Educate the whole child with over one hundred activities that promote physical, cognitive, and emotional/social balance in children! This insightful resource helps educators, parents, and childcare providers discover how emotions affect learning and behavior, recognize the symptoms and sources of imbalance, and promote students' physical, mental, emotional, and social development. Students and teachers will learn more about the body-mind-heart connection, the importance of nutrition, and options for correcting and preventing imbalance with over one-hundred activities. Using the author's flexible guidelines, teachers can help children develop attributes such as kindness and courage, love and joy, and a sense of meaning and interconnectedness. Creating Balance in Children: Activities to Optimize Learning and Behavior takes the lessons learned from Creating Balance in Children’s Lives and transforms them into easy-to-use activities for use in the home and the classroom.

Formerly published by Peytral Publications Educators will discover how emotions affect learning and behavior, recognize the symptoms and sources of imbalance, and promote students' physical, mental, emotional, and social development.

Through the 1990s and into the present, concerns have increased regarding children's learning, behavior and health. In this book, educators, parents, and childcare providers will find options for addressing these concerns. The strategies presented will help balance and optimize children's physical, mental, emotional, and social development. Look inside to learn more about; the many aspects of balance; how the body, mind, and heart work together; how emotions affect learning and behavior; the importance of nutrition; meeting children's basic needs; how to recognize symptoms and sources of imbalance; options for preventing and correcting imbalances. Children are the world's most precious resources. A cooperative effort on the part of adults in behalf of all children is urgently needed to set the course for our future. This book can be a guide for this important process.

Explains sensory motor development and provides activities and games for use in the classroom and at home.

Solve toddler challenges with eight key mindshifts that will help you parent with clarity, calmness, and self-control. In Why is My Child in Charge?, Claire Lerner shows how making critical mindshifts—seeing children’s behaviors through a new lens —empowers parents to solve their most vexing childrearing challenges. Using real life stories, Lerner unpacks the individualized process she guides parents through to settle common challenges, such as throwing tantrums in public, delaying bedtime for hours, refusing to participate in family mealtimes, and resisting potty training. Lerner then provides readers with a roadmap for how to recognize the root cause of their child’s behavior and how to create and implement an action plan tailored to the unique needs of each child and family. Why is My Child in Charge? is like having a child development specialist in your home. It shows how parents can develop proven, practical strategies that translate into adaptable, happy kids and calm, connected, in-control parents.

The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents "how to do school" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristics. Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms is a critically important volume for all teachers and teachers-to-be, and for researchers and graduate students of language, culture, and education.

Concrete methods for enhancing young children’s growth and development! This user-friendly book, written for educators who work with 3- to7-year-olds, provides more than 350 strategies to promote success for beginning learners, especially those with special needs. The second edition contains current brain research about learning and behavior challenges, updated information on IDEA 2004, a glossary, resource listings of organizations, and reproducibles. The author provides teachers with developmentally appropriate practices to help children: Increase motor skills Develop emotionally and socially Acquire better communication, listening, and attention skills Work toward self-management of behaviors Develop preparatory reading, writing, and math skills