By Sarah Vander Schaaff Friday is the first day of summer, officially, but around here, some of us have been out for weeks while others are still making up “snow” days. Still, we will continue our summer series on pertinent questions with one aimed at what do when the final school bell rings. What’s the best use of summer if your child has been diagnosed with a learning difference? For this we asked a member of the Mindprint Team with more than a decade of experience teaching at a school dedicated to students with learning differences. As you might expect, her top recommendation is school. “If that is not an option, consistent tutoring throughout the summer and academic summer camps… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff This summer, we’re going to focus on some specific questions parents might have about development and, well, life. Sometimes we’ll turn to some experts for advice, and sometimes we’ll turn to you—experts in your own right. We start with a question on many of our minds as the schedule of the school year gives way to free time: When do you let your child walk to a friend’s house alone? This is a variation on the “when do you let your child walk to school alone,” a question answered extremely well by Gavin de Becker, an expert on the predication and management of violence and author of Protecting the Gift. Mr. de Becker has a “Test… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Of course, Vince Vaughn and I are often thinking about the same things. This week, for example, I planned on writing about internships, and sure enough, he beat me to it with a new movie called The Internship. Perhaps he was also driving in his minivan when he heard a story on Marketplace back in March that put the power of the internship in context. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Marketplace surveyed employers and found that internships were the most important thing considered when “evaluating a recent college graduate.” The Marketplace website quotes Dan Berrett, a senior reporter at the Chronicle, saying candidates’ internships were “…more important than where they went to college, the major… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff To hear Dr. Brian Hare speak about the genius of dogs is quite something. In fact, just last week, when I was listening to my local NPR station, I heard a rebroadcast of an interview with him and was still fascinated. And it was this second-time around that I was able to visit Dr. Hare’s website: Dognition. If you think I’ve got too much free time, I should add that Dr. Hare is a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke’s Institute for Brain Sciences, got his Ph.D. from Harvard, and yes, I do have a puppy. My interest was both personal and Mindprint related. Consider this explanation of Dr. Hare’s cognitive approach to… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff This week, I’m sharing a blog I wrote a few years ago with a math teacher who has “seen it all.” And by that I mean, she’s seen what happens when the students she taught all year show up the following fall. Some have kept their skills sharp or even advanced them, and others, not so much. Many of her students, most of whom have learning differences, benefit from summer school. Others find integrating math into day-to-day activities is enough to maintain math skills. We hope you find her advice useful, and as with all things, frame it in the context of your own child’s needs. Questions for our Teacher on Summer Math: 1. Any thoughts you wish parents and students… Read More

Summer Reading: Why It Matters Thanks to a few tips from the National Summer Learning Association summer reading can be a bit less stressful and a lot more effective. If there is one tip I inferred from looking at their 2009 Research Brief, “How to Make Summer Reading Effective” it is this. If you want to increase your child’s reading comprehension, spend less time on quantity and more time on quality. The quality of the book (is it a right fit) and your discussions afterwards count most. While it’s true that low-income students lose two months in reading achievement over the summer, all students regress if they don’t read. According to the NSLA, students “typically score lower on standardized tests at the… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Tradition. My family does not have a lot of it, to be honest, so the events at school that fall under that category, are interesting to me. And if there was ever a season for traditions it seems spring is it. The only one I remember from my own elementary school days was track and field day, but it was big—and it was something I looked forward to, if only to see my principal play tug-of-war. My oldest daughter recently had a Maypole celebration. Her cohort of second-graders practiced for several days, learning to bow to their neighbors and then move, with a steady pace, in what became a weaving of the colorful ribbons draped from… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Sitting in the examining room during my eight-year-old daughter’s recent visit to the optometrist, I had a rare insight into how she sees the world. For the most part, it seemed, as I looked at the chart she viewed, “D’s” looked liked “O’s”. In fact, anytime a letter was difficult for her to see, she called it an “O”. I was proud of her poise, sitting in the big chair in the darkened room, with instruments set before her eyes, the doctor flipping the slats, asking again, and then again, for her to read a line of letters. And I was struck my how narrow my own understanding of her eyesight has been. As her mother,… Read More

By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff It was only four months ago that we, as a country, and as parents, were stopped cold, left to wonder how to make some sort of sense out of the events unfolding. While it is too early to know much about the bombings in Boston, we thought the best use of the blog this week was to provide links for parents that might be of use if and when they speak to their children about the tragedy. It was a Bedford, New Hampshire Patch site that lead us to the link on the Boston Children’s Hospital Pediatric Health Blog. There are some good points there, as well as links, including one at PBS KIDS, called,… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff The most troubling thing about the story in last week’s New York Times, “New Disney Characters Make it Big in TV’s Preschool Playground“, was not that Disney Jr.’s “Sofia the First” is leaving Nick Jr.’s “Dora the Explorer” in the ratings dust. That contest, between the down-to-earth explorer in a pair of shorts with a talking backpack, and a newly dubbed princess in a floor-length dress with a crown, is another blog post entirely. No, the troubling thing for parents might be the explanation Disney Jr. reportedly has for its successful new formula of preschool programming. According to The New York Times, Disney said, “its research indicated that mothers were less interested than they used to… Read More