Click here to download the New World Kids at School brochure.

MetroParent has a circulation of 85,000 and a readership of 225,000. The magazine is designed to function as a local parenting publication for families in southeastern Wisconsin, including the metro-Milwaukee area and Racine and Kenosha. Editorial material provides a comprehensive look at raising children, from infants to teens. www.metroparentmagazine.com

In addition to our thoughts about this -- honoring kids' individuality, making creative choices, giving childen ways to strenghten and work from their strong suits -- my co-author sent over this great page from METROPOLIS from IDEO. It's aimed at the school and the community more than the individual parent, but the points are strong, the sentiments right.

The reviews on various Mommy Blogs are coming in daily. Here's just a few of the recent notices. So far, every mom (or dad) who took the time to read has given the book high marks. Take a peek and then let us know what YOU think about New World Kids.

From An Island Review, a children's toy and book review wiki:

My Review (by Debra):
I learned so much while reading this guide, and it really had me thinking about how to develop creativity in my toddler. At this age it’s easy……she readily uses her imagination during playtime and I am constantly amazed at how she comes up with ideas.
The point the authors really drive home is that at some point, usually when kids are in school, “playing” stops being encouraged. Kids are often discouraged from thinking outside of the box.
What I love most about the book is practical, there are over 200 creative activities listed in different categories. Some even for adults, but most are for children. Some of my favorites were creating a secret code, fingerpainting with mud and earth, and building tin can stilts for a walk around the neighborhood.
The guide had me wanting even more lists of activities, but then I wouldn’t be using my own imagination and creativity to come up with ideas, would I? Hmmm.

Debra traded in high-powered suits and high-heeled shoes for a new role as mommy–crayon enthusiast, storyteller, and kisser of boo-boo’s. You’ll find her helping families at A Frugal Friend, where she teaches others how to reduce their expenses through coupons, rebates, freebies and deals.

Another:

This from Tales From the Mom Side

Parents always want the best for their kids. That means wanting them to grow up capable and ready to take the challenges that is in store for them in the future. With the trend our society is experiencing these days (highly capable cellular phones, high definition viewing, state of the art satellite dish, etc.), we see that the future will basically require kids to be armed with creativity to succeed. That is why it is pertinent, more than ever, to develop our kids' creativity. Parents who do so are ensured that their kids will be at the top their game when it is time for them (kids) to take up the reins of society.

New World Kids is an excellent way to help parents develop their kids' creative thinking. This book will guide parents in giving their kids the skill to be creative thinkers who will be an asset for and in the future.

From Washington, D.C. mom Dee

file:///Users/smonday/Desktop/Brimful%20Curiosities.webloc

And from Brimful Curiousities

One of the things I learned from my Odyssey of the Mind experiences is that creativity can be nurtured, even taught. A newly released book titled New World Kids: The Parents' Guide to Creative Thinking encourages parents to reach out to their children and help them exercise their active imaginations. The authors, Susan Marcus and Susie Monday, introduce parents to a new kind of alphabet--a sensory alphabet that consists of nine elements: line, shape, color, texture, sound, space, light, movement and rhythm. The book explores these elements in detail and offers activity suggestions for ways parents can incorporate them into daily life. Parents are also taught how to promote individuality by identifying their children's natural strengths.

The book made me stop and think about my daily interactions with my children. What am I doing to help foster their creative thinking skills? Sure, we engage in pretend play, build structures with blocks and those sorts of everyday activities. But do I regularly help build their imagination? Today we made cinnamon rolls. When the rolls are finished cooking I usually let my daughter choose whatever one she wants, but this time around I asked her why she picked out her roll. She briefly thought about the question and responded that she wanted one with just a little bit of cinnamon and she liked the pointy part in the middle of the one she chose. She took in the color, shape and texture of the rolls and used that information to make her decision. The book has been a kind of catalyst for me to enlarge our world. I'll caution that the book at times reads like a textbook, but the large number of color photographs add interest to the ideas presented and help clarify the topics discussed. I especially like all the activities and investigation suggestions. New World Kids takes playfulness to a new level and helps parents encourage their children to look, compare, contrast and collect impressions and observe the world around them.

Maria, from Maria's Space, is the latest mom to put New World Kids on her blog, and, we have another winning review. Here are a few excerpts:

Wow, this book should be a mandatory read for anyone who works with children. Since reading it, I notice that I am seeing things in a whole new way and I can only imagine how children who learn this way will be as adults.

For parents, this is the perfect guide book for you, I couldn't put it down and it is full of ideas to help you nurture a child's natural ability to see the world outside and especially inside the box.

I love the emphasis of this book which is to foster and instill creative thinking among children. We and our children were taught "critical thinking" associated with analyzing and weighing information. This is no longer enough. Traditional thinking skills are still important but we need to filter in media, creating, making connections, approaching a subject sideways or solving problems from the inside out.

My personal favorite part of the book, talks about the Sensory Alphabet. The Sensory Alphabet as described in the book is a sensory language (line, shape, color, texture, space, sound, light movement, and rhythm.

And our publicist at Phenix and Phenix has sent us word that another blog review will appear on June 9 on the review site The Mom Buzz in Riverview FL at http://themombuzz.com.

New World Kids is making it into some of the well-read "mommy blogs,' and San Diego based mom gave the book a rave review in her popular blog, Mama Sparkles.

New World Kids is chock-full of activities that we can do with our children to develop their creative growth. It also has wonderful photographs and illustrations. One of my favorite sections was the Sensory Alphabet. I loved reading and learning about each element: line, color, texture, movements, sounds, rhythms, space, light and shape. I felt I actually viewed the world differently and appreciated it more after reading this section. The whole book kept me interested the whole time I was reading it - in fact I pretty much read it all in one sitting because I just couldn't put it down.

We're planning on seeing a nice turnout on the web, with lots of copies out there being reviewed. We'd love to have your comments and reviews, too. You can add them on our Amazon page -- tell us what you think and join the conversation.

As promised, here's the introductory text and a few excerpts from our new teachers' guide to New World Kids. We hope this will inspire you to purchase both books, for yourself or a teacher in your life.  From Dr. Cynthia Herbert.

New World Kids is an educational approach based on decades of applied research with young
people of all ages, and supported by current brain research and cognitive studies. The approach is
compatible with the theory of multiple intelligences and the tenets of differentiated instruction.
Programs based on this approach are founded on specific beliefs and meet specific criteria:

• Learning should be learner-centered. In education, the development of individual potential
should be foremost, rather than the imposition of a body of knowledge. This emphasis will
also lead to deeper and more sustained learning across the curriculum.

• Creativity is "basic." Perhaps even more important than the three R's is the ability to create a
meaningful life and deal with an unknown future. Creative thinking is not just the domain of
an elite group, but can be developed and nurtured in all young people

• The Sensory Alphabet provides a powerful language for learning. Even in a digital age,
external information still comes into the human mind through the senses. This alphabet
provides a way to characterize both individual creative strengths as well as the forms that
result from creative thinking.

Our Teachers' Guide has arrived from the publishers to our warehouse. Ready for purchase and ready for shipping. The price is $19.95 plus shipping and sales tax as applicable (Texas residents only). Read on and then click on the Teachers Guide link at the top of the website to order for yourself, or a favorite teacher. (Just in time for end-of-school gift giving!)

Dr. Cynthia Herbert continues her cognitive autobiography, one shared in many aspects by the both of the authors of New World Kids.Learning About Learning Educational Foundation operated in San Antonio,Texas, first under the auspices of Trinity University and then as an independent research and development institute in between the early 1970s and late 1980s. After its closure, the founders and directors pursued independent careers in the arts, education and design.

For a six-year period, I co-directed LAL's Laboratory School, chosen as a national model in learning through the arts by the National Endowment and lauded by cognitive psychologist evaluators for its metacognitive, learner-appropriate approach. This opportunity allowed us to attempt to answer some of our questions about thinking and learning through working with K-10 students in an all-day, all-year school program. (The program, however, engendered more questions than it answered!) Visitors often remarked that the students must be "gifted and talented," when, in truth, we chose children from a wide-range of academic histories, as well as from different social/economic backgrounds

We were able to meet the restrictions placed on the program (Learning About Learning's research school): Students were released from local school districts and so had to show a year or greater advancement on standardized tests in order for the program to continue each year. We signed contracts with parents to provide tutoring, if, after leaving the Lab School and returning to public school, students fell behind their public school peers.

More importantly, to us, we were able to think about thinking—with students—across the curriculum. Teachers included individuals who had been with LAL, or the programs that preceded it, for ten years or more. Besides retaining most of the characteristics of the afterschool program at Baylor and Trinity, the Lab School added the following:

"Me" as a course of study.
School began, for all ages, with an investigation of one's own cognitive, social, emotional, and creative identity. Through routine reflective experiences, this course continued and was interwoven into other courses throughout the entire school year.

Expert thinking as a continuing theme.
Without knowing all the answers, we explored, with the students, connections and contrasts between one's own way of thinking and the way experts in various fields gave form to ideas and solved problems. We asked many, many questions. We invited botanists and other experts to school to help us understand new viewpoints. We traveled to settings in the community that would give us a better understanding—especially of thinking in social studies.

We put on the viewpoints, as we understood them, as one would put on a pair of glasses to provide a new way of looking at the world. For example in math, we asked questions (and tried out answers) about the following:

• What does a mathematician notice in the everyday world that someone else might miss?
• How do mathematicians like to play?
• What materials and symbol systems are useful to mathematicians? Why?
• What kinds of thinking habits or scripts—such as estimating or rounding—do they use routinely?
• Do mathematicians think differently than I do? Are there any branches of mathematics that I can relate to more easily?

Open-ended tasks.
Many experiences and problems given to students were the same for all students, but open-ended so that they allowed individual diversity to surface. For example in math, we might give the following task: "The answer is 2. What is the problem? Use math ideas you have been studying lately to help you create a problem. Represent the problem in pictures, words, numbers, and at least one other medium."

Group and individual special projects.

Other experiences and problems were tailored to the individual characteristics of a child's thinking. For example in math:

• D, who loved moving through space and lived near the School, was asked to find and characterize all the routes he could between school and home.

• R, who hated math, but thought like a surrealist artist, was asked to read Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and other writers who dealt with logic/illogic. Afterward she expressed her own understanding by writing and illustrating an original book containing pages like, "Do I wear my glasses...or do my glasses wear me?"

• C and K, who loved interpersonal intrigue and drama, were asked to determine how many "put-downs" occurred during the school day and then to plot the numbers across each hour. (They discovered put-downs usually "peak" right before lunch!)

Portfolios and presentations.
Teachers struggled daily to characterize each student's characteristic ways of thinking and learning and sought materials, people, and experiences that would allow them to most easily find ideas and give them form. Each student, alone and in groups, developed multimedia presentations to demonstrate their learning and kept portfolios of written and visual work. We brought in other minds to look at this work and help give helpful feedback to us and to our students.

The following is an abstract and proposal for a scholarly contribution to a journal -- one that hasn't been accepted (yet!). But it does provide background for those of you interested in the theoretical scope of New World Kids, as well as citations for some of the research that the book is based upon.

By Dr. Cynthia Herbert and Susan Marcus

Most young people now are “digital natives.” (Prensky, 2006) They’ve grown up in the presence and culture of technology and often exhibit far greater facility with its permutations and possibilities than their parents and teachers who, in this same vernacular, are “digital immigrants.” Although the youth have the edge in familiarity, their critical and creative thinking skills in digital media are open to question. And these skills are essential to true literacy. This situation of kids knowing more about the media than the adults is unprecedented. And at the same time, the imperative for education to change, to become more relevant to the needs of the 21st century, and to become more learner-centered has never been stronger.

Is there a way the current imperative for “digital literacy” can improve rather than perpetuate education’s problems? While the digital domains are busy growing and becoming ever more pervasive, brain research and other cognitive and educational studies have discovered keys to more efficient learning for the diverse brains of our young people (Bransford, Brown, Cocking, 2000).

More and more "learning about learning" and mega-analyses of best practices in education (Cole, 1995) now demonstrate what could and should be happening in instruction. But the institution of education has been slow to accommodate what has been learned about learning, much less to accommodate the recent research concerning the changes in students’ brain development brought about by "digital engagement,” including rapid changes in attention.

On another front, modern needs and changes in the workplace urgently call for other kinds of thinking and working skills to be taught. People today pursue careers different from their original education and change careers more than once. Business and industry crave graduates who possess creativity and flexibility…workers with the ability to innovate, solve problems, and continue learning (Robinson, 2001).

These are not the thinking skills that were chosen to be taught long ago when our curricula were created. So, the disconnects between young people, educators, learning and future needs are indeed vast and growing. Is it possible to build new “bridges” between theory and practice that can assist with these crucial issues? The digital revolution is pushing education to catch up or fall hopelessly behind. Many current technology plans devised by schools still focus on often un-needed computer literacy and acquisition of more hardware. Real and encompassing digital literacy, complete with the requisite thinking skills, is not part of the picture.

Not only that, technology as an instructional tool is too often based on an old model of the learner as a vessel to be filled with data. Education seems to persist in doing "business as usual"—folding outdated technology ideas into teaching practices that are less and less effective.

The opportunity is ripe for deepening relevant thinking skills for young people and for using technology as a lever to incorporate what has been learned about learning—and what is good for minds of all kinds—into the educational mainstream.

This paper will explore in depth

(1) what is know known about learning,

(2) what could and should be happening in schools based on this knowledge, and

(3) how technology is implicated in these changes.

Five themes will be addressed:

• Media impacts learning.

• Learning is unique.

• Learning is personal.

• Learning is a creative process.

• Metacognition enhances learning.

Media impacts learning.

Learning is enhanced when learners experience the same skills and concepts in a variety of different media (Olson, 1970). For example, students who retell a story by discussing and acting it out have significantly higher comprehension than others who simply discuss (Salz, Dixon, and Johnson, 1978). A new medium provides a new context, and both skills and knowledge are strengthened when they are practiced/experienced in a variety of contexts (Bransford and Johnson, 1972).

Digital natives already regularly engage in new contexts. But what are they learning? What thinking are they using? Schools still routinely rely on lecture, textbooks, and worksheets to teach and assess learning. Word processing, data bases, spreadsheets, programming, video production, digital photography, virtual worlds, internet research gaming, and publishing offer teachers and curriculum developers new tools for presentation and assessment. More importantly, diverse learners can use the new media to demonstrate what they have learned.

Learning is unique. Different people learn in different ways.

All normal children have varied strengths and skills in eight or more intelligences (Gardner, 1993). Brain studies of individuals with different heredities, environments and circumstances support the notion of uniqueness (Jensen, 1998; Sylwester, 1995; Caine and Caine, 1997). A "one size fits all" notion of curriculum and instruction is inaccurate and sure to stifle, rather than inspire, many learners. "Differentiated instruction" (Tomlinson, 2004) is a new term describing educational practices based on an appreciation of diverse ways of learning. Without having to provide individualized courses of studies, teachers can allow students to learn in their own best ways through a variety of strategies such as using open-ended problems and assignments, including WebQuests (March, 2006) and authoring tools like Pachyderm, PowerPoint and Keynote.

Learning is personal.

What a student feels about learning and the value of the educational experience is the best predictor of whether or not he/she will learn. To go beyond memorization, all learners must relate their own past experiences and current feelings and interests to the concept or skill to be learned. Brain research teaches that emotion and cognition cannot be separated. Current educational practice pays at least lip service to this idea by incorporating some "learner-centered" strategies into instruction, but the very best teachers understand how to use personal issues, humor, challenge and positive emotions to motivate more students and insure more long-lasting learning. However, few teachers know much about the real talents and concerns of their students—including their digital lives. Furthermore, education is enhanced when students feel they belong to a learning community. Students are already experiencing this belonging in chat rooms, through emails, wikis, IM- ming, and other digital communication forms. Could something as impersonal as technology be used by educators to personalize education? Learning is a creative process. Brain studies support the notion that "doing" is essential to learning. Learning creates individual schemas that represent diverse ideas such as "dog," "color," and "justice." Conceptual maps or other graphic organizers, help students show the content and organization of these schemas as well as put them "in their own words." Some learning is more like a script than a map. Students must construct scripts for everything from solving a multi-digit multiplication table to how to ask someone out on a date. Even metacognitive scripts concerning complex problem-solving and other mental activities can be developed and taught (Brown and DeLoache, 1978). Mental skills must be practiced and applied to achieve high levels of performance. Teachers need training to think about learning in this way and to develop instructional practices that reach their "digital natives" and other students.

Metacognition enhances learning.

Students cannot just ingest information—in order to make it their own, they must reflect upon it. One of the easiest strategies for this is the use of reflective journals, diaries, and sketchbooks. The digital equivalents of these are blogs, original websites, and audio or video journals. Other metacognitive skills, including self-monitoring, are enhanced when students routinely reflect on themselves as learners. Model educational programs (Farnham-Diggory, 1979) explore questions such as the following with students: How does my mind work best? What media, including digital media, most easily facilitate my development of ideas into forms and my design of solutions for problems? For the work I just finished, was it my best effort? What constitutes expertise in math or other areas of the curriculum? How can I help myself learn difficult subjects?

:: Overall Implications If we want our young people to be fluent and flexible thinkers, schools (and parents) must re-think the priorities of the current curricula that fill up kids' days. Teachers need training in thinking about thinking and learning. They need experiences in new kinds of media to express thinking and learning. They need a vocabulary for talking about thinking and learning. Digital media can be a great partner in this enterprise, providing new models of expertise as well as platforms for the open-ended creative process and products of the diverse learners in every classroom. Moreover, it can be an essential ingredient in converting the “incidental learnings” brought to school into powerful and intended results.

About the Authors: Dr. Cynthia Herbert and Susan Marcus

Herbert and Marcus were co-founders of the Learning About Learning Educational Foundation, a nationally recognized organization in Texas whose research focused on individuality, creativity, media and play. The LAL Lab School, funded by the NEA, was acknowledged as a national model for learning through the arts. Together they have also co-authored books and other products.

Herbert has over 30 years experience helping educators improve programs for diverse learners, K-12, both statewide and internationally. A developmental psychologist, she is former director of the Texas Alliance for Education and the Arts, at that time, the Texas member of the Kennedy Alliance for Arts in Education Network. Current projects include development of an evaluation design for the Houston school district's "Art Education Matters" project and assessment of the new web portal of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, "Teaching Through Art."

Marcus is principal partner of Foundry/Media, based in Austin and New York, and has 25 years experience as a researcher, educator and designer/writer. While at LAL she produced "Imagination Works," a line of interactive products for the retail market as well as interactive programs and exhibitions for kids, parents and educators. She is currently producing a suite of products and exhibitions for parents and young children. Translating applied research into accessible and entertaining media remains an important focus.