cope with your sons' energy? Do you have any tips to help boys settle down and complete their assigned school work? Or do you eschew sit-down school work all together and plan innovative, active lessons? How do YOU help your boys learn? I'd love to share your comments, thoughts and ideas at my session this weekend.

Moms Should Get Paid

Out of nowhere the other night, my 8-year-old son looked up at me and said, "I think moms should get paid." You think moms should be get paid, I asked. How come?

Because, he said, moms make the babies, and babies, if you train them right, grow up into smart people and without smart people, there wouldn't be a world.

Can I just say that my heart melted in that minute? My 8-year-old son, the one who just minutes prior was watching American Idol and tormenting his brothers, GETS IT. My 8-year-old son intuitively understands the value of mothers.

We live in a culture that pays lip service to the importance of moms and motherhood. Everyone, from teachers to clergy to the average Joe on the street, seems to understand that what happens at home is far more important than what happens in school or elsewhere, but few people want to provide support to parents. And I'm not necessarily talking financial support (although it's clear that my son was). I'm talking support: Valuing and recognizing the family's contributions to society, advocating for and creating jobs that allow parents to contribute to the economy without neglecting their responsiblities to their children, structures that provide parents with the inspiration and tools they need to become good parents and supportive networks of people who will share the realities and burdens of parenting with those in the trenches.

That kind of support for parenting -- much less economic support -- is sadly lacking in many communities. Yet my 8-year-old hit the nail on the head: Good parents create good kids. Good kids make the world go 'round.

On some level, my kid even understood the economic value of a parent. Nuture a kid's brain and interests now, and later that kid may contribute something great to their society. William Kamkwamba brought power to his village.

That kind of economic contribution of parents is overlooked by our society, and more often that not, it's mothers that pay the price. As Ann Crittenden points out in her book, The Price of Motherhood, mothers are still far more likely than fathers to take time out of the workforce, to work part-time in order to care for their children, or to select lower-paying, no benefit jobs that allow them time to parent. As a result, women, in general, make far less money during their lifetimes -- and have far less retirement income.

My 8-year-old, in some small way, understands that it's wrong for mothers to suffer economically for their devotion to their children. I can only hope that others of his generation eventually come to the same realization and work together to create a society that truly values the contributions of the family.

"Teaching Too Much Can Stifle Exploration"

Have you seen the Boston Globe article about how babies learn?

The March 28 article, "A Squeeze, a Squeak, a Glimpse of Learning," provides fascinating insight into how young children learn -- and why, perhaps, our schools aren't as effective as they could be. In one interesting study, researchers handed preschoolers a complex cause-and-effect toy. Researchers showed half the kids how the device worked; the other kids were simply left to figure out the toy on their own. Guess which kids investigated the toy more thoroughly?

From the article:

Those who were explicitly taught how to make the toy squeak played with it for less time and discovered fewer functions than those who did not receive a tutorial. How children learned that the toy squeaked also affected their behavior. When the adult seemed to accidentally trigger the squeak instead of explicitly showing them how to use the toy, children explored more and discovered more aspects of the toy than when they received instructions.

The Globe says that, "teaching can...limit children's impulse to investigate and test their own ideas, and how something is taught to a child can affect his or her exploration." Is it any wonder that children who are force-fed knowledge for state-mandated tests show very little curiosity or true learning? By giving them the answers, we've taken away all the fun!

Children are, by nature, curious learners. From little on, they're constantly investigating the possibilities. They're driven, instinctively, to learn how the world works. So they invent experiments (What will happen if I mix my mashed potatoes into my milk?), observe the results and adjust their knowledge of the world accordingly. What kids need to learn is 1. Time, 2. Space, 3. Access to Materials and 4. Support. They also need Freedom to Explore, because once you've squashed a child's natural inquisitivenss, it's pretty hard to re-capture.

Interestingly, the time-space-access-support-freedom framework for learning is common -- but not exclusive to -- homeschoolers. Sandra Dodd, an unschooler, has frequently said that "strewing," leaving interesting things about, is an important part of her homeschooling. My homeschooling is much more along the lines of going interesting places/reading about interesting things/doing stuff with the boys than stuffing specific knowledge in their skulls. And the best schools seem to understand that allowing children to discover knowledge on their own is much more effective than rote learning. One thing I've been pleased to see at the schools my boys attend part-time: multi-sensory, project-based approaches to learning. My oldest son, for instance, learns language arts while also learning about civil rights. My second son's teacher will give students multiple options (act out a play, write summary, create a character) to demonstrate their learning.

What do you think of the time-space-access-support-freedom framework for learning?

I Feel Pretty

My 13- year-old son is wearing my prom dress, a pink, sparkly thing straight out of the 1990s.

For some reason, my Mom held onto that dress for 20+ years. It hung in her closet, unloved, in limbo, for all those years. I certainly never asked her to hold onto the dress; prom, in my memory, was a disappointing event that only drilled home that fact that I was not pretty or popular enough to snag a boyfriend. Maybe my Mom hoped that someday I'd see the dress with clearer eyes, that someday the dress would remind me of a young, happy time. Perhaps she simply couldn't bear to part with a dress that had cost her so much. (Prom dresses aren't cheap, you know.) Whatever her reasons, my son and I both agree that she didn't expect THIS to be the dress's next stop. In the words of my son: "I bet Grandma never thought I'd be wearing this dress!"

He's right, of course. I have four boys. None of us ever expected that dress to see action again. But he's a theatrical one, my 13-year-old. He's involved in music and dance and gamely agreed to play the part of Mama in a lip sync production of "Welcome to the '60s!" When he came home and told me he needed a pink, sparkly dress, I knew just the dress for him. We headed over to Grandma's, grabbed the dress and within minutes of returning home, my pink prom dress was swathed around my son's body.

It fit him. (Well, mostly.) My pink prom dress, the one I wore at age 16, fit my 13-year-old son. The pink satiny material hugs his sides and I look on with wonder. Was I that small as a teen? The dress, in fact, is a little tight on him and he asks how I managed to breathe. I try to picture myself in the dainty dress, the dress with a small, narrow waist which opens into a full skirt. I don't recall feeling dainty in the dress. I recall feeling ugly and out-of-place.

For 20+ years, I have recoiled at pictures of myself in the dress, have slammed shut the closet door every time I stumbled across the dress at Grandma's, because the dress served only as reminder of my physical unattractiveness. How could I have chosen such an ugly dress, I wondered?

But now that the dress is back in service -- draped over seat of my van, hanging from my kitchen cupboards, hugging the not-at-all fat body of my son -- I see that the dress is not ugly. It's actually quite pretty: a lacy skirt overlaying pink satin; a wide, pink sash at the waist; a bosom decorated with tiny irirdescent beads. And from this perspective, I'm willing to acknowledge that maybe I wasn't ugly then either. If I could fit into that dress at age 16 - and fill it out in ways that my 13-year-old will never be able to -- clearly, I wasn't as large or ugly or ox-y as I once thought. I look at the dress now and shake my head at the sadness of it all. For 20+ years, I thought my 16-year-old self was ugly. It took my 13-year-old son in a dress to show me my errors of perception.

Fellow writer Dara Chadwick, author of You'd Be So Pretty If..., argues that moms of boys need to be just as concerned about girls' body image issues as moms of daughters. "Healthy self-esteem and self-respect are the foundation for healthy relationships," Chadwick wrote on her Psychology Today blog. "When girls don't feel good about who they are or the bodies they live in, they somtimes act out in unhealthy ways...And they're often not alone in this acting out behavior: our sons are with them."

It's taken 20 years -- and my son in a dress -- for me to even realize that I had body image issues as a teen. My goal now, as a mother of boys, is to make sure my boys see the person behind the dress, not just the dress or the pretty figure.

Should You Fight Back?

Bullying has been in the news a lot lately. Despite parents' and teachers' efforts to the contrary, bullying continues to exist, just as it has for, well, millenia. And while almost everyone now agrees that bullying needs to be stopped, I'm not sure sure we've figured out how to do that.

Sure, we tell our kids to treat others with respect. We tell them to intervene, to stand up beside the bullied in a show of solidarity. We tell them to report incidents of bullying to teachers, daycare providers and other authority figures. But is that enough?

Like it or not, our boys live in a culture that requires them to take a stand. According to the Boy Code, status and dominance are prominant, and every boy I know talks about the need to let other boys know that they won't take any guff from anyone. I see it in my house all the time. Even at home, in a family environment of love and acceptance, my 13-year-old feels the need to stand up to the torments of his younger brothers. Why? In the words of my 13- year-old: "because they need to learn they can't get way with treating me like that."

I see where he's coming from. But on a daily basis, I have a hard time reconciling boys' need to stand up for themselves with my desire to teach them peaceful, non-violent ways of conflict resolution. Yet at some level, I wonder if telling boys to speak up, walk away and tell an adult is enough for boys.

In Australia, a school boy was recently suspended after physically standing up to a bully. I know that fighting violence with violence is rarely the way to go. And the video is disturbing. But I'm willing to bet the younger bully leaves this kid alone from now on.

What do you think? Do you ever think it's appropriate (or necessary) for bullied boys to "fight back?" How can we help our boys end bullying while respecting their need to prove their dominance among other boys?

The Boys Initiative

I have stumbled onto a treasure trove of information.

Today, in my inbox, I found a press release announcing the launch of The Boys Initiative, a "national campaign to address alarming negative trends in recent years pertaining to boys' educationl achievement and social adjustment."

As you know, I started this blog to address just those trends. My goal was -- and remains -- to share information about boys so that parents can make decisions from an informed perspective. I want concerned parents to know that they are not the only ones worrying over sons who lag behind in reading, whose behavior has been deemed unacceptable for the classroom and who wonder if the current academic environment might not have something to do with boys' troubles. I want parents to know the biological and developmental reality of boys. I want them to know about news and research studies that highlight the issues and concerns of today's boys, as well as some of the innovative programs that are helping boys across the country. I want to create a safe space where parents can share their concerns and draw strength from one another.

The Boys Initiative shares many of the same goals. Their website is FULL of useful resources. Need some facts or figures about boys' academic achievement? Need to know about boys' unique mental health concerns? Alternative educational options? Expert opinions and the latest research? It's all there.


Visit The Boys Initiative. Add your voice to the voices of others concerned for our sons. And always, continue to do your best at home. Parenting boys is a lot of work, but together, we can make a difference, one boy at a time.