I read a recent tweet from another children’s minister professional who said he finds himself planning activities for 5th-6th graders that were once planned for high school students. I teach early childhood students ages 3-5 and they are doing activities and learning assignments that used to be accomplished in K-1st grades.

It is amazing how much children are growing older and how young they are in their thinking processes and at what ages they are when they reach certain lifestyle milestones. This is true for their physical attributes as well, causing young children (especially girls) to mature faster and experience adult physical conditions and characteristics.

Here is a recent article explaining how children are younger and younger when they begin to reach their puberty years. Researchers have linked many reasons to these younger years but here is the most recent reason:

“The biggest culprit seems to be the super-sized American diet. The rate of obesity in children ages 2 to 11 has nearly tripled over the last few decades. Fat cells produce estrogen, as well as the hormone leptin, which can stimulate the release of the hormones that trigger puberty. Girls who are overweight also produce excess insulin (a hormone that helps the body use starches and sugars from food for energy), which can stimulate the ovaries and adrenal glands to release more sex hormones. A 2003 study found that nearly 60 percent of girls with precocious puberty were overweight.”

Click here for the full article.

Facts like this greatly change the children’s ministry thinking. Not only must we change our ideas and thoughts on activities for early childhood and elementary students, we must change how we think about fun activities and summer camps. Elementary students must almost be thought of as youth when it comes to camps, etc.

It is amazing how much teachers can learn from their students when they listen more. Teachers often talk too much and think they have to be talking to be teaching. Teachers are intense learners. They can learn from their students and more learning will take place if teachers listen more to their students. Both parties involved in the learning process will learn more if they listen to each other more and talk less.

Read this post on teachers talking less and listening more.

I have read many posts and comments recently regarding success in ministry. Many of these posts were determining their success in ministry by numbers. The idea that success must be about numbers is disturbing to me. We must determine the definition of success in ministry. Success is not about numbers. A ministry can have 2 people or it can have 2,000 people. It can have $20 or it can have $200,000. Ministries can be successful by many means, not only by numbers.

Check out this e-book on redefining success in ministry: Reframing Success: Missional Metrics for Missional Ministry. The book only costs $1.25 — go ahead and order the 40-page book. It is worth your time.

Get the e-book link here.

Are you trapped inside on sunny hot summer days? Is the heat wave too much to be outside? Don’t sit in front of the TV or the computer or the video games all day. Click here to check out these indoor games.

Yes, parents need to get ready for kindergarten, too. The transition can be challenging to parents as much as it is to children. Click here for tips on preparing for kindergarten. Early childhood education is a great way to start.

I found the following article on one of my favorite blogs by Maryellen Weimer. Click here for the article.

A good teacher wants to be a good teacher—“Teaching has to be its own reward.” (p. 809) Reward and recognition are fine, but they cannot provide the motivation necessary to achieve teaching excellence. The diligence necessary requires hard work—just as much work as research and clinical practice.

The focus of instruction should always be on student learning, not faculty teaching—Markert believes that faculty often get stuck on what they think students should know. They must go beyond that to ascertain what students need to know.

When instruction is focused on the accumulation of factual knowledge, learning is quickly extinguished …, but when teaching aims at a higher level of cognition, what is learned is organized and remembered in useful ways—“Learning is seen not as the storage of information but as the continuous process of filtering new knowledge through structures we have developed from prior learning and experience.” (p. 809)

Good teachers do not talk as much as their less effective colleagues do—Good teachers talk less because their students are talking more. Their students ask questions, have cases to solve, discuss in small group, and solicit the views of fellow learners. Additionally, both students and teachers are silent now and then as they pause to ponder and think.

Good teachers are always thinking about ways to improve what and how students learn—Good teachers are always working on questions like: “How can I give students more control over their learning?” “How can I encourage collaboration among students?” “How can I provide timely and effective feedback?” “How can I accommodate learners at various levels of sophistication?” (p. 809-810)

Good teachers create an atmosphere where students are motivated by the intrinsic rather than the extrinsic—“Students are motivated for intrinsic reasons when (1) the course of instruction is well planned, transparent, and fair, (2) the relationship between learning and real life is clear, and (3) they see that their teachers care about their disciplines and their students.” (p. 810)

Reference: Markert, Ronald J. (August 2001). What makes a good teacher? Lessons from teaching medical students.Academic Medicine, 76 (8), 809-810.

Have you ever wondered how beneficial educational video games are? According to this article:

“A small survey reports that kids who played educational video games were less likely to suffer from attention problems at school. This contrasted with kids who played violent and/or arcade-like video games. They were more likely to have attention problems.”

Click here to read the remainder of the article for more interesting information on educational video games.

“He’s not sharing! She won’t share the blocks. He has all the blocks and won’t share.”

These are statements I hear everyday in my classroom. A student tells me that a friend isn’t sharing. Sharing is a difficult concept for young children. One child is happy playing with the blocks and another child wants to join in the fun times, too. But wait… that second child wants the exact same block that the first child has. So child #2 says: “You need to share.” She tells the teacher, hoping the teacher will tell child #1 to give up the block.

The reality of the situation is that child #1 may not be finished with that block yet and child #2 needs to wait until she is finished or choose another block from the shelf. This adds another difficult concept in the picture for young children: patience. They want it now!

These concepts are always in the learning process and come with age and maturation. In my classroom, when a student tells me that her friend isn’t sharing, I tell her that she isn’t finished with that toy yet. She can either wait for it or choose another toy and add to the working project. No, this answer doesn’t have great results the first time, but over many weeks the students begin to get the idea and can work it out.

Click here for tips to help children share.

We are blessed to celebrate the 4th of July and rejoice in our freedom in the USA. Thank you to the many military men and women who work daily to provide us a free country in which to live.

God bless America! Watch the video below:

Thank you

I remember as a kid running down the street to my friends’ houses to knock on the door and ask if they can come outside to play. There were several other kids who lived on my street. We built a clubhouse in one neighbor’s yard. We played football. We rode bicycles. I remember having bike races up and down the street. This was the decade when CHiPs was a popular television show about California Highway Patrol officers. We pretended to be the main characters, Ponce and Jon, on that show and our bikes were our patrol motorcycles. We would also pretend to be The Dukes of Hazzard and we all had t-shirts with pictures of Bo, Luke, Daisy, and the General Lee. We would run around in the orange grove behind our house and try to climb trees.

What fun times we had running around the neighborhood back in the day. Nowadays, kids are experimenting with play-dates online. For various reasons, kids are unable to get outside for play time: lack of time at home, not enough neighborhood kids nearby, not safe in their neighborhoods. Read this article on kids experimenting with online play-dates using Skype.

Kids as young as toddlers and 2 year olds are Skyping friends down the street when the weather isn’t permitting for them to play face-to-face. It is interesting in the article that young kids are discovering ways to interact with one another online. They are playing with toys together over the internet. They are quoted as saying this playtime is not as good as being together in the same room but it works for a time.

One psychologist “cautions against parents thinking of it as a replacement for face-to-face playdates, which are more valuable for kids.”

I can see one major benefit of Skype playdates being more for long distance family and friends rather than friends within close driving distances. What do you think about this?