Wherever you go, it is the staff who make a school what it is.  And the staff at Riviera PlaySchool are all grounded in the same philosophy — that of non violent communication, and mindfulness.  You will notice that every interaction between child and adult has a consistent and tangible feeling of respect and compassion.  And when any conflict occurs, it is a true learning moment, and teachers are on hand to hold space for the children to resolve their own conflicts.  We try not to rush to a resolution of our adult creation.  Sometimes children can take a while to sort a conflict out to a place they deem to be “fair.”.  And we give them space to take the time to do that, while offering support, and helping them keep bodies and hearts safe.  We pay particular attention to where we are during the conflict.  We stay on the sidelines, energetically.  We don’t jump into the fray reactively.  If we notice our speech becoming more rapid, or our voice becoming louder, then that’s a signal to us to take a step back and let them have their own emotions about the conflict at hand.  It’s pretty tricky, and it keeps us more awake as people.  It is an incredibly magical thing to witness a couple of small children figure out a workable solution to their volatile dilemma…and then walk away laughing together, more emotionally and socially intelligent than before.

Riviera PlaySchool is mainly child-directed.  In other words, the teachers at PlaySchool meet the children where they are.  Not just physically, by getting down on the same level when we speak, but also energetically, by being in the moment, and celebrating in their successes, and joining them in the joy of creation.

In the tradition of Reggio Emilia and Bev Bos, we know that the environment is also a teacher.   So in the classroom (both outdoors and inside) we facilitate enriching environments within which the children can learn through freely allowed exploration.  And we know that the very best “toys” and “tools” for this exploration are the ones that are open-ended and undefined.

We like to make opportunities to allow for magic in our teaching by providing lots of parts of things for the children: tape, boxes, spools, pipe cleaners, twine, wire, glue-paint, glitter, scissors, tongue depressors, yarn, pom poms, cardboard tubes, corrugated cardboard, glue guns for attaching heavy parts (when building spaceships, for example) ribbon, string, fabric …

And we then let the kids lead us, and devise their own creations.  Parts allow us to create fantasies. Today we had a big box at PlaySchool. The children first painted it, then another group made it into a car, and then it became a clubhouse…. the play was emergent, organic, and fantastic.

Magic can happen in any environment if you have a few elements:

- freedom to explore

- power; permission to create

- space to create in

(I think this is also the definition of how invention happens!!)

We follow the most current practices in Early Childhood Education: we embrace and nurture the “Whole Child,” and allow each child to learn at his or her own pace.  We believe an environment that provides children with the elements listed above is best suited for every child.  Any person feels good in an environment that empowers them.

The children leaving our program understand more than just 1 + 1, they understand that 1 weighs less than 2.

Our graduates are honed for primary school:  they are well developed in all realms, cognitive, emotional, and social; they are able to resolve their own conflicts peacefully, are well-grounded, sure-footed, confident, understand themselves well, and are able to self-regulate, and have incredible critical thinking skills.

Most importantly, we believe that each person is born with at least one special, particular gift, and an environment that allows them to focus on what enthuses them is best suited to help those individual gifts emerge and become honed and developed.

As Plato said:   ”Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”

Riviera PlaySchool offers a humanistic, constructivist, and mindful program for the “whole child,” inspired by the best of Attachment Parenting, Reggio Emilia, and Non Violent (Compassionate) Communication.  We are also inspired by the fun and freedom to explore of Bev Bos, the beautiful and abundant nature of Waldorf, and Maria Montessori’s easily digestible, experiential approach to learning.

Come join us for a visit!

Linda Shannon

www.RivieraPlaySchool.com

I just have to say that “helicoptering”  is not only unnecessary, but it steals your child’s confidence….it damages their connection to their personal “inner compass”  (that thing that allows then to learn through pure observation)…and replaces it with a radar that tunes to us for their navigational information.  You see the dillemma, right?  If they defer to our lead and fail to develop their own inner guidance, then they will defer to someone else’s lead when they leave our nest.

We all know that our children are not reflections of us, but every once in a while we get tricked into that lie again! It sneaks in, and we spring into RE-action, rather than mindful response. That way of “reflective” thinking is a trap that often leads us to seek approval from the random parents around us. It can throw us into a tizzy of self-judgment: Oh my gosh my child is screaming (at me)! What is that father/store clerk/woman thinking about us/me?! Instead of, “Oh my gosh my child is screaming… what does my child need that I can give him?” The irony is that those parents who we are trying to please in that hot moment of crisis don’t actually matter to us as much as our own children do, nor are they even in line with our own core values!

That self-judgment is probably the most difficult thing to overcome in being parent. It seems we are never enough: we never do enough for our children, we don’t do it well enough, we don’t love them enough, we aren’t patient enough with them, we aren’t energetic enough for them, we aren’t sweet enough for them. That condemning JUDGE inside us tells us in so many ways how we simply aren’t enough for our children.  How do we quiet that voice once and for all?

Perhaps the most important thing about being a parent is to know that we are mentoring all of the time. As Joseph Chilton Pearce says, “We must be the person who we want our child to become.” So if we want our child to love themselves as they deserve to be loved, and to respect themselves with the respect they deserve, and to be OK with being “less than perfect,” then we have to offer that same regard to ourselves first. Ease up on yourself when you are less than “perfect.” (What is, IS perfect, because it IS!)

You have all of the answers your family needs. When in doubt, tune into your your inner compass. You are the guiding light of the house; “mother (father) knows best.” Your child chose you for the answers you have for her. Your child chose you for the parent you are right now — not some perfect parent you will become someday. So the great news is that you get to relax and trust yourself! You ARE enough!

Our children are here to teach us as much as we are here to provide guidance to them. Who else in your life has the ability to take you deep within yourself on a journey of self-discovery and re-ignite that fire within?

Parenting from balance is as simple as taking a step back, and responding to life. How refreshing and so much easier it is to relax into your own family groove, than to keep a stiff upper lip and stay in that grueling race with the Jones’es!

Parenting Workshop: Oh Siblings!

“I secretly believed that sibling rivalry was something that happened to
other people’s children.  Somewhere in my brain lay the smug thought that I
could outsmart the green-eyed monster by never doing any of the obvious
things that all the other parents did to make their kids jealous of each
other.  I’d never compare, never take sides, never play favorites.  If both
boys knew they were loved equally, there might be a little squabble now and
then, but what would they really have to fight about?

Whatever it was they found it.”

PARENTING SIBLINGS with MELODY ELDER M.A. Ed. of Awakened Heart Parenting

Tuesday, July 19th, 7pm-9pm

Feeling a little challenged (OK, FRUSTRATED) by sibling relationships?!  We
invite you to join Melody Elder, Parenting Support and Coach for a Parenting
Workshop focused on the following topics:

*       Introducing the new sibling
*       Relationship building between siblings
*       Sibling rivalry: what is the role of parents in children’s conflicts
*       Dealing with age and skill differences–younger child/older child
*       Parental expectations

For Additional Information, visit http://www.awakenedheartparenting.com
<http://knowinggarden.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=21157942244ebcd67b59
0c151&id=6f800a5d9b&e=8ee1cfa401>   The quote referenced above is from Faber
& Mazlish’s Siblings Without Rivalry.

This workshop is in cooperation with The Knowing Garden Elementary School:
THE KNOWING GARDEN is a community Elementary school for the children and
families of the Greater South Bay area. Slated to open this September, our
school supports the development of the whole child through constructivist
philosophy and the understanding that humans generate knowledge and meaning
from an interaction between their experiences and their ideas. We believe
that a project-rich curriculum anchored in academics, hands-on experience
and social plus emotional development will prepare our students to be
critical thinkers who become lifelong learners and active contributors to
the global community. With credentialed teachers, utilizing principles of
democratic education, low-ratios and developmentally appropriate guidelines,
our learning plans will be generated in partnership with each child. Our
students, from diverse backgrounds, become part of a greater community that
values respect, mindfulness, creative expression, confidence, risk-taking,
and concern for the Earth.  THE KNOWING GARDEN is a non-profit private
school with a public purpose.  www.knowinggarden.org
<http://knowinggarden.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=21157942244ebcd67b5
90c151&id=8c0283bab5&e=8ee1cfa401>

Date

Tuesday, July 19, 2011 from 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Location

Private Residence

Address will be confirmed upon registration

Torrance and Prospect Blvds.

Redondo Beach, CA 90503

~~~

Recommended by: Riviera PlaySchool pre kindergarten program in Redondo Beach, California

An organic, nature-ful, and mindful program for the whole child.

Riviera PlaySchool pre-kindergarten program in Redondo Beach, CA www.RivieraPlaySchool.com

“People are people no matter how small.” ~ Horton

Qualifications:

Teaching Credentials, AA or bachelor’s degree, earned ECE certificate or ECE units in progress, or experience.

You love being with and playing with children.

You love hiking, animals, art, music, and creating and building projects.

Plusses:

Experience working in a non-traditional, emergent, constructivist preschool environment, or

If you understand what Attachment Parenting is, or if you have experience with NVC (or even know what it is!), Reggio Emilia, Alfie Kohn, or Bev Bos, you may be a ringer for this position!

Teacher/Facilitator, Assistant Teacher/Facilitator, or substitute teacher/facilitator.

Up to 24 hours per week. We offer free training, and a fun and rewarding position in an incredibly peaceful environment full of nature and great energy — for the right person.

We offer a very competitive, generous Compensation depending upon experience and qualifications.

PLEASE DO NOT CALL.

Please send your resume to us at the email address below if you feel you are interested in and qualified for this position.

RivieraPlaySchool@gmail.com

My husband (my best buddy and also nemesis, at times) and I went out to see Shutter Island last fall.  Oh my gosh it was shocking.  I was not up for it.  But very well done.  If you love superbly fine actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ben Kingsley, and you crave the psychological thrill of Alfred Hitchcock, the cinematography of Stanley Kubric, and the drama of Martin Scorsese, then this is for you.

Ben Kingsley, always amazing, played a sinister-looking yet surprisingly humanitarian head psychologist in a cutting edge psychological institute for criminally insane people.

And this brings me to why I would be writing about a movie on this blog: I was surprised to find that his character was an advocate for something resembling non violent communication!  He said in one place in the movie (to paraphrase) ‘All these people need is someone to listen to them.  They just need to be heard.  And through being heard, they will hopefully arrive at a place of taking responsibility of their actions.  They will do away with the blame.  And thus they can live life fully, here, and in the now.  In the present.  In reality.’

And if you haven’t heard of non violent communication, then maybe you’ve heard of The Four Agreements.  It is basically just another way to express non violent communication.  There are many ways to describe that way of being in the world.

At Riviera PlaySchool, we have all of our teachers read “The Four Agreements” to read, and we let them know that this is how we want to operate within our community.  We also send them downtown (Los Angeles) to train with Ruth Beaglehole at the Echo Center (formerly the Center for Non Violent Education and Parenting.)

If we could all just try to come from that place, then the world would instantly shift to a much more peaceful and welcoming place to be.

Riviera PlaySchool is mainly is child-directed.  In other words, the teachers at PlaySchool meet the children where they are.  Not just physically, by getting down on the same level when we speak, but also energetically, by being in the moment, and celebrating in their successes, and joining them in the joy of creation.

The best “toys” for this are the ones that are open-ended and undefined.

We like to make opportunities to allow for magic in our teaching by providing lots of parts of things for the children: tape, boxes, spools, pipe cleaners, twine, wire, glue-paint, glitter, scissors, tongue depressors, yarn, pom poms, cardboard tubes, corrugated cardboard, glue guns for attaching heavy parts (when building spaceships, for example) ribbon, string, fabric …

And we then let the kids lead us, and devise their own creations.  Parts allow us to create fantasies. Today we had a big box at PlaySchool. The children first painted it, then another group made it into a car, and then it became a clubhouse…. the play was emergent, organic, and fantastic.

Magic can happen in any environment if you have a few elements:

- freedom to explore

- power; permission to create

- space to create in

(I think this is also the definition of how invention happens!!)

I think that an environment that provides children with these elements is best suited forevery child.  Any person feels good in an environment that empowers them.

The children leaving our program understand more than just 1 + 1, they understand that 1 weighs less than 2.  They are ready for first grade:  they are well developed in all realms, cognitive, emotional, and social.  Our graduates are able to resolve their own conflicts peacefully, are well-grounded, sure-footed, confident, understand themselves well, are able to self-regulate, and have incredible critical thinking skills.

Most importantly, we believe that each person is born with at least one special, particular gift, and an environment that allows them to focus on what enthuses them is best suited to help those individual gifts emerge and become honed and developed.  Like Plato said:  ”Do not train children to learning by force and harshness,but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”

Riviera PlaySchool in Redondo Beach offers a humanistic, constructivist, and mindful program for the “whole child,” inspired by the best of Attachment Parenting, Reggio Emilia, Montessori, Waldorf and Compassionate (Non Violent) Communication.  Call today for a visit.

Linda Shannon

Founding Director

Riviera PlaySchool

310-408-5616

When I was a child, we had a couple of special things in my house: so many kids around all the time that we always had enough people to play monopoly with, and the freedom to explore pretty much on our own.  There were 6 of us, 3 girls and 3 boys, each 2 years apart.  It was a lot for my parents to handle, and so they would often divide us up into 2 groups of 3: the big kids, and the little kids.  As a result, we each had 2 ordinal positions in the family.  Since I was child number 4, I became the oldest of the little kids, and with that title came a certain responsibility and trust.

My mother was always home and available for us, but never “in our space.”  She was very good at providing rich environments for our self-directed discovery, and yet she never crowded us.  She was great at providing interesting gadgets and materials from which we could create and build.  The Christmas that I turned 6 was monumental: our big gift for the holiday was building supplies!  Mom got us hammers, saws, Montessori-style rotary drills, a sack of nails, and a pile of wood.   We spent weeks just attaching one piece of wood to another, with no method or plan.  It was all process and no product; the fun was simply about hammering the nails into the wood.  Since it was winter, and we lived in Michigan, all of this hammering took place in the living room. Could you imagine allowing your 6 children to hammer and build in the living room of your house?  I couldn’t!  My mother was great in that way.  We all knew that our house was our house.  Once in a while we would go right through the wood and into the floor, but she didn’t get angry.  She showed us how to take the nail out using the claw, and then how to put a second piece of wood below to catch those errant nails.

We also had plenty of physical freedom.  Because we were from a tiny village in the countryside of southern Michigan, we had the freedom to move about on our own.  We knew everyone by name, and they knew us, too — at the very least they knew which family we belonged to : our eyes gave us away.  It was ultra safe for children, and when we had a plan, Mom let us travel downtown to fulfill it.  The appliance store down town, 3 blocks off in our 6-block square town, always had their deliveries on Thursdays.  We would go down right after school and check for a big box.  We loved boxes, the bigger the better.  Give us a refrigerator box and a steak knife, and we would be off in our own land of deep play for the week.

Sometimes on the way to the appliance store we would see Butch the policeman, or Mr. Brown, the butcher, who would paint our noses on the window as he created his new advertisement for the week in white paint.  Mr. Kirby, the shoe man, would say hello, and Mr. Bailey would always have a new birdcall to whistle at us as we passed by his drug store.  Finally we would reach Mr. Newman’s appliance store, and we would go in through the front door, us 3 grown up people, very much in charge of our own undertakings,  and we would march right back to his sales counter, where we would wait for our turn in line to ask whether we could have a box that day.  Not one of us could see above the counter, so Mr. Newman would lean over to accommodate our request. We were in luck!  It was Thursday, and a new shipment had just arrived that morning!

We would drag our treasure ship back home:  8 year old me commandeering at one front corner, 6 year old Wayne at the other, and 4 year old Judy pushing in back.  We would pull and push that box back home and right into our driveway.  We would then grab steak knives and crayons, and start working.  We would collaborate on window and door placement, and Wayne and I would start cutting with the knives, while little Judy colored and designed the sides with flowers and curtains and scrolling patterns.  Finally we were done, and we would begin our play — bringing over furniture from our other play house, and dolls and bears, and dishes from mom’s kitchen.  We would stretch a blanket on the floor and start with a picnic.

The three of us were constant companions, even though at times it was a little challenging to accommodate each one’s wishes.  Judy and I might be quite  interested in playing house or school, but Wayne would usually want to spice things up with something involving a battle, or a gun fight.  We would often accomplish this by creating a new role — Wayne would become the policeman, or the hunter, the mean principal, or the postman.

One box would last almost a week, and accommodate a motley variety of play.  Starting as a house, the structure would metamorphosize into a bus, and as the week progressed it would slowly transform into a fort that hosted a huge battle, and then a trampoline, and from there the structure would quickly deteriorate into a slide.  Finally someone would grab the paints and dump them out on the flattened cardboard, creating a sliding rink for our slithering bodies.

And all of this spontaneous change and cooperation would happen without the aid of an adult urging us to compromise.  We would come to our own resolutions, and everyone involved would be content with the result.    I remember arguing a lot with my brothers and sisters, but we were given the space and power to work things out on our own, and we usually did.  Through our play we learned how to compromise, and how to get along as a member of a group.  We also gained a lot of confidence in our ability to navigate the world on our own.

We had freedom in our community, too. On our block, none of the neighbors had fences, and all of the back yards came together in one unending play space.  Each yard was defined by whatever personal equipment and gardens each family had, but we were free to visit each other spontaneously, and often.  Talk about freedom!! After dinner, we were usually turned out and told to be home when the street lights came on.  We would usually run out to play hide and seek with all of the neighborhood children.  4 year olds would play together with 8, 9 and 12 year olds.  Many an argument and tussle occurred, but we worked it out among ourselves.  We didn’t want to go home and bring a parent into the argument for fear of being told to stay in.  When we couldn’t work it out, we sat on it, eventually bringing it up to Mom or big sister, but only well after the street lights came on, when there was no longer any danger of our evening play being cut short.

Though times have changes, and most of us can no longer can allow our children to play outside until the street lights come on,  we can still provide our children with freedom to explore and think and resolve on their own.  Even in the close confines of a living room parents today are still able to provide their children with the freedom to work things out on their own.  It just takes a little trust, and a willingness to take a step back, and allow our children to have their own experiences, rather than inadvertently forcing them to relive ours.  I like to think of it like this: I want my son to have his own relationship with my mother, rather than my relationship with my mother…so I consciously take a step back and give him the freedom to interact and create his own relationship, good, bad, and richly conflict-ridden as it may be.   I don’t want to take a thing from him.  The world is his oyster….

“People are people no matter how small.”
~ Horton

XOXO

Linda

September 27, 2009

By PAUL TOUGH

“Come on, Abigail.”

“No, wait!” Abigail said. “I’m not finished!” She was bent low over her clipboard, a stubby pencil in her hand, slowly scratching out the letters in the book’s title, one by one: T H E. . . .

“Abigail, we’re waiting!” Jocelyn said, staring forcefully at her classmate. Henry, sitting next to her, sighed dramatically.

“I’m going as fast as I can!” Abigail said, looking harried. She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and plowed ahead: V E R Y. . . .

The three children were seated at their classroom’s listening center, where their assignment was to leaf through a book together while listening on headphones to a CD with the voice of a teacher reading it aloud. The book in question was lying on the table in front of Jocelyn, and every few seconds, Abigail would jump up and lean over Jocelyn to peer at the cover, checking what came next in the title. Then she would dive back to the paper on her clipboard, and her pencil would carefully shape yet another letter: H U N. . . .

Henry fiddled with the CD player. Like Abigail and Jocelyn, he was a kindergarten student in Red Bank, a small town near the New Jersey shore. The students at the elementary school came mostly from working-class and low-income families, and, like the town itself, the student population was increasingly Hispanic. Jocelyn, with flowing dark hair, was the child of immigrants from Mexico; Henry was Hispanic with a spiky haircut; Abigail was white and blond.

“Abby!” Henry said. “Come on!” He and Jocelyn had long ago finished writing the title of the book on their lesson plans. They already had their headphones on. The only thing standing between them and the story was the pencil clutched in their classmate’s hand.

G R Y. . . .

“O.K., we’re starting,” Jocelyn announced. But they didn’t start. For all their impatience, they knew the rule of the listening center: You don’t start listening to the story until everyone is ready.

“Oh, man,” Henry said. He grabbed his face and lowered his head to the desk with a clunk.

C A T E R. . . .

“Let’s begin!” Jocelyn said.

“I’m almost done!” Abigail was hopping up and down now. “Don’t press it!” She bounced from foot to foot, still writing: P I L. . . .

“I’m pressing it!” Henry said. His finger hovered over the play button on the CD player . . . but it did not fall, not until Abigail etched out her last few letters and put on her headphones. Only then, finally, could the three of them turn the pages together and listen to “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”

When the CD finished, each child took a piece of paper and drew three pictures to illustrate what happened at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the book. Then they captioned each one, first drawing a series of horizontal lines under the pictures, one for each word, and then writing out each word, or an approximation thereof: For “butterfly,” Abigail wrote “btrfli.” Their language skills were pretty impressive for kindergarten students. But for the teachers and child psychologists running the program in which they were enrolled, those skills were considered secondary — not irrelevant, but not as important as the skills the children displayed before the story started, when all three were wrestling with themselves, fighting to overcome their impulses — in Abby’s case, the temptation to give up on writing out the whole title and just submit to the pleas of her friends; for Jocelyn and Henry, the urge to rip the pencil out of Abby’s hand and start the CD already.

Over the last few years, a new buzz phrase has emerged among scholars and scientists who study early-childhood development, a phrase that sounds more as if it belongs in the boardroom than the classroom: executive function. Originally a neuroscience term, it refers to the ability to think straight: to order your thoughts, to process information in a coherent way, to hold relevant details in your short-term memory, to avoid distractions and mental traps and focus on the task in front of you. And recently, cognitive psychologists have come to believe that executive function, and specifically the skill of self-regulation, might hold the answers to some of the most vexing questions in education today.

The ability of young children to control their emotional and cognitive impulses, it turns out, is a remarkably strong indicator of both short-term and long-term success, academic and otherwise. In some studies, self-regulation skills have been shown to predict academic achievement more reliably than I.Q. tests. The problem is that just as we’re coming to understand the importance of self-regulation skills, those skills appear to be in short supply among young American children. In one recent national survey, 46 percent of kindergarten teachers said that at least half the kids in their classes had problems following directions. In another study, Head Start teachers reported that more than a quarter of their students exhibited serious self-control-related negative behaviors, like kicking or threatening other students, at least once a week. Walter Gilliam, a professor at Yale’s child-study center, estimates that each year, across the country, more than 5,000 children are expelled from pre-K programs because teachers feel unable to control them.

There is a popular belief that executive-function skills are fixed early on, a function of genes and parenting, and that other than medication, there’s not much that teachers and professionals can do to affect children’s impulsive behavior. In fact, though, there is growing evidence that the opposite is true, that executive-function skills are relatively malleable — quite possibly more malleable than I.Q., which is notoriously hard to increase over a sustained period. In laboratory studies, research psychologists have found that with executive function, practice helps; when children or adults repeatedly perform basic exercises in cognitive self-regulation, they get better at it. But when researchers try to take those experiments out of the lab and into the classroom, their success rate is much lower. Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent the last seven years trying to find reliable, repeatable methods to improve self-control in children. When I spoke to her recently, she told me about a six-week-long experiment that she and some colleagues conducted in 2003 with 40 fifth-grade students at a school in Philadelphia.

“We did everything right,” she told me: led the kids through self-control exercises, helped them reorganize their lockers, gave them rewards for completing their homework. And at the end of the experiment, the students dutifully reported that they now had more self-control than when they started the program. But in fact, they did not: the children who had been through the intervention did no better on a variety of measures than a control group at the same school. “We looked at teacher ratings of self-control, we looked at homework completion, we looked at standardized achievement tests, we looked at G.P.A., we looked at whether they were late to class more,” Duckworth explained. “We got zero effect on everything.” Despite that failure, Duckworth says she is convinced that it is possible to boost executive function among children — she just thinks it will require a more complex and thoroughgoing program than the one that she and her colleagues employed. “It’s not impossible,” she concludes, “but it’s damn hard.”

Which is why Abigail, Henry and Jocelyn are potentially so important. They and their classmates are enrolled in Tools of the Mind, a relatively new program dedicated to improving the self-regulation abilities of young children, starting as early as age 3. Tools of the Mind is based on the teachings of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who died of tuberculosis in 1934, at age 38, and whose educational theories and methods were, until recently, little known in the United States. Over the past 15 years, Deborah Leong and Elena Bodrova, scholars of child development based in Denver, have turned Vygotsky’s philosophy into a full-time curriculum for prekindergarten and kindergarten students, complete with training manuals and coaches and professional-development classes for teachers. Tools of the Mind has grown steadily — though its expansion has sped up in the past few years — and it now is being used to teach 18,000 prekindergarten and kindergarten students in 12 states around the country. Leong and Bodrova say they believe they have found the answer to the problem that has bedeviled Duckworth and other psychologists for so long. Their program, they say, can reliably teach self-regulation skills to pretty much any child — poor or rich; typical achievers as well as many of those who are considered to have special needs. (They make the claim that many kids given diagnoses of A.D.H.D. would not need Ritalin if they were enrolled in Tools of the Mind.) And if Leong and Bodrova are right, those improved self-regulation skills will lead not only to fewer classroom meltdowns and expulsions in prekindergarten and kindergarten; they will also lead to better reading and math scores later on.

At the heart of the Tools of the Mind methodology is a simple but surprising idea: that the key to developing self-regulation is play, and lots of it. But not just any play. The necessary ingredient is what Leong and Bodrova call “mature dramatic play”: complex, extended make-believe scenarios, involving multiple children and lasting for hours, even days. If you want to succeed in school and in life, they say, you first need to do what Abigail and Jocelyn and Henry have done every school day for the past two years: spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea, doing the hard, serious work of playing pretend.

Over the last decade or so, the central debate in the field of early-childhood education has been between one group that favors what you might call a preacademic approach to prekindergarten and kindergarten and another group that contends that the point of school in those early years is not to prepare for academic study; it is to allow children to explore the world, learn social skills and have free, unconstrained fun. The preacademic camp began to dominate the debate in the late 1990s, drawing on some emerging research that showed that children’s abilities at the beginning of kindergarten were powerful predictors of later success. If a child reached his 5th birthday well behind his peers in measures of cognitive ability, this research showed, he would most likely never catch up. The good news in the research was that if you exposed struggling children to certain intensive reading and math interventions in prekindergarten and kindergarten, when their minds were still at their most pliable, you could significantly reduce or even eliminate that lag. And so the answer, to many scholars and policy makers, was clear: there was no time to waste in those early years on Play-Doh and fingerpainting, not when kids, and especially disadvantaged kids, could be making such rapid advances in the critical cognitive skills they needed.

More recently, though, a backlash has been growing against the preacademic approach among educators and child psychologists who argue that it misses the whole point of early-childhood education. “Kindergarten has ceased to be a garden of delight and has become a place of stress and distress,” warned a report released in March by a research group called the Alliance for Childhood, which is advised by some of the country’s most esteemed progressive-education scholars. There is now too much testing and too little free time, the report argues, and kids are being forced to try to read before they are ready. The solution, according to the report’s authors, is a return to ample doses of “unstructured play” in kindergarten. If kids are allowed to develop at their own paces, they will be happier and healthier and less stressed out. And there will still be plenty of time later on to learn how to read.

On the surface, Bodrova and Leong would seem to belong to the second camp. They say, after all, that play should have a central place in early-childhood classrooms. And they do find fault with the academic approach, arguing that in practice, many of the early-childhood academic initiatives that have been introduced in the No Child Left Behind era have failed to produce any significant improvement in academic skills. At the same time, they don’t agree that the solution is unstructured free play. The romantic idea that children are born with flowering imaginations and a natural instinct for make-believe is simply wrong, they say. Especially these days, they contend, when children spend more time in front of screens and less time in unsupervised play, kids need careful adult guidance and instruction before they are able to play in a productive way.

Bodrova and Leong began working together with early-childhood teachers in 1992, soon after Bodrova immigrated from Russia to be a visiting professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver, where Leong was a professor of child development. When they visited local classrooms, they were struck by how out of control things often seemed. It was a period when preschool and kindergarten teachers were taught to “follow the child’s lead,” to let children guide the learning process with their own interests and unfettered imaginations. In practice, Bodrova and Leong observed, classrooms were often chaotic free-for-alls.

Bodrova and Leong had both studied Vygotsky, and they discussed whether some of his methods might help improve the climate of these classrooms. For Vygotsky, the real purpose of early-childhood education was not to learn content, like the letters of the alphabet or the names of shapes and colors and animals. The point was to learn how to think. When children enter preschool, Vygotsky wrote, they are “slaves to their environment,” unable to control their reactions or direct their interests, responding to whatever shiny objects are put in front of them. Accordingly, the most important goal of prekindergarten is to teach children how to master their thoughts. And the best way for children to do that, Vygotsky believed, especially at this early age, is to employ various tools, tricks and habits that train the mind to work at a higher level. So Tools of the Mind students learn to use “private speech” — to talk to themselves as they do a difficult task (like, say, forming the letter W), to help themselves remember what step comes next (down, up, down, up). They use “mediators”: physical objects that remind them how to do a particular task, like CD-size cards, one with a pair of lips and one with an ear, that signify whose turn it is to read aloud in Buddy Reading and whose turn it is to listen. But more than anything, they use play.

Most of Vygotsky’s counterparts in the field of child psychology, including influential figures like Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori, held that imaginary play was an immature form of expression, a preliminary stage of development. But Vygotsky maintained that at 4 or 5, a child’s ability to play creatively with other children was in fact a better gauge of her future academic success than any other indicator, including her vocabulary, her counting skills or her knowledge of the alphabet. Dramatic play, he said, was the training ground where children learned to regulate themselves, to conquer their own unruly minds. In the United States, we often associate play with freedom, but to Vygotsky, dramatic play was actually the arena where children’s actions were most tightly restricted. When a young boy is acting out the role of a daddy making breakfast, he is limited by all the rules of daddy-ness. Some of those limitations come from his playmates: if he starts acting like a baby (or a policeman or a dinosaur) in the middle of making breakfast, the other children will be sure to steer him back to the eggs and bacon. But even beyond that explicit peer pressure, Vygotsky would say, the child is guided by the basic principles of play. Make-believe isn’t as stimulating and satisfying — it simply isn’t as much fun — if you don’t stick to your role. And when children follow the rules of make-believe and push one another to follow those rules, he said, they develop important habits of self-control.

Bodrova and Leong drew on research conducted by some of Vygotsky’s followers that showed that children acting out a dramatic scene can control their impulses much better than they can in nonplay situations. In one experiment, 4-year-old children were first asked to stand still for as long as they could. They typically did not make it past a minute. But when the kids played a make-believe game in which they were guards at a factory, they were able to stand at attention for more than four minutes. In another experiment, prekindergarten-age children were asked to memorize a list of unrelated words. Then they played “grocery store” and were asked to memorize a similar list of words — this time, though, as a shopping list. In the play situation, on average, the children were able to remember twice as many words. Bodrova and Leong say they see the same effect in Tools of the Mind classrooms: when their students spend more time on dramatic play, not only does their level of self-control improve, but so do their language skills.

In the past, when psychologists (or parents or teachers or priests) tried to improve children’s self-control, they used the principles of behaviorism, reinforcing good and bad behaviors with rewards and punishments. The message to kids was that terrible things would happen if they didn’t control their impulses, and the role of adults, whether parents or preschool teachers, was to train children by praising them for their positive self-control (“Look at how well Cindy is sitting!”) and criticizing them for their lapses. And in most American prekindergartens and kindergartens, behaviorism, in some form, is still the dominant method. But Bodrova and Leong say that those “external reinforcement systems” create “other-directed regulation” — good behavior done not from some internal sense of control but for the approval of others, to avoid punishment and win praise and treats. And that, they say, is a kind of regulation that is not particularly valuable or lasting. Children learn only how to be obedient, how to follow orders, not how to understand and regulate their own impulses. The ultimate goal of Tools of the Mind is not emotional or physical self-regulation; it is cognitive self-regulation — not the ability to avoid grabbing a toy from the kid next to you (though that’s an important first step), but the much more subtle ability to avoid falling for a deceptively attractive wrong answer on a test or to concentrate on an arduous mental task. And those abilities are more difficult to affect by other-directed regulation. Because the abilities are more abstract, they are less likely to be elicited by rewards. Kids are rarely able to organize their thoughts better in order to get an ice-cream cone.

As a result, many practices that most prekindergarten teachers consider essential are more or less banned from Tools of the Mind classrooms. There are no gold stars, no telling the class that they are all going to have to wait until Jimmy is quiet; even timeouts are discouraged. When there is a conflict — when, say, Billy grabs a toy from Jamal — the Tools of the Mind teacher’s first questions are supposed to be: What was it in the classroom that made it hard for Billy to control himself? And what mediators could help him do better next time? The teacher does remind Billy that there is a rule and he broke it, but she doesn’t make a big deal out of the incident. “We pretty much try not to use this whole concept of misbehavior,” Bodrova told me. “These kids are not born criminals. Even if they do something that is completely out of bounds, they do it because they can’t stop themselves.”

There are not yet firm experimental data that prove that Tools of the Mind works. But two early studies that began in the late 1990s in Denver showed some promising results: After a year in the program, students did significantly better than a similar group on basic measures of literacy ability. And more recent studies, including one overseen by Adele Diamond, a professor at the University of British Columbia who is one of the most prominent researchers in the field of cognitive self-control, have shown that Tools students consistently score higher on tests requiring executive function. Angela Duckworth told me that when she read Diamond’s report, which was published in Science in 2007, “I got very excited.” Her failed 2003 study had persuaded her that the usual approach to self-control in early-childhood education, a brief intervention here or there, wouldn’t work. But Tools of the Mind was clearly a different strategy. “It’s an immersion approach,” she said. “It’s not that these kids are pulled out and they do self-control for half an hour a day. Everything is about self-regulation, every single moment. Everything about the culture that the classroom creates reinforces that.”

It’s one of the reasons that visiting a Tools of the Mind classroom can cause moments of cognitive dissonance. While there’s a lot of dressing up and playing with blocks, plenty of messing around with sand tables and Legos and jigsaw puzzles, there are also a few activities that seem not just grown-up but protocorporate, borrowed directly from the modern office. Every morning, before embarking on the day’s make-believe play, each child takes a colored marker and a printed form called a play plan and draws or writes his declaration of intent for that day’s play: “I am going to drive the choo-choo train”; “I am going to make a sand castle”; “I am going to take the dollies to the beach.” At the beginning of prekindergarten, children are coached on dramatic play — called Make-Believe Play Practice — with the teacher leading the children, step by step, through the mechanics of pretending. (The training manual describes how a teacher might coach a child to feed a baby doll: “I’m pretending my baby is crying. Is yours? What should we say?”) In kindergarten, every student carries around a clipboard with the day’s activities on it — that’s what Abigail was writing on at the listening center — and each Friday, every child has a 5- or 10-minute “learning conference” with his teacher, a mini-performance review in which the children discuss what they accomplished in the last week, where they fell short and what skills they want to work on in the week to come. All of these practices, along with plenty of others that fill the day, are designed to reinforce habits of self-control.

This comprehensiveness creates an extra level of complication for researchers examining Tools of the Mind. There are now four separate large-scale long-term experimental studies under way across the country. But even if the researchers do find, in a few years, that the program has long-term effects on executive function and school performance, they still won’t know exactly which techniques in the Tools of the Mind package are the most useful, or whether they all need to be employed in concert in order to have an effect. Stephanie M. Carlson, a professor of child psychology at the University of Minnesota who studies executive function, told me she is impressed with what she has seen so far of Tools of the Mind. But, she pointed out, “it’s a really heavy-hitting approach, and there are a lot of different techniques used during the course of the day. What we don’t know is what the secret ingredient is.” It might be all the dramatic play, but it also might be the literacy practice, or the learning conferences, or something else entirely.

In the end, the most lasting effect of the Tools of the Mind studies may be to challenge some of our basic ideas about the boundary between work and play. Today, play is seen by most teachers and education scholars as a break from hard work or a reward for positive behaviors, not a place to work on cognitive skills. But in Tools of the Mind classrooms, that distinction disappears: work looks a lot like play, and play is treated more like work. When I asked Duckworth about this, she said it went to the heart of what was new and potentially important about the program. “We often think about play as relaxing and doing what you want to do,” she explained. “Maybe it’s an American thing: We work really hard, and then we go on vacation and have fun. But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete hedonism. What Tools does — and maybe what we all need to do — is to blur the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because something is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.”

Paul Tough is an editor of the magazine and the author of “Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America,” which is out in paperback this month.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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Riviera PlaySchool

As you prepare for kindergarten, I wanted to write a letter to you, my love, to document my hopes for you, my love for you, and my admiration of you.  

You are an amazing person, with unlimited gifts.

I hope you will live in a world of peace, nature, community, egalitarianism, and high ideals.

I want you to be fulfilled and happy, and value the importance of life’s simple pleasures.  This is where you will find true bliss. 

My hope for your life is that you will realize early the importance of wanting what you have.  And this should not preclude, if you are intrinsically inspired to do so, reaching for the stars.

I want you to be respectful of life, satisfied, passionate, and intrinsically motivated.  I want you to understand how to heal others, and the difference between being able to do so, and feeling compelled to do so in a co-dependent way. 

I am sure I am making mistakes.  And if you feel that I could have done better in some areas, and would like to discuss it with me, please do me that favor.  I am always willing to hear how I might be able to improve in my abilities to communicate with others and teach my values.  And also know that having children is an evolutionary process.  It can be an upward progression, if you seize the chance.  Each generation can progress as “people” a little more!  And that is where you have the opportunity and power to improve upon things with your own children.

When my emotions overcome my ability to handle them, and I don’t respond compassionately to you, (the way I intend always to) or even when I ‘lose it’ totally and yell at you,  I want to be compassionate and forgiving with myself, and resolve to do better next time.  Because you are always watching, and I am always mentoring, and I want you to be compassionate and forgiving with yourself when you make mistakes, rather than hold yourself up to some inhuman rigid standard that will only make you bitter, self-loathing, and self-reproaching. 

We will nurture you from a “whole child” approach.  To promote your cognitive development I will provide enriching environments with plenty of freedom for your to explore, and gentle guidance and scaffolding when necessary.  To promote your emotional development I will allow you to feel and exhibit the full range of your emotional expression, without judgment or coercion.  To promote your social development I will continue to  provide a group of peers that Bev Bos would call “family order,” with children aged below and above you in a range of about 2 years.  I will provide opportunities for you to interact socially without an adult “helicoptering” over you and orchestrating every exchange.  And I will provide opportunities for you to resolve your own conflicts, and gentle guidance when necessary to help you resolve them.

When the time comes, I will enroll you in a play-based developmental elementary school, like Riviera PlaySchool, that has a constructivist staff that is well-versed in what Marshall Rosenberg calls Non Violent Communication, what John Gottman calls “Emotion Coaching,” and what Don Miguel Ruiz calls “The Four Agreements.”  

To allow your personality to develop fully and unspoiled by my guidance, I will allow you to experience a wide variety of what life has to offer, with no regard for whether it is ‘appropriate’ to your particular sex, color, race, religion, or creed.  I will allow you to make choices about the activities your engage in, and how you engage in them.  I will also provide plenty of rich nature-ful experiences so you can learn about the beautiful and incredible natural world we live in.  I will provide a playgroup that is as diverse as Los Angeles, both economically and ethnically, and many opportunities to meet people you would normally not meet, so you can understand more cultural viewpoints than just our own.  I will provide you with a mother who is constantly seeking to question her own biases, and clear them, so you can have the experience of living with a parent who does not narrow your mind with her viewpoints.

I will promote your creative development by proving books, and reading daily, and by providing you with a variety of open-ended toys like building blocks and legos, and creative materials like cardboard boxes, tape, pipe cleaners, paint, fabric, glue, string, boxes and wooden parts so we can make the things you desire, and the things that spring up in your imagination. 

Your sex-role development will occur spontaneously through the influence of your family and the children in your school and peer group.  As much as possible, I will offer you a non-sexist environment to grow in, so you can choose your activities based on your desires, rather than your fear of being stigmatized.

Kian, when we first found out we were going to have you we were ecstatic.  We had already been married for 12 years, had lived in Japan together, traveled, and worked at our respective careers, so were more than ready to welcome you into our family. The year you finally decided to come to us we had settled into a new home on a hiking path, which made the neighborhood closer-knit: everyone walked on the path, and so everyone knew each other.  It was the perfect neighborhood to welcome children into. 

Your birth made us a family.  Your birth also completed a lifelong dream I had of becoming a mother.  From the moment I took you into my arms, it felt natural to be holding you, as though I had never NOT been holding you.  I knew you the moment I saw you, and I was finally complete.  And when I watched your father with you, I could see that he felt the same.

You just turned 6 this week, and in another 2 weeks you will start kindergarten.  It seems to be perfect timing for you.  We are grateful to have given you an extra year to play and develop without the stress of meeting academic pressures.  You are amazing.  We love your active fantasy life, and how you negotiate like a pro.  You are kind, and compassionate, and generous.  You are honest, passionate, funny, and have strong beliefs and values.  And you are a wordsmith, and constantly wow us with your brilliance.  At 2 years 10 months you asked me some questions that floored me: “What do scorpions think?” “Do ants sleep” “Do bees poop?” and “Where do my words come from?” Since then you have continued to unfold like an amazing exotic flower, filled with surprises and secrets that you reveal with your questions and thoughtful remarks.  

Just today you said to me “I believe anything is possible,”  and with that, I felt I had achieved the bulk of my intentions with you.

We love you more than anything in the world, and are so grateful that you chose us to be your parents.  I hope we do not let you down.

(And in rereading this letter, I realize that I could just as easily have written it to myself.  I love you!)

Lots of love,

Linda (Mommy)