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The Final Hurrah of Summer Ask Dr. Kate Q&A: To Listen or to Read (Books)? Healthy Eating: Summer Greens The Role of Play in Pediatric Language Development Aaron's Presents: Inspire Me Mermaid Children's Book Review: You are (Not) Small Enter to Win! (See page 3) Enjoy the Rest of Your Summer!
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AUGUST 2015
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Family & Friends
Endings (Summer) & Beginnings (School) by Suzanne Provencher, Publisher & Editor Hello again, dear readers! I hope you are enjoying your summer so far. It’s time to start thinking about all of the things you wanted to do this summer – and do them! And it’s also time to start thinking about getting ready for another school year. In this issue, Dr. Kate Roberts shares ways to get the most out of the last official month of summer – and ways to start setting the tone for the new school year. Ask Dr. Kate talks about reading vs. listening to books. Mary Higgins offers different summer greens – and ways to incorporate them into your family’s meals. Jeannette Kahn discusses the role of play in pediatric development and Leah Okimoto shares another inspiring Aaron’s Presents grant recipient project. Last
but not least, Cathy Ballou Mealey shares another great children’s book review from a book she borrowed from her local library. Also in the issue – your last chance to win a pass good for 2 tickets to see any musical at North Shore Music Theatre! See page 3 and enter online
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by August 30. Do you or someone you know have a business that needs to reach MORE North Shore parents with children of all ages, interests and needs? North Shore Children & Families is the largest distribution publication for parents and families on the North
Shore – since 2007! Our September issue closes for advertising space on Wed., August 19 (noon). For more information on advertising, please visit www.northshorefamilies.com/advertise. As we look towards the final weeks of summer, remember to play with your children in addition to preparing for the new school year. Pack a picnic lunch and head for the beach. Don’t forget a kite, bubbles, Frisbee and toys to play in the sand. Feel the cool water on your toes and don’t forget your sunscreen. Wonderful memories can be made from the simple things we do during the lazy, hazy days of summer. I hope you have a fun-filled August – and the very best wishes to you as you get ready for another school year! Until next time ~ Suzanne
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Ask Dr. Kate
How to Enjoy the Final Hurrah of Summer by Dr. Kate Roberts
coming off the trees.
By the time August rolls around, it’s easy to feel panicked that summer is going by way too fast to meet all of your hopes and dreams. It’s statements like “Only 30 more days until school starts” that can send typically joyous and rational parents and children into a tailspin of anxiety and fear.
Here are some suggestions to help parents set a tone of pleasure during the last full month of summer and to encourage excitement for the upcoming fall and back to school time:
And even when many schools don’t begin until after Labor Day, if sports are involved, those typically creep into summer days sooner than that. As difficult as it is for many parents to see the end of summer coming, most children will adopt the outlook that parents deliver. If parents are fretting about buying supplies, class lists or teacher assignments or any of the many stressors that come with back to school, children will follow their lead and take on that stress and risk losing the pleasure of summer’s final days to worry over nothing that can be changed. It’s inevitable that school will begin again. Accept and embrace it and be grateful that we have schools to anchor and educate our children. The reality is that with the change of seasons from summer to fall, the pace of life increases – even for parents whose children are grown adults. Let’s face it, for most of us summer means vacations, more family time and more free time. It’s inevitable that the change of seasons can bring more loss than just leaves
North Shore Children & Families
1. Be Mindful. Mindfulness is a state of active, open attention on the present. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to each experience. Mindfulness is being committed to each moment and, rather than seeing time as slipping away unconsciously, it’s being intentionally present to experience everything life has to offer in every moment – allowing you to focus solely on the present experience. 2. Be Positive. When people are committed to the present, or mindful, they are not focused on future worries like back to school stress. Enjoy summer free of future worries. 3. Be Balanced. If summer has been a free for all with little routine and lack of night time sleep, August is a perfect time to reintroduce balance of lifestyle. That means returning to some routine that supports healthy activity and regular sleep cycles without being overly rigid. Sleepovers and late night movies are still possible, but should be balanced with routine. Continued on page 4
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The Final Hurrah of Summer Continued from page 3
4. Be Paced. There’s nothing worse for a child than fretting about returning to school while cramming in two months of homework. Most schools assign homework math packets and reading lists to do over the summer. Leaving it all to the last week before school starts is not helpful for kids. Begin early in August with 30 minutes a day of homework and that should accomplish the task without angst. 5. Be Organized. The sooner the school lists are completed, the less power they have over you. Leaving all the preparation of returning to school until the final hours will surely create unnecessary stress in even the most relaxed families. 6. Be Quality Focused. Summer offers the possibility of more quality interactions and time. Spend that extra ten minutes of reading time with your children at night because now you have the time. 7. Set Traditions. Having a traditional end of the summer and beginning of the school year dinner with other families establishes a ritual that children can depend on and look forward to. 8. Plan to Celebrate the Fall. Plan a weekend family getaway or day trips that will allow for family to enjoy together time in the fall. Just because summer is over doesn’t mean family fun has to be! Promote the goodies of the fall like football and soccer games, foliage, apple picking and Halloween. Every season has its jewels and fall’s need not be overshadowed by the loss of summer! 9. Be Social. Arrange a few play dates during those last 10 days of summer before school starts to help your child reconnect with old friends before the first day of school. 10. Be Happy. Research indicates that people are happier in summer. Whether it’s the better fruits and vegetables or more sleep, sunlight and exercise or a combination of all of these is unclear. But when moods are brighter, that impacts children. If you notice a mood boost, do whatever you can to maintain it as kids love it when parents are happy. As we will inevitably have to say goodbye to summer, remember what John Steinbeck wrote: “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?” John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America Dr. Kate Roberts is a licensed child and school psychologist and family therapist with offices in Salem and Hamilton. She specializes in cognitive-behavior therapy, family therapy, ADHD, anxiety and learning disabilities. She can be reached at kate@drkateroberts.com and www.drkateroberts.com.
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Ask Dr. Kate
Q & A for North Shore Parents Books: To Listen or to Read? Question: Dr. Kate, what are your thoughts about allowing my child to listen to her required summer reading rather than read it from a book? Answer: Thank you for your question. You raise a topic that I often debate with parents and educators about how children learn best. The answer is, it depends. For children who read at grade level and with proficiency and who can easily read the book but who prefer to listen to it, I say that’s awesome. The goal of the summer reading is to get the most out of the story. There are plenty of people who are auditory learners who comprehend more easily through auditory means such as listening to a book. I am one of those people. Of course, I can read and
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write. But if I have to really learn something and know it well, I will listen to it instead of read it. Knowing that I am a preferred auditory learner has meant the difference between passing and failing standardized exams. I will tape class notes and get lectures in auditory form and ace any test in my area of expertise, because that’s how I learn best – through listening. So if you have a child who knows how to read, and is in fourth grade and or higher and who wants to listen because they are an auditory learner, I think that’s just fine. It’s more enjoyable, pragmatic and efficient because they may have to read slower or even twice to absorb the same information they get from listening once and I don’t believe this will change that much regardless of practice. Of course practicing reading will improve
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reading skills up to a certain point, but not more than their natural auditory tendency. If someone is born with a brain that gravitates more towards the auditory than the visual, it’s not going to change. The other time you may want to use audible books is when you have a younger child who struggles to decode and yet has the ability to comprehend at a significantly higher level when listening than their reading ability allows. You want to promote audible books to this child because they will get frustrated and feel inferior reading books that are significantly lower than their comprehension level. Audible books
will engage that child at their intellectual level even when they can’t yet read at that level. This will renew their interest in the reading process and the grueling work of learning to read because they now have experienced the benefit. I can’t tell you how often I hear parents say things like listening to a book rather than reading it is cheating. While it’s true that listening will not increase skills in reading decoding, it’s hardly cheating when the exercise is to absorb the information in the book and know the story well enough to be able to write about it as is the case in many summer reading assignments. I know that when I listen to materials to study for an exam and then I ace the exam, that’s not cheating – that’s just being smart.
If you have a question for Dr. Kate, please email her at kate@drkateroberts.com. We may publish your question, anonymously, in a future issue – along with Dr. Kate’s response. This feature is brought to you, courtesy of Dr. Kate and North Shore Children & Families.
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Healthy Eating
Summer Greens
heating the kitchen to make supper? Long days and warm temperatures accompany a bountiful supply of leafy summer greens to entice the appetite with delicious, cooling salads. Take home some mesclun mix, crisp romaine lettuce, soft, buttery bibb or Boston lettuce. Add some cucumbers and bell peppers. Lettuce greens are meant to be eaten cold and with the exception of nutritionally devoid Iceberg lettuce, supply us with the minerals they acquire from growing in the ground, such as magnesium and potassium along with calcium, selenium and manganese. Greens make the basis for the perfect summer meal. Topped with hard-boiled egg, chunks of tomato, apple, celery and dried cranberries, salads can be a way to easily fulfill your five a day quota in one meal! Add mayonnaise to chicken on a bed of baby spinach with shredded carrot and slices of apple on Monday; serve black beans in a pineapple salsa on a bed of romaine lettuce with tomatoes on Thursday. Salad greens are naturally low in calories with most less than 20 calories per serving. They are carbohydrate foods, barely registering on the carb-scale. Low-carb diets promote restrictions on “starchy” carbohydrates, high on the glycemic index. But veggies such as zucchini squash, celery, bell peppers, tomatoes and greens have a low glycemic index.
by Mary Higgins Days spent at the beach; long, slow laps in the lake; watching your child swim for the first time without water wings – these are the memories of summer that are likely to stay with us for years. Who wants to turn on the oven,
Leafy greens are one of the few foods where two cups actually is the recommended serving size. Top them with any fruit or vegetable, including avocado with its healthy monounsaturated fat. But some of you may have heard that salads are not that low in calories. Items like macaroni salad, bacon bits and creamy dressings create the calorie overload. It may come as a surprise to some that we actually require fat in our salad
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dressings. Yes, in order to absorb all those vitamins (A, C and K), we need some fat to transport nutrients to the liver where they are stored. Just be choosy about the type of fat you eat. That means going lightly on the shredded bacon and choosing a dressing that is olive oil based. Whenever possible, make your dressing with Extra Virgin Olive Oil. This noninflammatory fat benefits our eyes, joints and heart. Studies found that those who use it regularly, due to its strong aroma, are less hungry. Introduce the picky eaters in your family to salads using mild bibb lettuce, baby spinach and hearts of romaine, while the rest of the family may enjoy endive, arugula, watercress, radicchio and mesclun mix. The outer dark green leaves of romaine may taste bitter to young children, but baby spinach leaves, even uncooked, are rich in iron. Invite the children to assist in salad preparation. They’ll enjoy tearing romaine leaves into bite-size pieces – no knife necessary. Young children who easily manipulate small things will enjoy counting out grape tomatoes, raisins, chunks of pineapple, sunflower seeds and nuts and are more likely to eat food they’ve participated in preparing. For a special treat, bring your children to Topp Salad, a North Shore food destination where Salad is the entree. Amidst a strip of fast food restaurants along Endicott Street in Danvers, you will find the healthiest restaurant choice. Topp Salad features salads and wraps with the option of designing your own meal. Unlike a salad bar where clumsy hands can drop ingredients, the chefs on the other side of the counter create the magic, directed by you and your child. They offer an unlimited selection of vegetables, fruits, seeds and nuts alongside meat, cheese and shrimp, a nutritional gold mine of delicious, healthy foods. Mary Higgins, M.Ed., is a nutrition educator who writes about food for several websites. She has a Bachelor’s degree in both Nutrition and Education. She studied exercise science and received her M.Ed. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has worked as a Sports Nutritionist and personal trainer at YMCAs in the greater Boston area and is certified by both the American Council on Exercise and the American Academy of Sports Dietitians and Nutritionists.
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Child Development
The Role of Play in Pediatric Language Development by Jeannette Kahn It is 2:00pm on a Saturday afternoon when I hear my 3 year old daughter say, “ssssss-snowman starts with ‘s’”. The mom side of me is ecstatic, thinking, I must be raising a genius! This kid could be reading in six months! The child “expert” side of me is thinking, Are you nuts? First of all, why does a 3 year old need to read and secondly, neuroscience does not support reading until the age of 8, and lastly, as a society, we get so hung up on academic skills, but in fact, social skills are a far better indicator of future success over academic capabilities. Ultimately, as a mom and an educator, I am most proud that I have a 3 year old who can play. She can play with me; she can play by herself; and she can play with her peers. She develops elaborate play schemes with dragons and princesses (even in spite of the fact that I have modeled our play after phenomenal women in history). Play scenarios set aside, her play supports language development far beyond her years. Through play, she has experimented with vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure. She builds relationships in her play in which characters constructively work together to achieve a common goal. As academic expectations quickly trickle down from grade to grade, it is imperative that we, as parents, do not lose sight of the importance of play. It is my greatest fear that we are letting our children engage far too long in screen time and not enough in face time. When friends ask me, “What’s a good app that supports language development?,” I always reply, “None.” Don’t get me wrong, I let my daughter play on the iPad, but it is not so that she can learn anything, per se. It’s so that I can grab a few quiet minutes to tackle life as a parent of two small children. Language development is supported by bombarding our children with rich language experiences, but most parents may wonder, What is a rich language experience? And how on earth am I going to find time in my day to do it? Our family’s best language experiences happen in the car. We suit up in our astronaut gear. I start the countdown and we blast off into space. In the car, we dodge space trees, space rocks and even space geese! We collaboratively work together to mend holes in our spacecraft. As a language expert, I’m teaching my daughter to stay on topic, to take conversational turns, to really listen to what her conversational partner is saying, and ultimately, to work collaboratively, using language, to solve the problem and share an experience. Yes, I’m one of those weird people who doesn’t want my child to read at an early age. During these early years, I hope that she will have fun experiences that she treasures. I hope she will develop a sense of self. I hope that she will learn to problem solve with her friends. I hope that she will have the same experience I got to have as a child, when no one cared whether or not I could read at age 3, and the only work I had to do was play! For more information on the role of play in speech development, visit www.nsctpeabody.com. Jeannette Kahn is the owner of North Shore Children’s Therapies in Peabody. She holds a Masters in Speech-Language Pathology from Northwestern University, Massachusetts state license and Certificate of Clinical Competence. She is a North Shore mother with two young daughters.
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Raising Compassionate Children
Teaching Kids to Give Brings Happiness, Healing and Purpose Spotlight on Grant Recipient: Amber; 6th grader from Lowell Project: Inspire Me Mermaid by Leah Okimoto Amber is a member of Girls, Inc., of Greater Lowell. She learned about Aaron’s Presents this past fall when I presented to the middle school girls there. A couple of weeks later, I returned to talk to anyone who thought they might want to participate in our program, and I could immediately sense the passion in Amber’s voice. She loves all things
mermaid! When she was younger, she remembers being made fun of and bullied because she couldn’t swim. She was unhappy and jealous of other kids who could swim, so she researched online about how to swim and practiced and practiced at a local pool until she could swim well by the age of 9. She decided to turn this negative, challenging experience into something
positive by applying for a grant to do a story time, dressed as a mermaid, for little kids. How cool is that? It might sound simple, but in reality, it is difficult and all too rare for someone to receive meanness and turn it into kindness. Her idea is so special and unique because it came from an experience from her own life. It’s also the kind of idea that adults would not have thought of, and this is another reason why I love putting kids in the leadership role and asking them to come up with the fresh ideas! They never disappoint, with their incredible creativity and freedom of thought. Amber originally researched the cost of a mermaid’s tail costume, but then we had the bright idea to connect her with an awesome seamstress and mentor at the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, who spent five Tuesdays teaching Amber to sew her own costume from scratch! To
me, this is how community is built: it starts with a positive idea; this idea attracts others in the community to help with some part of it; and then before you know it, several people who didn’t know each other previously have now been brought together in a meaningful way for a common good purpose. As a 6th grader, Amber now knows that there are institutions and individuals within her community who are ready and waiting to support her valuable ideas. In February, Amber was invited by the American Textile History Museum to share her story time and a mermaid craft at one of their special family events. In April, she was invited by The Mary Baker Eddy Library to read to little kids participating in their school vacation activities. Amber the mermaid read to the children and led them in the craft as well. The kids Continued on page 10
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10 North Shore Children & Families Aaron’s Presents Continued from page 9
were in awe of her and believed she really was a mermaid! She answered all of their questions, in character, with patience and humor. In her application, Amber had written that if she were able to do this project, “[she] would feel amazing [as] nothing is more satisfactory than a smiling child.” By the smiles in the room at both events, her project was a rousing success! This project received a total grant of $320.57, which was funded by Walker Clark Coaching, a business that provides peak performance, life, business and acting coaching. Please visit www.aaronspresents.org to learn more about how a child you know can apply for a grant or to support our work in some way. We hope that this story will inspire other kids to think of how they might give of themselves!
Leah Okimoto is the Founder and Executive Director of Aaron’s Presents, an innovative youth grants and development program designed to empower children in 8th grade and below to create and lead positive projects that benefit others. She is also a North Shore mother who lives with her husband and 6 year old and infant daughters. Her son, Aaron, lives on in her heart and through her work with the amazing Aaron’s Presents grant recipients, who bring her and others joy and inspiration every day.
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Children’s Book Review
You Are (Not) Small Written by Anna Kang; Illustrated by Christopher Weyant (Two Lions, $16.99, Ages 2-6) by Cathy Ballou Mealey Do you have a young child who listens to stories, and an older child who is starting to explore easy reader books on their own? You Are (Not) Small, winner of the 2015 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award from the American Library Association, is a perfect crossover book to share with them both. The cartoon-like illustrations and size sensitive meta-message will appeal to a broad span of ages and still elicit chuckles from parents and care-givers. Across the opening page, a plump, purplish bear-like creature merrily blows dandelion seeds into an airborne swirl. From stage right, one very large, fuzzy orange-brown foot emerges. “You are small,” says the new bear-like critter to the weed-clutching little one. This innocent observation kicks off a spirited dialogue between the two. “I am not small. You are big,” purple critter retorts. But the larger one gestures to his pals, noting that he is one of many, all alike. Then more purple ones
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appear to back up their buddy as well. Tempers flare and the dialogue becomes an argument. (Sound familiar, parents?) There are pointed fingers, angry frowns, even insistent shouting. The size debate escalates until, BOOM! A huge, hairy paw crashes down from above. Diminutive pink critters float onto the page, borne by tiny yellow parachutes. Will chaos ensue? Fear not, the last line guarantees laughs, big and small, from every reader. You Are (Not) Small is a simple story that will delight for story time or bedtime, and stands up to multiple requests for repeat reading. Tall or small, readers of all ages can absorb the meta-message about keeping things in perspective. Big and little kids, young and old, will learn that it is possible to appreciate differences of all sorts without necessarily comparing them. This is a great book to spark fun conversations about the way we see ourselves and one another. The thickly-outlined ink and watercolor animals are expressive and appealing in a Muppet-like fashion. They all share tiny round ears and large oval noses that make them appear to be related despite their differences in size, color and number. This debut picture book, from a husband and wife team, is not to be missed. Stay tuned for the highly-anticipated sequel already in the works, entitled That’s (Not) Mine! In the meantime, You Are (Not) Small, at just 91 words, is a great book choice with (not) a little kid appeal! Cathy Ballou Mealey is a picture book writer and mom to two great kids. She lives in Lynnfield and shares book reviews through Twitter via @CatBallouMealey. Cathy borrowed You Are (Not) Small from her local library, where she discovers wonderful new stories every week.