• No litterbugging. When paying the ocean a visit, don’t leave anything behind. This includes food, toys, containers, paper goods, or clothing. Pack your food in reusable containers, and dine with washable utensils and cloth napkins. Reusing items is the best way to learn about sustainability.

• Wear waterproof sunscreen. Don’t be a one-kid oil spill. Greasy, oily sunscreen leaves a residue on everything, including the ocean. This is especially important if your water-lovers are in and out of the ocean and need sunscreen reapplied throughout the day.

• Protect wildlife. Sure, sea stars are beautiful, but they belong to the sea. Curb the desire to bring home souvenirs such as marine life, shells, seaweed, or driftwood. Never chase or feed coastal wildlife. If Fido is along for the ride, leash and distance him from any marine life. Always be sure to clean up after him.

• Stay on the path. Sliding or jumping down sand dunes may be fun for kids, but it’s not fun for the little creatures and plants who call these environments “home.” Walk on the established paths and elevated walkways. Always avoid driving through sand dunes, soft sand, and wetland areas.

• It’s okay to be a snitch. Good stewardship is all about awareness. If you or your kids see someone destroying beach property, marine animal habitats, or dishonoring the environment, report the sighting to local authorities.

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During the kicking-and-screaming chaos of the moment, tantrums can be downright frustrating. But instead of looking at them as catastrophes, treat tantrums as opportunities for education.

Why Kids Have Tantrums

Temper tantrums range from whining and crying to screaming, kicking, hitting, and breath holding. They’re equally common in boys and girls and usually occur between the ages of 1 to 3.

Kids’ temperaments vary dramatically — so some kids may experience regular tantrums, whereas others have them rarely. They’re a normal part of development and don’t have to be seen as something negative. Unlike adults, kids don’t have the same inhibitions or control.

Imagine how it feels when you’re determined to program your DVD player and aren’t able to do it, no matter how hard you try, because you can’t understand how. It’s pretty frustrating — do you swear, throw the manual, walk away, and slam the door on your way out? That’s the adult version of a tantrum. Toddlers are also trying to master their world and when they aren’t able to accomplish a task, they turn to one of the only tools at their disposal for venting frustration — a tantrum.

Several basic causes of tantrums are familiar to parents everywhere: The child is seeking attention or is tired, hungry, or uncomfortable. In addition, tantrums are often the result of kids’ frustration with the world — they can’t get something (for example, an object or a parent) to do what they want. Frustration is an unavoidable part of their lives as they learn how people, objects, and their own bodies work.

Tantrums are common during the second year of life, a time when children are acquiring language. Toddlers generally understand more than they can express. Imagine not being able to communicate your needs to someone — a frustrating experience that may precipitate a tantrum. As language skills improve, tantrums tend to decrease.

Another task toddlers are faced with is an increasing need for autonomy. Toddlers want a sense of independence and control over the environment — more than they may be capable of handling. This creates the perfect condition for power struggles as a child thinks “I can do it myself” or “I want it, give it to me.” When kids discover that they can’t do it and can’t have everything they want, the stage is set for a tantrum.

Avoiding Tantrums

The best way to deal with temper tantrums is to avoid them in the first place, whenever possible. Here are some strategies that may help:

• Make sure your child isn’t acting up simply because he or she isn’t getting enough attention. To a child, negative attention (a parent’s response to a tantrum) is better than no attention at all. Try to establish a habit of catching your child being good (“time in”), which means rewarding your little one with attention for positive behavior.
• Try to give toddlers some control over little things. This may fulfill the need for independence and ward off tantrums. Offer minor choices such as “Do you want orange juice or apple juice?” or “Do you want to brush your teeth before or after taking a bath?” This way, you aren’t asking “Do you want to brush your teeth now?” — which inevitably will be answered “no.”
• Keep off-limits objects out of sight and out of reach to make struggles less likely to develop over them. Obviously, this isn’t always possible, especially outside of the home where the environment can’t be controlled.
• Distract your child. Take advantage of your little one’s short attention span by offering a replacement for the coveted object or beginning a new activity to replace the frustrating or forbidden one. Or simply change the environment. Take your toddler outside or inside or move to a different room.
• Set the stage for success when kids are playing or trying to master a new task. Offer age-appropriate toys and games. Also, start with something simple before moving on to more challenging tasks.
• Consider the request carefully when your child wants something. Is it outrageous? Maybe it isn’t. Choose your battles; accommodate when you can.
• Know your child’s limits. If you know your toddler is tired, it’s not the best time to go grocery shopping or try to squeeze in one more errand.

If a safety issue is involved and a toddler repeats the forbidden behavior after being told to stop, use a time-out or hold the child firmly for several minutes. Be consistent. Kids must understand that you are inflexible on safety issues.

Tantrum Tactics

The most important thing to keep in mind when you’re faced with a child in the throes of a tantrum, no matter what the cause, is simple and crucial: Keep cool. Don’t complicate the problem with your own frustration. Kids can sense when parents are becoming frustrated. This can just make their frustration worse, and you may have a more exaggerated tantrum on your hands. Instead, take deep breaths and try to think clearly.

Your child relies on you to be the example. Hitting and spanking don’t help; physical tactics send the message that using force and physical punishment is OK. Instead, have enough self-control for both of you.

First, try to understand what’s going on. Tantrums should be handled differently depending on the cause. Try to understand where your child is coming from. For example, if your little one has just had a great disappointment, you may need to provide comfort.

It’s a different situation when the tantrum stems from a child’s being refused something. Toddlers have fairly rudimentary reasoning skills, so you aren’t likely to get far with explanations. Ignoring the outburst is one way to handle it — if the tantrum poses no threat to your child or others. Continue your activities, paying no attention to your child but remaining within sight. Don’t leave your little one alone, though, otherwise he or she may feel abandoned on top of all of the other uncontrollable emotions.

Kids who are in danger of hurting themselves or others during a tantrum should be taken to a quiet, safe place to calm down. This also applies to tantrums in public places.

Preschoolers and older kids are more likely to use tantrums to get their way if they’ve learned that this behavior works. Once kids are school age, it’s appropriate to send them to their rooms to cool off. Rather than setting a specific time limit, parents can tell them to stay in the room until they’ve has regained control. The former option is empowering — kids can affect the outcome by their own actions, thereby gaining a sense of control that was lost during the tantrum.

After the Storm

Occasionally a child will have a hard time stopping a tantrum. In these cases, it might help to say to say, “I’ll help you settle down now.”

But do not reward your child after a tantrum by giving in. This will only prove to your little one that the tantrum was effective. Instead, verbally praise a child for regaining control.

Also, kids may be especially vulnerable after a tantrum when they know they’ve been less than adorable. Now is the time for a hug and reassurance that your child is loved, no matter what.

When to Call the Doctor

You should consult your doctor if:

• You have questions about what you’re doing or what your child is doing.
• You’re uncomfortable with your responses.
• You keep giving in.
• The tantrums arouse a lot of bad feelings.
• The tantrums increase in frequency, intensity, or duration.
• Your child frequently hurts himself or herself or others.
• Your child is destructive.
• Your child displays mood disorders such as negativity, low self-esteem, or extreme dependence.

Your doctor can also check for any physical problems that may be contributing to the tantrums, although this is not common. These include hearing or vision problems, a chronic illness, language delays, or a learning disability.

Remember, tantrums usually aren’t cause for concern and generally diminish on their own. As kids mature developmentally and their grasp of themselves and the world increases, their frustration levels decrease. Less frustration and more control mean fewer tantrums — and happier parents.

By: The Nemours Foundation – Education.com

As you read through the table, which shows just a fraction of the dozens of classification schemes that have been proposed, you’ll probably think that many of the schemes sound at least plausible. How can we know which one is right, or if several of them are right?

Psychologists have a few ways to test these proposals. First, they try to show that cognitive style is stable within an individual. In other words, if I say you have a particular cognitive style, that style ought to be apparent in different situations and on different days; it should be a stable part of your cognitive makeup. Cognitive styles should also be consequential; that is, using one cognitive style or another ought to have implications for the important things we do. If I claim that some people think serially and other people think holistically, then these two types of people ought to differ in how they learn mathematics, for example, or history, or in how they understand literature. Finally, we have to be sure that a cognitive style is not really an ability measure. Remember, styles are supposed to represent biases in how we prefer to think; they are not supposed to be measures of how well we think.

This last point seems kind of obvious, but it has been an issue for some of the distinctions made in Table 1. For example, people who are more likely to evaluate something they see independently of the object’s relationship to other objects are called field independent, whereas field dependent people tend to see an object in terms of its relationship to other things (Figure 2).

People are classified as field dependent or independent only on the basis of visual tests, which don’t seem to be very cognitive. But it seems plausible that what’s true of vision—that field-dependent people see relationships whereas field-independent people see individual details—may also be true for all sorts of cognitive tasks. That’s a neat idea, but the problem is that field-independent people tend to outperform field-dependent people on most cognitive measures. Now, remember that field dependence is supposed to be a cognitive style, and that, on average, people with different styles are not supposed to differ in ability. The fact that they do implies that the tests shown in Figure 2 actually measure ability in some way rather than style, although we may not be sure what the mechanism is.

I’ve mentioned that a cognitive styles theory must have the following three features: it should consistently attribute to a person the same style, it should show that people with different styles think and learn differently, and it should show that people with different styles do not, on average, differ in ability. At this point there is not a theory that has these characteristics. That doesn’t mean that cognitive styles don’t exist—they certainly might; but after decades of trying, psychologists have not been able to find them. To get a better sense of how this research has gone, let’s examine one theory more closely: the theory of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners.

The logic underlying the idea of mental ability is as follows: if there is a single ability—call it intelligence, if you like—underlying different mental activities, then someone who is good at one type of mental activity (for example, math) should be good at all mental activities. But if some people are good at one mental activity (math) and poor at another (reading comprehension), then those activities must be supported by different mental processes. For more than one hundred years, psychologists have been using this logic to investigate the structure of thought. In a typical study, an experimenter takes one hundred people and administers to each of them, say, an algebra test, a geometry test, a grammar test, a vocabulary test, and a reading comprehension test. What we would expect to happen is that each person’s scores on the English tests (grammar, vocabulary, and reading comprehension) would hang together—that is, if a person scored well on one of the English tests it would mean he was good at English, so he would tend also to score well on the other English tests. Likewise, people who scored well on one math test would probably score well on the other math test, reflecting high math ability. But the scores on the math and English tests wouldn’t be so highly related. If you did this experiment, that’s more or less what you’d see.

This sounds like pretty obvious stuff. When I was in graduate school, one of my professors called commonsense findings “bubbe psychology.” Bubbe is Yiddish for “grandmother,” so bubbe psychology is giving fancy labels to stuff that your grandmother could have told you (Figure 6). As far as we’ve gone, it is pretty obvious stuff. It can get a lot more complicated when we try to get more detailed (and the statistical techniques are pretty complex). But roughly speaking, what you noticed in school is true: some kids are talented at math, some are musical, and some are athletic, and they are not necessarily the same kids.

Educators got much more interested in this type of research in the mid-1980s when Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard, published his theory of multiple intelligences. Gardner proposed that there are seven intelligences, to which he later added an eighth. They are listed in Table 2 (on p. 124).

As I’ve mentioned, Gardner was certainly not the first to generate a list of human abilities, and his list does not look radically different from the ones others have described. In fact, most psychologists think Gardner didn’t really get it right. He discounted a lot of the work that came before his, for reasons that researchers have thought were not justified, and he made some claims that were known at the time to be wrong—for example, that the intelligences were relatively independent of one another, which he later deemphasized.

Educators were (and are) interested not so much in the particulars of the theory but in three claims associated with the theory:

Claim 1: The list in Table 2 is one of intelligences, not abilities or talents.

Claim 2: All eight intelligences should be taught in school.

Claim 3: Many or even all of the intelligences should be used as conduits when presenting new material. That way each student will experience the material via his or her best intelligence, and thus each student’s understanding will be maximized.

Gardner made the first of these claims, and it is an interesting, debatable point. The other two points have been made by others on the basis of Gardner’s work, and Gardner disagrees with them. I’ll describe why each claim is interesting, and try to evaluate what it might mean for teachers.

Let’s start with Claim 1, that the list shown in Table 2 represents intelligences, not abilities or talents. Gardner has written extensively on this point. He argues that some abilities—namely, logical-mathematical and linguistic—have been accorded greater status than they deserve. Why should those abilities get the special designation “intelligence” whereas the others get the apparently less glamorous title “talent” ? Indeed, insisting that musical ability should be called musical intelligence, for example, carries a good share of the theory’s appeal. Gardner himself has commented more than once that if he had referred to seven talents instead of seven intelligences, the theory would not have received much attention.

Abilities and Multiple Intelligences

So? Are they intelligences or talents? On the one hand, the cognitive scientist in me agrees with Gardner. The mind has many abilities, and there is not an obvious reason to separate two of them and call them “intelligence” while referring to other mental processes by another label. On the other hand, the term intelligence has an entrenched meaning, at least in the West, and it’s unwise to suppose that a sudden switch of the meaning will not have any fallout. I believe that confusion over Gardner’s definition versus the old definitions of intelligence helps to explain why other people have made the other two claims—the ones with which Gardner disagrees.

Claim 2 is that all eight intelligences should be taught in school. The argument for this claim is that schools should be places where the intelligences of all children are celebrated. If a student is high in intrapersonal intelligence, that intelligence should be nourished and developed, and the student should not be made to feel inferior if he is lower in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences, the ones that are usually heavily weighted in school curricula. There is a surface plausibility to this claim. It appeals to our sense of fairness; all intelligences should be on the same footing.

Gardner disagrees, however, saying that curricular decisions should be made first on the basis of the values of the community, and that his multiple intelligences theory can help guide the implementation of the curricular goals.

The claim that all intelligences should be taught in school is, I believe, a reflection of relabeling talents as intelligences. Part of our understanding of intelligence is that intelligent people do well in school. As a result of this assumption, some people’s thinking, I believe, has gone this way:

Children go to school to develop their native intelligence.

A new intelligence has been discovered.

Therefore, schools should develop the new intelligence.

Some educators do seem to think that Gardner “discovered” that people have musical intelligence, spatial intelligence, and so forth whereas musical intelligence is of course the same thing your bubbe would have recognized as musical talent. I personally believe that music should be part of school curricula, but the idea that cognitive scientists could tell you anything to support that position is wrong.

The third claim states that it is useful to introduce new ideas through multiple intelligence avenues; for example, when students are learning how to use commas, they might write a song about commas (musical intelligence), search the woods for creatures and plants in the shape of a comma (naturalist intelligence), and create sentences with their bodies, assuming different postures for different parts of speech (bodily-kinesthetic intelligence).2 The expectation is that different children will come to understand the comma by different means, depending on their intelligence. The idea will click for the student who is high in naturalist intelligence during the search-the-woods exercise, and so on.

Gardner disavows this idea, and he’s right to do so. The different abilities (or intelligences, if you like) are not interchangeable. Mathematical concepts have to be learned mathematically, and skill in music won’t help. Writing a poem about the arc that a golf club should take will not help your swing. These abilities are not completely insulated from one another, but they are separate enough that you can’t take one skill you’re good at and leverage it to bolster a weakness.

Some people have suggested that we might at least be able to get students interested in subject matter by appealing to their strength. To get the science whiz reading for pleasure, don’t hand him a book of Emily Dickinson’s poetry; give him the memoirs of physicist Richard Feynman. I think that’s a sensible idea, if not terribly startling. I also think it will only take you so far. It’s a lot like trying to appeal to students’ individual interests, a point I took up in Chapter One.

By: Daniel T. Willingham – John Wiley & Sons, Inc. – Education.com