Further Reading:

• Parents Need Someone To Talk To
• Counseling Help For Parents
• What Does Successful Parenting Look Like?
• “Parenting For Success”

Ask a Counselor

ScottCounseling.com was created to serve you and provide solutions for your everyday problems.  ScottCounseling has trained, licensed, professional counselors available to assist you with options that will successfully bring about a solution for your counseling need.  ScottCounseling has help hundreds of individuals with questions about:

Children and Teens  Anxiety  Marriage  Depression  ADD/ADHD  Academic and Schools

College Planning  Mental Health  Gifted Children  Child Development  Drugs and Chemical Use

Addictions  Bullies  Discipling Children  Parenting Questions  Step Parenting

and more!!

Try ScottCounseling today!!

Click on Ask a Counselor and start feeling better about your life today!

Further Reading:

• Counseling Help For Parents
• Do I Need Counseling?
• “101 Top Child Development & Parenting Articles” eBook
• Readers’ Questions
• When To See A Counselor, Doctor or Psychologist

Fun Learning

Visit the museum.

Most locations have a museum or other low-admission attraction that would make a nice day-trip. Not only is it something you don’t do every day, but it’s fun and educational, too.
Community Service

The local retirement home and hospital often like when children come in to help serve lunch, or read to the patients. Places like “Feed My Starving Children” provide great volunteer and learning opportunities to serve others. Kids can also have fun volunteering at an animal shelter. These shelters always need help making getting the dogs out for some exercise!

Create and Write A Picture Book

With construction paper and some crayons, your children can become authors and illustrators. If old enough, let them write their own stories and illustrate them (either by drawing pictures or cutting photos out of old magazines) or for younger children, you can write down their story as they dictate it to you.
Board Games

Create a board game. Spend some time creating your own board game with cardboard, crayons and other objects- then play it! The real fun is the creation of the game itself, but you can play and save the game for future playtime as well.

Lemonade Stand

Create a business! Teach them how to figure out their profits by subtracting the cost of their materials and supplies and how many cups of lemonade they sell.

Make a Movie/Play

If you have a video camera, let the kids write, direct, act, and record their own movies. If you don’t have one and can’t borrow one, you can do the same thing but have a live performance- like a play.
Host A Treasure Hunt

Hide a small treasure such as a bag of candy, games etc. somewhere in the house or yard. Then use post-its to write clues. Each clue will lead to another clue, until finally the last one will lead the children to the treasure.
Stock Market

For middle school students: create a stock market. have the children use the newspaper or internet to research stocks and pretend to buy shares. Monitor the stocks throughout the summer and see whether you make or lose money. There are numerous stock market programs for the kids to use online.
Computer Time

On rainy days allow the children to find a educational websites and let them explore the world. Most kids love computers and there are thousands of websites designed to educate and entertain at the same time. Be aware of the internet dangers and stay with them (or in the area) to avoid problems.

Yard Sale

Help your children organize a yard sale. They can price their unused toys and clothing and other items that it’s time to get rid of, set up the tables outside with the items to sell, and handle the “customers”.
Create a Store

Either purchase a toy cash register from the store, or set up a calculator at the check out station. Make or buy play money, and spend an afternoon buying items and making change. You could even make a pretend check register and write checks, depending how old your children are.

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Further Reading:

• Failure Is Not An Option: Plan To Stop Student Failure
• Positive Sports Parenting
• Traveling with Children: Car Trips That Lead To Positive Memories
• Great Schools: 35 Factors That make A School Great
• Discussing Peer Pressure with Your Child

Build Social Skills – Encourage Participation in Extra-Curricular Activities

Encourage your child to participate in plays, drama, band clubs, sports, community education programs, YMCA, summer camps, science clubs and more! During the school year, tell your child that you want them to get involved with “one activity at school” and “one activity out of school.” many churches offer programs that are excellent in encouraging appropriate social interaction and friend- making opportunities.

Activities To Help Learning Disabled or Special Needs Children Build Social Skills

If your child has special needs, learning disability or ADD/ADHD, please read the article on “ADHD and making Friends” in the ADD/ADHD Category of ScottCounseling.

Help Kids Develop Friendships and Social Skills in Easy-to-Manage Steps

• Teach your child to smile and greet others.

• Teach your child the art of polite questioning: Ask students or other children how their day is going, comment on the weather, classroom activities, or compliment their work in class or other positive statements.

Building Social Skills and Making Friends Takes Practice

Allow you child time to practice with you, another adult family members or someone they trust. They should greet you (as a friend) or ask an older sister to do something with him or her in the same manner that you would want them asking a potential friend.

Practicing Social Skills – Role Play Social Situations

While you are practicing, role play. The parent can pretend to be the “friend,” the child “the friend maker.”

Work on Game and Sportsmanship Social Skills in Advance

Before your child participates in any activity, teach sportsmanship, gamesmanship and any other manner required to become socially acceptable. Don’t over teach! Part of socialization is learning from trial and error. For example, if you child is going to join a softball team, it appropriate to teach and encourage the use of positive words. Share with your child that telling another child after he or she strikes out, “that’s o.k., you will do better next time,” will lead to friendship than, “You are not very good.”

Team With the Teachers and Activity Leaders

Communicate with your child’s teachers, coaches and activity leaders that you are encouraging your child to make friends and become more social. Many teachers and activity leaders are trained and willing to help your child reach this goal.

Schedule Fun Time and Make Friends a Priority

While some children go out of their way to avoid doing homework so that they can spend time with their friends, others bury themselves in school assignments, reading and quiet time alone. Share with your child the importance of living a “balanced” life that includes time for work and time for play.

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Further Reading:

• My Child Has No Friends: What Can I Do?

Your email:

• Having a gifted child is something special.  It’s take special time, knowledge, foresight, patience and a willingness to explore new options.  This article by author Susan Johnsen touches on the topics and titles that the parents of gifted children seem to ask the most question about their gifted child.  Johnsen’s article also shares real-life experience that gifted children are challenged with each day.
  
  Definitions, Models, and Characteristics of Gifted Student
  by Susan K. Johnsen

Andrea is a kindergarten child, full of energy and excitement like most children her age, except that she is already reading at a fourth-grade level and understands mathematics concepts at a fifth-grade level. She likes to play games with the other children in her classroom, but she is interested in black holes, a topic most children her age don’t understand. Since she is social, she has established a learning center about black holes for other children in her kindergarten classroom and has become the editor of a schoolwide newsletter. While very accomplished for a 6-year-old child, Andrea is quite humble about her prodigious abilities and appears to enjoy each day with her classmates.

* * *

• After failing two grades in his elementary school, Burton is 13 and has finally made it to the sixth grade. While Burton doesn’t turn in much work, his sixth-grade teacher has noticed that he seems to have a mathematical mind and catches on to new concepts easily. In fact, he aced a nationally normed analogies test and enjoyed talking about how each of the items was designed. His friends know that he has built a working roller coaster in his back yard out of scrap lumber and electronic equipment. However, because of his lack of interest in grades and schoolwork, the teacher did not refer Burton to the gifted and talented program because he doesn’t do the work that will prepare him for the mandated state test.

* * *

• Ryan, a high school student, is a challenge for his parents and teachers alike. It’s not unusual for him to wear Christmas lights to school to attract attention from his favorite girlfriend, to dye his hair several colors, or to wear red gloves to a band concert. Although he scores well on national tests, recently making a 1350 on his SAT, he performs at a minimal level in his classes and is not even in the top 10% of his class. He loves music, playing three different instruments proficiently: the tuba, the cello, and the bass guitar. Outside of school, he has organized and leads two jazz bands, recently cutting his first CD. The summer following his senior year, he has been accepted to the Drum Corps International before beginning college.

Definitions of a Gifted Child

These three vignettes based on true stories describe children who are gifted and talented. While not always shown in school, each one has particular abilities that are manifested in a variety of ways—one through his music and leadership, another through his reasoning and constructions, and the third through academic performance. Andrea’s teachers would clearly identify her as gifted and talented, but Burton and Ryan might not be selected because of their lack of interest in school. They are indeed different from one another, yet they all show high performance in the areas included in the United States federal definition of gifted and talented students:

• The term “gifted and talented” when used in respect to students, children, or youth means students, children, or youth who give evidence of high performance capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who require services or activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop such capabilities. (P.L. 103–382, Title XIV, p. 388)

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Further Reading:

• My Child Argues With Me!
• Drugs and Alcohol: Parents Take Action
• Teaching Kids To Go Green
• What is Cutting & Self-Injury?
• Celebrating A Holiday After A Death

7 Ways Teachers & Parents Can Use Online Tools To Keep Students Interested

Can schools keep up with their net-generation, text-savvy students? A lecture and a white board pale in comparison to online videos, cell phone games, interactive virtual worlds and 3-d animation. Already, schools have been incorporating more high-tech technology such as smart boards and projectors in the classroom. My old high school uses ipods to test and record listening comprehension. This is great–and really expensive.

I plan on writing a few blog posts on this topic, but I first wanted to review a few free resources teachers (and parents) can use in the classroom or for homework to keep kids interested in learning. Most of all, by employing new technology you will be speaking in this generation’s language, appeal to what already interests them and therefore make school really relevant to their lives.

Here are some easy and free ways to get teachers more informed about what we are doing online, and how they can adapt to it!
1) Parent & Teacher Communities

The very first free teacher resource I am going to mention is something that you cannot directly use in the classroom, but is something that will be a continuing source of inspiration for new tools. New websites, blogs, applications, software and trends are developed everyday that you can use to capture student’s attention, but there is no way you can teach and keep track of all the new updates at the same time. This is why it is important to join other teachers online and share ideas, support each other and communicate. I am huge fan (as you all know) of collaboration. So, the first tip is to join some of these communities and just start browsing and talking:

Teacher Lingo.com is a great website for teachers to write helpful articles for each other. Parents can check these sites out too! Teacher Vision.com I like this website because it is all about saving time for teachers and providing free resources.
A social network for teachers is NextGen Teachers.com.

2) Blog’s

A blog is: “A website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries.” (Wikipedia) Of course, you can use blogs to communicate with other teachers, but blogs can be a great way to allow kids to express their personal ideas on what you are learning. The classroom only offers limited opportunities for students to talk about their opinions on classroom topics like the revolutionary war, cellular respiration or To Kill A Mockingbird. For those who are shy, or need more time to articulate their ideas. Building a class blog is a great way to let kids informally (not as formal as a paper, not as terrifying as expressing an idea in class) think and discuss something academic in a personal way (from their home computer).

Building a blog is shockingly easy and simple to moderate. Blogger is a great free website for blog building, I use Wordpress. We love when teachers have a flexible assignment such as “post one blog post a week discussing one topic from the week and your perspective.” It just gets us thinking and participating, then to take an hour on a friday to read some of the posts and have little discussion groups.

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Further Reading:

• Signs of Autism
• What’s A Good Age To Start Dating?
• Quick Parenting Tips: Helping a Child Make Good Decisions
• Gift Giving For Children & Parents During the Holiday Seasons
• Cutting: Self-Injury Facts & Statistics

Coaching Parents to Encourage Young Readers

There are four steps children take to becoming readers. In the first step, they are known as pre-readers. Pre-readers like to look at books and behave like a reader. In this stage, your child begins to understand how text works and can retell a story from memory. Next, she becomes an emerging reader. At this point, she is ready to be taught how to read. She begins to match written words to spoken ones, and can identify simple words in text. From here, she develops into an early reader. As an early reader, she is more confident of her ability and capacity to learn. She recognizes more words and understands their relationship to language sounds. The last phase is that of a fluent reader. The fluent reader can read a variety of materials and relate to the information. Once your child reaches this stage, her reading foundation is in place.

Six Ways to Encourage Young Readers

1) Start With Language. Language sounds are the basis for reading skills. Children learn these sounds by listening to you converse. Every time you talk with your child you are strengthening this understanding. You can improve her sound recognition in a number of ways including:

· Telling stories
· Asking questions
· Singing songs
· Playing word games
· Pointing to words as you read them

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Further Reading:

• Getting Excited To Read

Former U. S. Commissioner of Education Sidney P. Marland, Jr.

What Does Giftedness Mean?

Many parents say, “I know what giftedness is, but I can’t put it into words.” This generally is followed by reference to a particular child who seems to manifest gifted behaviors. Unfortunately, there are many misconceptions of the term, all of which become deterrents to understanding and catering to the needs of children identified as gifted. Let’s study the following statement:
“Giftedness is that precious endowment of potentially outstanding abilities which allows a person to interact with the environment with remarkably high levels of achievement and creativity.”
This statement is the product of a small neighborhood group of parents who took a comprehensive view of the concept of giftedness before focusing on any attempt to define the gifted child. They thought, first, that within giftedness is a quality of innateness (or, as they said, “a gift conferred by nature”), and second, that one’s environment is the arena in which the gifts come into play and develop. Therefore, they reasoned that the “remarkably high levels of achievement and creativity” result from a continuous and functional interaction between a person’s inherent and acquired abilities and characteristics.
We often hear statements such as “She’s a born artist,” or “He’s a natural athlete,” or conversely, “Success never came easy for me; I had to learn the hard way,” or “He’s a self-made man.” Those who manifest giftedness obviously have some inherent or inborn factors plus the motivation and stamina to learn from and cope with the rigors of living.
We suggest that you wrestle with the term in your own way, looking at giftedness as a concept that demands the investment of time, money, and energy. This will help you discuss giftedness more meaningfully with other parents, school administrators, school board members, or anyone who needs to understand the dynamics of the term.
Children who have been diagnosed with gifted abilities in academics frequently report display a range of problems as a result of their abundant skills. Areas that include perfectionism, competitiveness, unrealistic expectations, social rejection, and confusion from mixed messages about their ability level and parental pressure often lead the child to feel inadequate and frustrated. Some gifted children encounter difficulties in finding and choosing friends, becoming comfortable making decisions and, eventually, a career. The developmental issues that most children face on a day to day basis are further compounded by the gifted due to the special needs and characteristics that come with being gifted. Once parents and teachers are aware of these challenges, they seem better able to understand and support these children. This article focuses on assisting parents and educators on the challenges these children face and what solution can be implemented to assist these children to be successful at home and in school.

Further Reading:

• Making Geography Fun!
• Making History Fun!
• Success In School!

ScottCounseling wants to challenge your thinking. If “self” refers to “the understanding or determination of one’s own nature or basic qualities” (as described by YourDictionary.com), is it possible to build an understanding or determination of another person’s nature or basic quality for them?

ScottCounseling answer: No! You can’t build someone elses self-confidence or self-esteem for them. That’s why it’s call self-confidence and self-esteem.

Child behavior and Child psychology advocate, Patricia J. Paddock, presents some practical suggestions and solution for parents searching for answers to the title’s question.

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Further Reading:

• Building Self Esteem In Your Child
• Discussing Peer Pressure with Your Child
• Protecting Your Child: Safety Starts With Good Communication
• Why Should Parents Teach Life Skills?
• What Causes Children To Become Overweight?