Book Excerpt: Einstein Never Used Flash Cards

The following is an excerpt from the book Einstein Never Used Flash Cards:
How Our Children Really Learn -- And Why They Need to Play More and Memorize
Less by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D., and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.D.,
with Diane Eyer, Ph.D.

Bringing the Lessons Home

Play is a central component in children's mental growth. Play helps children
make meaning in their world, it helps them learn about themselves, and
equally crucially, it helps them to learn how to get along with others. Yet
it can be difficult to resist the trends of our achievement-oriented society
when we're faced with the choice of allowing our children more downtime or
signing them up for the latest class, sport, or activity. The following tips
can help you make play a central part of your children's -- and your own --
life.

Become an advocate for play. If we know play to be important, we need to let
our actions speak loud. Let us transform preschool rooms back into indoor
playgrounds that encourage and promote learning in a playful way. Let us
open up our homes to play and let us schedule activities around play rather
than squeeze play around our activities. Let us also acknowledge that
children need us to help them get going in their play, by providing
stimulating environments and by entering in and injecting important
knowledge from the wider world. By doing so, we will be sending the message
that play is the answer to how we build happy, healthy, and intelligent
children. Einstein knew that, and -- with your help -- so will the parents
in your neighborhood.

Provide the resources for stimulating play. Simply having objects to play
with appears to be an important component of later intellectual development.
Why? Toys and play materials provide the stimulus for children's
exploration. When these things are interesting to children, children learn
more from them. Toys and play materials are also centerpieces for
interaction. When toys are interesting to them, you are more likely to see
children coming together and united in a common activity. What do we all do
when we are playing together, rather than alone? We talk more, create more,
and engage more. These are the foundations for learning.

But there are several caveats. The first is that almost anything can be a
toy. You don't have to purchase a fancy toy to reap the benefits for
learning and social interaction. Consider some of the low-cost alternatives
for a change: Use blankets and chairs to make forts and tents. Our children
loved this kind of play, perhaps because it made them feel safe and gave
them a private space that they were in charge of (for a change!). Plastic
forks make great items to use to build with, and ordinary, inexpensive white
paper plates and a little string are great for making things like masks. How
about using your plastic containers and different amounts of raw rice,
beans, and split peas to make instruments? You can experiment with whether
they sound different depending on what they're filled with and how much they
are filled.

The movie Toy Story was fascinating for children because it made their toys
come alive. Stuffed animals can be characters in elaborate fantasy scenarios
that you and your child concoct together. These can be at the playground, in
school, in a car -- all sorts of scripts can be played out. Seashells
collected on trips make great toys, as do old tennis balls and old uniforms
(try Goodwill stores), various inexpensive school supplies (those colored
paper clips are great fun), used paper (ever make airplanes? or hats?), and,
for the older set, coins. Sorting coins can be great fun. The trick is to
look around your environment from your child's perspective. Whatever it is
that you are always warning your children away from is what fascinates them.
Can you figure out a way to adapt it to make it safe so they can play with
it, or can you find something like it?

Laura Berk, in her excellent book Awakening Children's Minds, provides
parents and caregivers with three useful questions to ask themselves before
buying that next toy: "What activities will this toy inspire? What values
will the activities teach? What social rules will my children learn to
follow?"

Too often we buy what our children ask for and don't stop to think about
whether it will be good for them to have that toy.Yet we are in control,
just as we control whether the television is on or not. And we don't have to
shell out money for every educational toy that comes along or that toy the
children see advertised on television. We're not bad parents if our children
are occasionally unhappy.

Join in the fun. Jane Brody, popular columnist for the New York Times,
writes, "Toys are best seen as tools of play . . . Toys should be used as an
adjunct to interactions between parent and caretaker, not as a substitute
for an adult's participation in the child's play."

Joining children in play is perhaps the hardest challenge we have to meet.
We are up for a board game or two, but we are not as good at joining in
their world. We get bored easily ourselves. If we don't really believe that
what they are doing is important, we have a tendency to either control the
scene or to opt out of their play. Yet, whenever possible, join in rather
than thinking, "Oh, good, she's playing alone. I can now make that call I
need to make." Part of joining in requires that you give yourself permission
to be a kid again and to see the world from that point of view. Do you
remember when jumping in puddles was glorious and when you used to take
apart Oreo cookies to lick the icing out of the middle? Do it again. You'll
find it rewarding.

Let your child take the lead. Child-directed games will pique interest and
learning. When we make play into work by controlling or limiting it, our
children lose interest, and we lose opportunities to bond and to imagine
with them. We need to strive to find the delicate balance between providing
props for play and directing play in our homes and in our classrooms. If we
are going to present our children with an art project, we need to make it
one where the children determine how the end product looks. We might find
that they are capable -- when they are the leaders -- of going well beyond
what we thought was possible. A good thing to remember is that it's the
process that counts, not the product.

Try to be a sensitive play partner -- reading your children's signals about
how much involvement they want from you. Parents who are good at being play
partners don't tell children what to do or constantly ask questions or hint
to children about the way to play the game.

Encourage your child to use his imagination. One way to get your child's
imagination flowing is to set up a pretend play sequence and then let him
take it from there. For example, act out a visit to grandma's house with
your child, taking his lead. Perhaps you can get him started by using chairs
to represent the seats in the car and encouraging him to drive you. You can
pass all sorts of interesting things as you go and even worry about the
weather because it's snowing. And you can have the snowflakes look like
little stars, cows, bowls -- whatever you like. A trip to the swimming pool
is another good one -- best done in the dead of winter! Swimming on the
carpet, you can spot all sorts of fish and plants and coins and other
children and family members.

One game we always used to play in our (Kathy's) house was "Imagination Is."
We would sit together on a bed, cover our eyes, and say, "Imagination is
when you're lying in bed, you close your eyes and open them. You're
somewhere else instead." The children would take us to many fanciful places
as we landed at the zoo, in a jungle, on the moon, or flying in the sky.
Sometimes we were giants, and sometimes we were ants looking at the world as
if we were in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. We would have an adventure at each
stop and when we wanted to journey on, it was as easy as announcing,
"Imagination is . . ." We would all cover our eyes and set out for new,
child-directed sites. Pretend play is fun not only for the children, but
also for the adults.

Evaluate your child's structured activities. Obviously, there's no need for
you to abandon all of the structured activities your children participate
in. But when you make choices for your children, select what looks like the
most fun. Visit some of the classes or activities and see what the children
are doing. Is the place one in which children can take a lead and show their
creativity? Is it child-centered? Are they engaged in pretend and social
play? Is there a happy feeling, and are children free to make a mess?
Structure in activities is a good thing, but too much control is not. Also
ask yourself what the purpose of the activity is. It should primarily be for
fun and only secondarily for learning. The more we question our own motives
and our own choices, the more we can close the gap between what we know is
good for children and what we are actually doing with their time.

Reprinted from Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really
Learn -- And Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less by Kathy
Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D., and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.D., with Diane Eyer,
Ph.D. © 2003 by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D., and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff,
Ph.D. (September 2004; $13.95US/$19.95CAN; 1-59486-068-8) Permission granted
by Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098. Available wherever books are sold or
directly from the publisher by calling (800) 848-4735 or visit their website
at www.rodalestore.com.

Authors
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D., is a member of the psychology department at Temple
University, where she directs the Infant Language Laboratory and
participated in one of the nation's largest studies of the effects of child
care. The mother of three sons, she also composes and performs children's
music.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.D., is the H. Rodney Sharp Professor in the
School of Education at the University of Delaware, where she holds a joint
appointment with the departments of linguistics and psychology and directs
the Infant Language Project. She has also been a recipient of the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and is the mother of a son and a daughter.

Together, the authors were featured on the PBS Human Language series and are
the authors of How Babies Talk.

Diane Eyer, Ph.D., is a member of the psychology department at Temple
University and author of Motherguilt and Mother-Infant Bonding.

For more information, please visit www.writtenvoices.com.