As students get ready for the end of the school year, parents and teachers can start thinking about how to get children excited to read over the summer and prevent summer learning losses for a strong start next semester.  Reading fosters valuable skills like follow-through, critical thinking and imagination.  Summer is the perfect time to do reading you wouldn’t necessarily get to during the school year. The organization,  Reading is Fundamental, shared the following tips to motivate students to read during the summer:

Make sure there is reading material around the house, whether it’s the newspaper, storybooks, magazines or informational material. For educators, set up a book lending program for the summer. If your having trouble parting with books for summer reading, let students check out old books that aren’t as popular during the school year.  LifeBound’s book are the nation’s leading resource in supplemental instruction—books on Leadership, People Smarts, Critical and Creative Thinking and our new book, Dollars and Sense:  How to be Smart About Money.

For tech savvy students who want on-line resources to augment their summer reading, registration is open for LifeBound’s Summer Virtual Academy.  Targeted to help students prepare for a successful high school experience, this experience is good for incoming freshmen, freshmen who struggled to do well freshmen year and any one else interested in learning the basics about how to do well in high school. Students will learn time-management skills, study skills, and goal-setting strategies, among many other topics. To learn more about this summer learning experience, visitwww.lifebound.com.

References: What can families do to keep children reading during the summer? http://www.rif.org/us/literacy-resources/articles/what-can-families-do-to-keep-children-reading-during-the-summer.htm

Author and Harvard University lecturer Richard Weissbourd examines the negative effects that “achievement obsessed” parents have on their children in the recent article “The Overpressured Student.”

Many of the parents who fall into this category are from the upper-and-middle class and are guilty of behavior like playing a Baby Einstein video for their children, hiring a tutor for their preschool student, and making their college-aged students believe their life is “ruined” when they don’t get into a prestigious school.

In research conducted by Weissbourd and his team, they found more than one-third of the 40 juniors surveyed believed “getting into a good college” was more important than “being a good person.” Almost 50 percent of students believed that their parents thought it was more important for them to get into a good school than be a good person.

Of course, students should be motivated to succeed, persevere, lead, and dream big but studies show, if anything, added pressure is keeping students from succeeding rather than preparing them for a successful college experience and career. Weissbourd believes parents, schools, and communities are selling unhealthy standards of achieving and a balance is needed in the community as a whole to make students not only high-acheiving, but also happy and moral.

Research shows the following problems have a strong association with achievement pressures:

• Poor children and teenagers from affluent families suffer from emotional and moral problems at roughly the same rate.
• Affluent children suffer high rates of behavioral problems, delinquency, drug use, anxiety and depression.
• In a study of 144 girls from affluent families, the girls were two to three times more likely to report clinical levels of depression than the general population.

When parents put such a large focus on their children’s achievement, especially when it’s done in subtle ways — like involving their students in extracurricular activities they don’t show any interest in just to spice up their college resume, or pushing them to apply to a prestigious college even if it’s a poor fit — children feel like their individual qualities are not valued by others.

There is a disconnect between what parents want their children to achieve in school, and the skills their students will need to succeed when they get out in the workforce. Not only will these AP, IB, and G&T students be unhappy and overstressed in K-12, the feeling will follow them through college and into the profession their parents chose for them. No matter how intelligent the student is, if they don’t have compassion, know how to communicate, or value their personal strengths, they won’t be valued in the world of work.

References: “The Overpressured Student” - http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may11/vol68/num08/The-Overpressured-Student.aspx

Experts are saying that the problems associated with ADHD may be a self-perpetuating loop. In a recent New York Times article, “Fixated by Screens, but Seemingly Nothing Else,” Dr. Perri Klauss addresses the issue of screen time and those with ADHD.

Many parents who are encouraged by their student’s teacher to get them tested for ADHD are confused by the diagnosis, saying their child can sit in front of a television or play a video game for hours. To be consumed by television and video games and not anywhere else, however, is a characteristic of ADHD that many experts have been interested in understanding.

It’s believed by experts that children with ADHD actually spend more time at the television than their peers. But, the attention they give to a screen is not the kind of attention they need for school or other real life situations, says Dr. Christopher Lucas at New York University School of Medicine. “It’s not sustained attention in the absence of rewards,” he said. “It’s sustained attention with frequent intermittent rewards.”

In a recent Edutopia blog, neurologist and teacher Judy Willis made the case that video games were among the best learning tools because the gamer is rewarded by doses of dopamine. When students guess right, dopamine is released and they have a “powerful pleasure response.” Students are motivated to keep learning/playing so they can be further rewarded.

It’s believed that children with ADHD play more video games because their “dopamine reward circuitry may be otherwise deficient.” One study found when children with ADHD were prescribed Ritalin, they played less video games, suggesting video games were a form of self-medication.

But research is also finding that playing video games might lead to ADHD. When children are exposed to fast-paced stimulation, they may find real life understimulating.

Another loop experts are worried about is that those with ADHD have a harder time identifying why events happen. This is one reason why those with ADHD have difficult social problems. When these kids don’t socially fit in, they might revert to video game where mastery of their world comes easier.

References:

• Fixated by Screens, but Seemingly Nothing Else http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/health/views/10klass.html?smid=fb-nytimes&WT.mc_id=HL-SM-E-FB-SM-LIN-SFA-051011-NYT-NA&WT.mc_ev=click
• A neurologist makes the case for the video game model as a learning tool, by Judy Willis MD - http://www.edutopia.org/blog/video-games-learning-student-engagement-judy-willis