K5 Learning Blog

For those of you who have been following our series on “what our kids need to succeed”, it’s becoming more and more apparent that our kids do not only need to have cognitive skills – the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests, including the ability to recognize letters and later read and comprehend, to calculate and detect patterns, etc. but that they also need certain character traits that will help them persevere when encountering and overcoming failure.  Traits such as grit and self-confidence, persistence and self-control.

Today, we’ll look at one more such trait as laid out by Jackie Gerstein of User Generated Education, and that is having a vision for the future, or what others may call having dreams and aspirations.  Vision, simply stated, is seeing your purpose in life. It’s tied in to knowing who you are and what you can vision yourself doing with your talents and desires. What we need to learn is how to use those talents and desires in living fulfilling lives.

Although hope seems like a simple, wishy-washy emotion, researchers suggest cultivating hope is actually a complicated process, but that there are significant rewards for those who make the effort.  They have found that students who have cultivated high hopes have greater academic success, stronger friendships, demonstrate more creativity and are better at problem-solving. 

So how can we tell if our kids are high in hope?  Researchers say that people that are high in hope don’t take failure personally.  Rather, they use failure to improve their performance next time.  They’re also more optimistic.  When they face challenges, they tell themselves: “I can do this.  I won’t give up.”

Today, we’ll start delving into the topics summarized in my last blog post – about what skills our kids need to succeed.  It’s an area that has fascinated many researchers and educators.  In this series,  I’ll attempt to bring these thoughts to you in a succinct manner and add to each section what we as parents can do to help our kids be self-sufficient and successful.

The topic of the day is grit.

Two years ago we put together a Prezi about how “digitally connected” our kids are.  In that Prezi we included statistics from a study carried out by Common Sense Media.  They recently released a second study on early childhood exposure to digital devices and it includes some alarming stats about device ownership and usage among our youngest.

The second study; Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America 2013, replicates the large-scale survey, conducted in 2011.  This new study provides a comparison to how our children’s media behaviors have changed.  Advocates for unplugging our kids and letting them simply play and connect face-to-face in the real world, will not be happy.

Finding 1: kids’ access to digital devices rose dramatically over the last two years

40% of families with children age 8 and under now own a tablet device, such as iPads, compared to 8% of families in 2011.75% of children now have access to a “smart” mobile device at home, a jump from 52% in 2011.