As we head into the holiday season, if you are looking for ways to raise kids who are grateful for their blessings, check out our Books and Movies That Inspire Kids to be Grateful. This list of movies and books will inspire kids from toddlers to teens to be thankful well past Thanksgiving. From classic films such as A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and It's a Wonderful Life to new books such as Last Stop on Market Street, you'll find lots of reasons to be thankful for this list of winning kids' picks. And, if your older kids need more great book options, review our just released list of 10 Book Series for Parents and Teens to Binge-Read.
By Lisa Solomon, Common Sense Media
As we head into the holiday season, if you are looking for ways to raise kids who are grateful for their blessings, check out our Books and Movies That Inspire Kids to be Grateful. This list of movies and books will inspire kids from toddlers to teens to be thankful well past Thanksgiving. From classic films such as A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and It's a Wonderful Life to new books such as Last Stop on Market Street, you'll find lots of reasons to be thankful for this list of winning kids' picks. And, if your older kids need more great book options, review our just released list of 10 Book Series for Parents and Teens to Binge-Read.
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Jenny Anderson November 11, 2015 The “educational” apps we buy our kids are not very educational, two leading researchers have found. Authors Lisa Guernsey and Michael Levine spent five years researching the role of media and technology on children’s literacy. The result isTap Click and Read, a book that explains how to make the abundance of both work to advance real literacy and learning. The authors ask whether the “educational” apps that parents buy are actually educational. “Most apps fail miserably,” Levine tells Quartz. Levine, who founded the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a nonprofit that researches educational technologies for underserved children, said parents should look for three things when considering whether an app is educational: 1) Did experts who know something about literacy or child development help develop it? 2) Is there an intentionally-sequenced curriculum with real learning goals? 3) Has it been tested to do what it says it does? Their conclusions are stark: the most popular and successful literacy and language apps have virtually no input from literacy experts, limited input from child development experts, and are rarely are tested to see if their educational claims are real. Few have a sequenced curriculum (ideas that build on one another and actually help kids learn). Guernsey, director of the Learning Technologies Project in the Education Policy Program at New America, a think tank, and Levine put together a team to examine 184 apps that were “award-winning” or the most popular in the educational category of literacy and language apps for 0-8 year olds. The team looked at what the apps taught, measured against 23 skills from literature and curriculum guides such as vocabulary, story-telling/narrative sequence, reading comprehension. It also examined how the apps taught, coding samples from them against 21 strategies used to teach language and literacy (labelling, tracing, highlighting). The bottom line: beyond teaching ABCs, the apps were not very educational. Levine isn’t in the business of recommending apps, but here are four that didn’t fall woefully short, and one that is fun:
The authors offer parents this list of resources to help vet their kids’ apps. Of them, Levine recommends Common Sense Media’s “Best apps and Games” section, whose team of experts are led by an editor with a background in education and child development, and Children’s Tech Review, started in 1993 by by Warren Buckleitner, who started as an elementary school teachers and has a PhD in education psychology. Anne Marie Slaughter, who founded the New America Institute, introduced the authors at a recent event by telling the audience that if you are a parent, you are a teacher: “You are shaping their brains. You are determining what they can learn for the rest of their lives.” No pressure, parents. Source: http://qz.com/544963/how-to-tell-if-you-childs-educational-app-is-actually-educational/ Today's kids are immersed in media. More than ever before, tweens and teens are watching, reading, listening, creating, and communicating throughout their entire day. It's become harder to distinguish between screen time and just … time. The newly released Common Sense Census found that American teens average about nine hours of media per day and tweens about six per day. If you're wondering how this all affects your kid -- there's no one-size-fits-all answer. But what's clear is that parents, teachers, and supportive adults can help support kids in using media and tech in healthy, productive, and responsible ways. Here are some top tips for parents (and for more detailed information check out our New Guide to Managing Media for Tweens and Teens):
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