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My son Mason loves anything that has a motor or buttons. The following is from Saturday's event at the WFCU.

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The Sports Parenting Podcast | JBM Thinks

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When Jake was six, he started playing T-ball. He gave it his best, always came home from the game with a smile on his face and couldn't wait to get out the door to the next game or practice.

Jake's mom and dad enjoyed watching him play sports, and dreamed of many more years of watching him develop and excel as he played.

Many parents start out feeling like Jake's parents. They have this picture in their minds when they think about their kids playing sports. They imagine themselves sitting at games, enjoying the excitement and fun as they watch their kids compete.

But as kids grow older, problems start to creep in: kids complain about playing time or what position they play. They become poor losers and cocky winners. They lose their enthusiasm for the game and constantly moan about how hard it is.

How does this happen? Why are kids losing their enthusiasm for playing sports?

The honest truth is: many parents are to blame.

As a youth sports leader, you know that disruptive parents can ruin an entire season. They can discourage kids, coaches, and other parents.

The sad fact is that 70% of kids quit youth sports by the time they are 13 and parents are partly (if not mostly) to blame because of things they are doing, many of which they are not even aware of.

As a sports mom for 21 years, a coach's wife for 28, and now a coach's mom, I know what the problems are in youth sports. I know why kids get discouraged and quit. I know why parents get angry with you. I know why you get frustrated with parents.

The best way to solve your parent problem is to help parents understand how they can help their kids have a positive youth sports experience.

Would you like to help parents:

Learn how to get along with a difficult coach?

Overcome team bullying and even make friends with difficult teammates?

Continue to have fun playing sports, even though the work gets harder?

Stay away from burnout and enjoy playing sports for many years?

If you'd like to solve your parent problem, then, I have the answer for you!

Here's the solution for youth sports leaders who do not want to deal with maniac sports parents. I've put together a course for you as youth sports leaders to use in educating parents about being a positive voice in youth sports.

Nine 5-7 minute teaching modules.

A fill-in-the-blank read-along for participants

a PDF report that can be copied for parents as many times as you'd like

A license to show the videos as many times to as many parents as you'd like.

In these videos parents will learn:

How to have a good relationship with their child's coach.

How parent and child can avoid team drama.

How their child can deal with playing time battles, and not get burnout out from sports.

How their child can beat bullying and get along with difficult teammates.

Specific steps parents can take to be sure they and their children are enjoying youth sports.

Here's what happens when the parents on your team don't turn into maniacs and choose instead to give their children a positive youth sports experience: their kids have fun while learning valuable life-lessons and your job is a lot easier because parents may actually sit back and enjoy every minute of watching them play!

Now you can help parents avoid being maniacs and at the same time allow their kids your to have a blast playing sports when you get Parenting Your Child Through a Positive Youth Sports Experience (organizational license) for only $197.

All This is Yours for $197:

Fill-in-the blank notes (to copy as needed)

To order Parenting Your Child Through a Positive Youth Sports Experience...

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Help Kids Stay in Love with Youth Sports - The Sports Parenting Podcast | JBM Thinks

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When Jake was six, he started playing T-ball. He gave it his best, always came home from the game with a smile on his face and couldn't wait to get out the door to the next game or practice.

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Pick it up now!!

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Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

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January, 2015
Coding is becoming one of the essential literacies in the 21st century education. There is a growing demand now for teaching students how to code. In his wonderful TED talk titled " Let's teach kids to code", Scientist Mitch Resnick made this beautiful analogy :

When kids learn to code , it enables them to learn many other things, opens up many new opportunities for learning. It's useful to make an analogy to reading and writing, when you learn to read and write it opens up opportunities for you to learn so many other things, when you learn to read you can then read to learn, which is the same thing with coding, if you learn to code you can code to learn.

Coding helps kids develop a variety of skills. Some of these skills include:

It helps kids learn in meaningful context

It teaches them that learning is a process and not a product

It teaches them how to take complex ideas and break them down into simpler parts

It teaches them how to collaborate with others

It also teaches them how to keep persistent and persevere in the face of frustration when things are not working well

it teaches determination and risk-taking

It helps them become fluent with technologies and enable them to open open up and express their ideas.

It helps them be creative

It helps them interact with the world around them

There are several web tools and mobile apps that teachers and parents can use to teach their kids coding. I have already covered some of the major ones in previous posts. Today, I am sharing with you another list of powerful coding tools but this time all of these tools are from Google for Education.

A Google-supported open source coding laboratory using drawing, music and creative fiction to introduce coding concepts

Shaped-based coding environment introducing young programmers to fundamental coding concepts and challenges.

Coding is the new literacy - it carries the potential to create, to innovate, and quite literally change the world. This initiative is designed to inspire millions of girls to experience the power of code.
4- MIT App Inventor

Create your own Android app with this easy to use tool! Learn how to program with a drag and drop interface appropriate for middle school and up.

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4 Powerful Tools from Google to Teach Kids Coding

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January, 2015 Coding is becoming one of the essential literacies in the 21st century education. There is a growing demand now for teaching students how to code. In his wonderful TED talk titled " Let's teach kids to code", Scientist Mitch Resnick made this beautiful analogy : When kids learn to code , it enables them to learn many other things, opens up many new opportunities for learning.

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Parents are squeezing the role of play out of their children's lives in favour of the three 'R's as they try to prepare their offspring for a competitive world, according to the head of Lego's education charity arm.

A lack of understanding of the value of play is prompting parents and schools alike to reduce it as a priority, says Hanne Rasmussen, head of the Lego Foundation. If parents and governments push children towards numeracy and literacy earlier and earlier, it means they miss out on the early play-based learning that helps to develop creativity, problem-solving and empathy, she says.

According to Rasmussen, the evidence for play-based learning has built enormously over the last decade, but parents don't know about it. "Both in the formal education system and in the homes of children, the focus on the value of play is rather limited. That's really something we want to work on - to improve the understanding of the value of play and what play really can do, where more and more it is squeezed by a desire both from the formal system and from parents that children should learn specific literacy and numeracy quite early."

The intervention by Rasmussen directly challenges the knowledge-based, heavily tested approach to schooling favoured by the UK government - and questioned by many education practitioners.

The 29-year-old Lego Foundation, generously funded with a quarter of Lego's post-tax profits, is beginning to flex its muscles. Where once it quietly dished out cash - and bricks - to lots of small projects, it has set its sights on campaigning for a mindset change in education around the world. "Our contribution to the world is to challenge the status quo by redefining play and reimagining learning," says the foundation's mission statement.

Part of the mission involves putting £4m into a new "Lego professorship" at Cambridge University - the first incumbent will be chosen in April - and supporting an accompanying Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning (Pedal). There are more links with Harvard, MIT and other prestigious institutions. The aim is to provide an incontrovertible academic underpinning to the educational value of play, and to define more clearly what works and how to measure it, arming Lego with more evidence to support its campaigning.

But can a toy company - albeit the largest in the world and so famous that its every move makes news ( David Beckham builds Lego "to relax"; Ai Weiwei embarrassed "non-political" Lego into bulk-selling him bricks for art) - really influence the way our children learn? Conquering the globe with little red and yellow bricks is one thing; changing the minds of governments is another.

As a child in Denmark in the 1970s, Rasmussen recalls there was more time to play simply because there were fewer of the planned activities that clog up the timetables of today's over-scheduled children. "We had more room to actually engage and keep ourselves entertained and we learned through that and we grew in many different ways through that," she says. She and her sister played with Lego, but Rasmussen's real joy was her years in the sea scouts, when she and three or four other teens would island-hop at weekends on a small boat off the coast close to the Danish capital, adult-free and entirely independent.

"All over the world, we see parents spending much energy doing the best for their child, and play is not on that list because they don't have the background to understand what it could do."

The problem is not that parents don't have their child's best interests at heart, she says. But "global competition, economic development - that has put fear or a concern into parents and into governments over how do we become relevant in 15 years or even right now".

Countries fear seeing their young people left behind, their workforce made irrelevant. "And in that situation what the parent says is, 'I want my child to have a job, without a job the child will not have a good life, so what can I do to prepare the child?' And the answer often ends up being more focus on specific skills, and earlier and earlier."

Rasmussen laments that "barriers in systems - school systems, homes, longstanding institutions that run on their own structures and methodologies" make it a "heavy, heavy task" to change things. Here in the UK - with a school starting age some three years earlier than that of our Scandinavian neighbours, "instructional" learning from the outset and external testing of seven-year-olds in literacy and numeracy - the barriers look pretty solid.

Lego identifies five types of play - physical, symbolic, with rules, with objects, and pretence - and points to the variety of skills developed through each. Even tech-driven play - that source of guilt and respite for so many parents - can fit in: not mindless screen-gawping but activities in which children can "engage with the technology", or what Lego calls "hands-on, minds-on". Its second definition of play is a playful state of mind in which, Rasmussen says, "you are open and try different things and are in a positive flow".

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Lego says the brick 'is a very, very valuable tool in learning through play but is it the only way or only tool'. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty

Nailing the benefits of play seems a bit like describing beauty - the essence of it seems somehow diminished by scientific analysis - but research findings are accumulating.

A Cambridge University project, funded by the foundation, saw children devise, tell and act out stories with Lego before writing them down, with play shown to boost narrative and writing skills, as well as interaction and cooperation. The Cambridge study centre will now look into how early play relates to other aspects of young children's development, explore what happens to the brain during play and conduct a longitudinal study examining what promotes children's playfulness and how it helps learning and wellbeing.

With strong evidence of the power of play, parents and politicians can be convinced, Rasmussen says. It's not a question of rejecting the importance of the "content" so beloved of Conservative education secretaries, "but things are changing so fast in our society so the understanding of how you gain and use content knowledge is for us much, much more important. It has to be a balance. You need skills to interact with others, to be able to seek knowledge yourself, because learnings will get outdated."

An early school starting age need not necessarily be harmful, she says, providing the learning is based on whole-child development and not "sitting at a desk". But, in contrast to the UK system, she advocates children learning through play well into key stage 2: "In the early years - and that's up to around eight - a play-based methodology makes a lot of sense." She cites New Zealand research indicating that early formal literacy lessons do not make children any better readers by age 11, and may even put them off reading.

If Lego is right, then in Britain, with our early formal schooling, we're getting it wrong. Critics might say that the Lego Foundation - though separate from Lego's commercial arm - is simply about flogging more models of the Star Wars Millennium Falcon. But, Rasmussen points out, Lego isn't producing pro-play research itself: the findings come from some of the most esteemed universities on the planet. The Lego link does not compromise the argument, she insists. "We certainly believe the brick is a very, very valuable tool in learning through play but is it the only way or only tool? No, certainly not."

Can Lego really persuade fearful parents and governments to trust in play? It's a safe bet that most of its audience will at some time have locked a few Lego bricks together - and just might be willing to listen.

A photo was replaced in this article on 31 July 2017 for reasons of cultural sensitivity.
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Children should learn mainly through play until age of eight, says Lego

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Parents are squeezing the role of play out of their children's lives in favour of the three 'R's as they try to prepare their offspring for a competitive world, according to the head of Lego's education charity arm.

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