Enrichment Teaching Archives

8 Tips for Successful Museum Visits for Kids

November 29, 2013 Brad Hoffman

Museums are fantastic places for learning and exploring the world around us. Where else can you find a dinosaur soaring 100 feet and a starry night indoors? Often times, bringing young kids to museums can be daunting. Here are some tips to ensure successful museum visits for kids and their parents!

1. Seek Out Museums with Family Friendly Galleries

Many museums offer spaces especially designed for young children. The Discovery Room at the American Museum of Natural History and Family Labs at MOMA provide fun-filled, safe spaces for little one to explore the wonders of the museum. Some museums like the Cooper-Hewitt, Guggenheim, Noguchi Museum, and The Jewish Museum also offer drop-in art programming in the galleries on set days of the week so make sure to check the calendar in advance.

2. Attend a Family Program

Family programs are designed with kids in mind. These programs are offered during the week and on weekends. At the Museum at Eldridge Street, kids become preservation detectives and sleuth their way through history each Sunday. During Arty Facts at the Brooklyn Museum families make all sorts of exciting discoveries.

3. Don’t Try to See the Whole Museum

Avoid the temptation to see it all! Instead, pick one exhibit to explore. Check out what’s on view on museums’ websites to make a selection in advance. Leaving happily after an hour-long museum visit will make everyone want to come for another visit.

4. Plan the Practical

Make sure to research the museum’s stroller policy before your visit. Also find out about the location of entrances with ramps, restrooms equipped with changing tables, and places where snacks can be shared. Print maps in advance so that you know where to go upon arrival.

5. Pack an Activity Bag

Bring a sketchpad and colored pencils. Drawing and writing is a great way to engage with art. Encourage kids to draw that they see, write a story about the artwork or the people pictured. Some museums like the Met and MOMA also have exhibition activity guides online that you can print and bring along for extra fun.

6. Play

Games like “I Spy” are great to help young kids focus in on a work of art or exhibit. Take turns choosing an object, shape, or color in a gallery and describing it to other family members.

7. Get Curious

Look closely at a chosen work of art. Ask your kids questions such as, “What do you notice?” Deepen the conversation with follow-up questions like, “What do you see in the work that makes you say that?” Encourage kids to use their imagination and describe what it would be like to enter the work. What would you see, smell and hear?

8. Find the Free

Thanks to Target, many museums have a free day. On Sundays, visit the Studio Museum of Harlem, check this calendar to explore Wave Hill, on Thursdays head to The Museum of Chinese in America. Every Friday afternoon at 4pm MOMA is free and on the first Friday of the month you can play at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Museum and Super Sabado at El Museo del Barrio on the third Saturday are filled with family fun. Although there will be more crowds, you won’t have the pressure to spend the day. Stay as long as your little ones can handle and leave with a clear conscience and some good memories.

For guided museum visits and art instruction and enrichment, reach out to the Museum Specialists here at My Learning Springboard!

Written by: Editorial Team, My Learning Springboard, Inc.

What is the Montessori Method?

November 25, 2013 Brad Hoffman

Dr. Maria Montessori was an educational philosopher and innovator who helped pave an inspiring path for educators to follow. There is a common misconception that Montessori Schools allow children to roam free with no boundaries – this is far from the truth! There is freedom within structure of engaging, thoughtful and inspiring materials that allow children to learn at their own pace to become independent learners, whilst being observed and guided by the teacher. Through close observation, teachers are able to identify when a child is ready to acquire a new skill and the teacher can direct them to material, which will enable the child to build on new skills learnt.

Concepts of Montessori

One of Dr. Montessori’s key theories was about child development and the use of the senses to learn, grow and navigate the world, especially for the keen minds from birth to age six. This age time frame is extremely important, as it is the sensitive period where new information is absorbed at a rapid pace.

The key learning areas in the Montessori classroom are practical life, sensorial, math and language, as well as culture, geography, science and art (which may vary in different schools). The materials used in the learning areas stress the importance of gaining new skills through the senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, and movement.

A prepared environment is imperative to facilitate learning. These classrooms are welcoming spaces reflecting the child’s eye and responding to their interests and needs. A prepared environment is tidy, orderly, beautiful and calm, promoting an atmosphere where learning is engaging and – this fosters social and intellectual growth.

The age range in a Pre-K classroom is from age 3 to 6 years old, and children are organized into multiage groups. This is a wonderful benefit to children, as there are a range of materials targeted at different stages of acquiring new knowledge and information. This means your child will always have materials that are appropriate to their level as well as more challenging materials if they are ready to progress onto harder work. The younger children learn from the older students through observation. The peer-to-peer learning is enriching as it gives children the ability to further concrete skills learnt and builds confidence in their learning. The younger or newer students have a goal that they see and want to work towards and achieve.

The Montessori teacher is responsive to all children’s strengths, abilities and interests. This enables educators to respectfully enter while a child is working to inspire, demonstrate and facilitate learning. Intentional teaching is deliberate, purposeful and thoughtful. Observation and documentation allows the teacher to assess the child’s learning. This is an ongoing process and refers to gathering and analyzing information as evidence about what children know, can do and understand.

Presentations of materials are when the teacher sees that the child is ready to learn a new skill and is presented a new work. Presentation of materials or works can be done in large or small groups or individually. Once the child(ren) have been presented with the new work, they may choose the work as many times as they please.

Respect. Grace and courtesy. Peacefulness! What wonderful and important themes and ideas to be taught and modeled to children. Respect is shown through examples of how children should respect themselves, others and the environment. Manners, respectful vocabulary, and conflict resolution are just a few of the concepts covered to help children understand social structures and to grow into happy, peaceful and respectful humans of this world.

By Cara Zelas, Private Tutor

Child Speak: Guiding Conversation

October 28, 2013 Brad Hoffman

Children love to tell stories. They’re brimming with anecdotes from the adventures of their short lives. Sometimes, they may seem to us like random strands of thought. But we can build off these thoughts, prompting conversations that offer children opportunities for rich language development. While children often love to talk, we can’t assume that they understand how to talk or how to organize their thoughts. We can help them learn by considering some of the following:

Instead of asking questions that invoke a yes/no or “it was good” response, ask something that encourages further elaboration. Rather than “How was soccer?” say “Tell me about this afternoon’s soccer practice.” Then, ask follow-up questions. What else do they remember? How were they feeling? Describe what it looked like. If the child has not already offered this information, questions like these can help them understand the usefulness of descriptive detail.
Parents often say that when they ask their child “How was school?” they’re met with “It was fine.” By making it a habit of knowing the child’s daily school schedule (the teacher should be able to provide it), a parent can have talking points from which to ask more informed questions.
Help a child stay on topic as they talk. If they veer in another direction mid-story, as children sometimes do, bring them back with “Tell more about ____.” This doesn’t disregard their new idea; it can be revisited. But committing to finish a single line of thought establishes a clarity of communication that will have a lifelong benefit.
Anything can be a conversation starter. If you pass a fire truck on the street, ask “What do you know about fire trucks?” or “What do you want to know about fire trucks?” If they express a preference (“My favorite movie is ____” or “I like ____ Park” for example) ask “Why?” or “What is it you like about it?” Encourage answers in complete sentences.
When a child is telling a story, help them define the story as having a beginning, middle, and end. Having a narrative progression that makes sense is an important skill that does not come automatically.

Developing the ability to converse in deep, substantial ways will greatly benefit budding readers and writers. Being able to communicate clearly and succinctly in writing is something with school application and far beyond. And the more developed the language of the child, the greater the benefit for reading comprehension and fluency.

None of these suggestions has to take a lot of time, and each can be done anywhere, at any time. One of the first ways a child learns to communicate is through spoken language. We can strengthen that ability in ways that will reverberate through all of their future learning by thinking deeply about how we talk with children.

By Kevin Wood, Private Tutor

Economics and Fiction: An Unlikely Pair

September 9, 2013 Brad Hoffman

$Econ and Fiction$ It’s cliché but true: a great teacher can change your life. In college, I majored in economics, a discipline which attracts me because it provides a rigorous quantitative framework that can be applied to examine any type of social or political problem. But on a whim in my junior year of college, I switched out of a mathematical economics class and into a class about King Arthur, Robin Hood, and Joan of Arc. The professor had an excellent reputation, and I’d always loved reading. At the time, I felt that equations were valuable, but on their own, they didn’t always spark my interest.

Suddenly my worldview changed: reading assorted tales of medieval adventure, I realized that literature tackles many of the same problems I’d always assumed that I needed an economics degree to examine, and that the ways books investigate these problems is vivid and imaginative in a way not always permitted by the strict rules of economic analysis. The mechanisms used by the books I was reading – language and narrative structures – are more communicative, more descriptive, and more seductive than numbers; they animated the economic and political principles at stake.

My economics research focused on trends in contemporary U.S. income inequality. A thousand years ago, tales of Robin Hood examined similar disparities between rich and poor; tales of Arthur and his knights explored concepts of democracy and tinkered with the idea of placing political power in the hands of the populace. Deep in the midst of feudalism, progressive taxation and democracy were impossibilities in England, yet there they were, staring at me in attractively heroic form. I was—and still am—hooked.

Reading literature forces me to re-examine my analytical assumptions as an economist; economics grounds my study of literature. But I might not have figured that out if I hadn’t taken a chance and switched into a class very different from the ones offered in my major. Most people encourage you to streamline your interests and focus so that you become efficient at one thing. Efficiency is important, but it also pays off to resist this process of narrowing down. Being able to think in multiple ways will allow you to come up with creative solutions that you might miss otherwise. And of course, it’s also more fun.

By Elias Leight, Private Tutor

Lessons from Homeschooling

August 28, 2013 Brad Hoffman

With the start of the new school year fast approaching, parents and students alike are looking for fresh new strategies to make the coming year a successful one. Of course, we all want the conventional academic success of high grades and stellar test scores, but in framing goals for this new year, it’s equally important to focus on the less tangible forms of success that education can offer.

When I was home schooled between the ages of ten and fifteen, I had very little to aspire to in the way of concrete academic goals—no grades, no teacher comments, no classmates to compete with. There would be plenty of time for all that once I got to boarding school and college. What I did have, however, was the chance to explore other forms of academic and intellectual achievement, and as I would later realize, that exploration was essential to my success in secondary and higher education.

Home schooling isn’t right for every student, but it does offer perspectives that are undoubtedly useful for every learner and parent to keep in mind. Below, you’ll find three of the most useful lessons I picked up during my years of homeschooling, lessons which will undoubtedly serve you well no matter what form of education you (or your child) are engaged in.

Lesson 1: Manage Your Time

In a conventional school setting, students’ days and years are mapped out for them. Their schools tell them which classes to attend when, how much of a textbook to read on a given day, how many words to write in every essay. Often, students are given very little agency in their own educations, until the day in middle school or high school (or even college or later) when they’re suddenly swimming in work and unsure of how to begin making their way through it, having had so little previous practice in managing their own time.

Not so with home schooling. By the time I was eleven, I was making daily schedules for myself, allotting time for different subjects and figuring out, for example, how many pages I’d have to read each day if I wanted to finish a book over the course of a week. And what’s more, I was in charge of holding myself accountable. My parents might correct me if I strayed from the goals I’d set, but over time, my own desire to stay organized and educated became my primary motivation. Imagine my surprise when I left for boarding school at age fifteen, afraid that I’d be behind all the other students, and discovered that I was way ahead of the curve when it came to completing work thoroughly and on time. I still believe that plenty of practice managing my time at an early age gave me a substantial edge in college and in my professional life.

There are plenty of ways for a student in a conventional school to get the same kind of practice. Even before your child’s workload increases, it can be very helpful to encourage him or her to outline tasks and break them into smaller pieces. This is a great strategy for school projects, but it works equally well for any other activity your child is involved in. If she wants to get better at softball, help her organize a schedule for practicing based on a specific skill she wants to master. If he has a lines to memorize for a play, encourage him to figure out how long the task will take and set aside time accordingly. It doesn’t matter what the activity is; the idea is to help students get in the habit of being responsible for their own time and understanding how even difficult tasks become more manageable with smart, consistent scheduling. Then, when the time comes to juggle four AP classes and five extracurriculars, those students will already have gained the tools they need to thrive.

PBS Kids has some great resources for helping kids learn time management, as does familyeducation.com.

Lesson 2: Explore Your Passions

Home schooled kids still have to learn the same academic basics as any other students; I never loved math, but of course I still had to sit down and work through it on a regular basis. The thing about home schooling, though, is that its individual focus and efficient logistics (no commute to school or time spent waiting for the teacher to deal with the class troublemaker, for example) mean that there’s usually lots of time left over for students to do whatever it is they really love. And there’s always something; even kids who can’t presently identify a pressing passion will almost certainly find one (or ten) with enough space and resources. For me, this usually took the form of entire afternoons spent reading through everything I could find on a specific subject—horses, Scottish history, Cirque du Soleil, whatever. I learned and grew as a thinker through that abundant intellectual freedom, and when it came to the investigative skills and abstract thought required of me in later education, I was so glad of the space I had had to identify and pursue my own interests.

It may seem difficult given the endless pressures on today’s kids, but in between the demands of school, friends, and activities, giving students the chance to explore whatever they really care about will give them a huge leg up in their academic careers. Even if your child’s interests have no clear academic bent—maybe they’re into baking cupcakes or learning skateboard tricks—it’s still worthwhile to encourage them; they might never run a bakery or compete in the X Games, but they will learn how to gather information and apply themselves to challenging tasks, skills that are invaluable no matter where their lives take them. No absolute need for expensive lessons or instructors, either; often just some unstructured time, a library book, and a little encouragement will be plenty to help kids explore their interests and learn how to engage deeply with a complex topic.

Lesson 3: Own Your Education

When it came time for me to write my dreaded college application essay, I tried at first to write about anything but home schooling. I felt as though I’d spent my time in high school trying to shake home schooling as a label, and I wasn’t eager to let it define me in the eyes of colleges. What ensued was a series of perfectly fine essays that sounded nice but were ultimately impersonal; my teachers and advisors all commented that I seemed to be skirting around an important aspect of my personal history. Finally, I gave in, and wrote an essay about what home schooling had given me. When I received my admission letter from Brown University—now my alma mater—there was a handwritten note from an admissions officer at the bottom of the page saying how much they’d enjoyed my essay, and how confident it had made them that I was well suited for a Brown education. It seems obvious in retrospect, but what I almost refused to see at the time was that my home schooling wasn’t a meaningless quirk; it was an integral part of who I was as a student and a person. If I hadn’t come around to acknowledging that—if I hadn’t gotten over seeing it as boring and trite—then I might not have ended up at the college I did.

So often in the extensive college application process, students get tired of talking about whatever their “thing” is—science, or student leadership, or whatever it is that’s most shaped their experiences in school. Because they’re sick of discussing it, part of them feels like colleges will be too; who wants to read another essay about a kid who loves English class, after all? But if that love is truly essential to a student’s identity as a learner, then the resulting essay—if written with care and honesty—won’t be boring or cookie-cutter; it’ll be a genuine insight into how that student sees the world of education and his or her place within it. Compared to a less heartfelt essay about something ostensibly exciting (like, say, the things you learned that one time you went bungee jumping), a sincere emphasis on the aspects of your education that you really value will be more compelling every time. Whatever your academic experiences and enthusiasms are, own them; you’ll likely have a more enjoyable time throughout school, and be a stronger college applicant to boot.

With the above thoughts in mind, I hope you’ll find this school year ripe with opportunities for intellectual growth, both inside and outside the classroom.

By Hannah Sheldon-Dean, Private Tutor