REA on Nick Wang

Diary - Roll back, rest, roll forward… and get picked up from behind

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 03:16:00 +0000

Sept. 7th

Just now, I was playing with my son Luc and my daughter Sel on the bed. Luc was doing his usual jumping around, I have to keep reminding him that I don’t want him to jump on the bed when his sister is lying here.

Sel actually really enjoys watching her brother jumps! Recently she had started turning onto her tummy, at first she would cry as the new position was unfamiliar to her. Later on, she could stay on her tummy with her head up for a while, until she got tired and couldn’t hold her head up any longer, that’s when her face will plant straight onto the bed / carpet and she would cry for help! I would gentle touch her and tell her that I’m by her side ready to give her a hand, it doesn’t seem like I’m getting through to her as she just continue to cry hysterically, but I believe she’ll understand me eventually.

The 2nd time she cried in this position today, our helper came over and said 1 of the 2 things she always say: “Your diaper wet mui?” (“Mui” means little sister in Cantonese.) She stuck her hand inside Sel’s diaper and then picked her up from the back. Sitting in front of Sel, I could see her facial expressions as she was being lifted up. Even though she was in the middle of crying for help due to her facing down, she still had a look of confusion rather than relieve from being “saved” from the face down position.

In RIE, it’s suggested that you talk to your babies and do things with them rather than to them. Personally, I haven’t seen concrete evidence of 6 months old Sel understanding what I am saying to her, but I have no doubt that this kind of in context communications is not only one of the best ways of training your baby’s ear for verbal communications, but also great for teaching them from day one that their body belongs to them and others need to have their permission to do anything to it!

Diary - Turned over on her belly and cry

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 15:23:00 +0000

Sept. 2nd

Today, for the first time, I saw Sel turned over on her tummy by herself, the whole way! She was able to get her hands out from under her chest once too! But this new position is still too new & unfamiliar to her so she cried out loud when she successfully turned onto her tummy! (Which was kinda cute :P I’m sure she’ll learn to enjoy the new position and perspective very soon.

Diary - Diaper Change, Taking Medicine and Giving me a Kiss

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:50:00 +0000

August 27th, 2012

Somedays, when you are all charged up, you have so much patience you’re like Buddha! It is at these times that you’ll see the miracles of RIE!

Today, the kids left with mom early in the morning so I had a bit of time for myself, then I went to a meeting with an angel investor friend of mine. It just so happens that he has a 10 months old daughter so he’s new to this baby thing as well, so we had a long, interesting talk about parenting! As you may know, I’m very passionate about raising creative thinkers who can think on their feet, and that if I can help other parents learn about RIE and the Reggio Emilia Approach, it has the potential to create such a big social change that will really disrupt the broken system that enslaves us today. However, I’m not very good at monetizing the work that I do! This is where my friend really helped out today, he gave me a few great ideas that kinda clicked in my head, so hopefully, I’ll be able to implement something that will enable me to sustain myself while continuing to create social change via 100village.co

Anyway, the main story starts at 5 pm when my son L came back home. I was invigorated by the talks with my friend earlier so I was in a good place mentally. Meanwhile L didn’t get enough of his afternoon nap so he was a little cranky. He played with the trains, I sat by him and watched him play, then I smelled something funky so I asked if I could check his diaper, sure enough, he pooped, so I said “Oh, you pooped, can I change your diaper? (No) Do you want to change it now? Or do you want to wait and change 3 minutes later?” He said “3 miniits”. So I went and set my timer and showed him “OK, we’ll go change in 3 minutes.” When the alarm went off, of course, he still wouldn’t go. He was tired and laying there on his side, pushing the train back and forth. I calmly lay in front of him and just said “You said we can go change you diaper after 3 minutes. It’s ok, I can wait here with you, but you know you have a full diaper, and you’ll feel much better if we change it.” After may be another 3 minutes of my nagging, finally when I ask if he was ready, he said “Ready”, and we walked to the bathroom together. He was most cooperative throughout the whole thing! This was soooo much better than forcing him to “hurry up and go the the bathroom”, picking him up and forcefully bring him there, and then fight with him to clean his behind… (not gonna describe what could happen next, I’m sure you can guess! :)

A slight scare took place when I played “Pom Pom” with him. Pom Pom was this panda character that got sent flying from a see-saw in one of those Disney World Family videos. Basically, I repeat the lines from that scene and throw L onto the bed. It’s a little rough play that he likes. This time, I threw him face down and he landed with his hand a little bit twisted. He laughed as usual, but he just stayed there in that position, and slowly, he turned around and said “Hurt”. I already knew something went bad, I said “Oh no, where does it hurt?” and he pointed to his arm. I hold his arm and carefully pressed and checked for anything broken. Luckily, he didn’t seem to be in pain anymore. I kept him immobiled in my arms for a bit longer just to make sure, and I said “I’m sorry I hurt you.” while hugging him. All was well 2 minutes later.

8:30 pm, L was so tired he didn’t protest when I said let’s pick our books and go to bed. We were laying on the bed, exploring Thomas the train engine and Danny & the dinosaur when I suddenly remembered he hadn’t taken his medicines yet. I opened the door to ask my wife and we decided that since he was so tired, he would probably be extra difficult if we tried to feed him his medicine now! And since his cough was almost all gone, we agreed to just skip it. Well, L decided he wants to go out! So, I told him “If you go out, you’ll have to take the medicine! Are you sure?!” He nodded. I made it extra clear by repeating the medicine consequence again, then I said OK and opened the door. He went to play with his train while I prepared the medicines. When it’s ready, I set them on his table and called him over. To my surprise, he came over by himself, and once again, extremely cooperative! I couldn’t believe what a difference my being patient and setting expectations up front had made! The last few days, my wife had to basically force the medicine down his throat, with L spitting half of it back out! At that point, even if I butt in it was too late.

Surprise #2, after the calmest medicine taking experience ever, we got back to bed and I picked up the dinosaur book again. L slowly made his way up, then he came over to me and gave me a cheek-to-cheek, which is his version of a kiss. Aww… it was so sweet! I said “Thank You” and gave him a big hug.

I think as we grow older, it gets harder to express our affections to our parents / children. This is especially true for Asians. I would love to be this affectionate with my own parents but I’ve yet to be able to give them a big hug like this! Here’s where Reggio Emilia Approach’s documentation really shines! I hope that in 20, 30, 40 years, my son will be able to pick up this diary and see how much we love him! (L, please feel free to come give your daddy and mommy a hug whenever you read this!) This is also why I want to build and share this tool with other parents, because I want everyone to be able to treasure their love between parents and children.

How trusting your baby early can save you from behavioral issues later on

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 15:14:00 +0000

Does your 2 ~ 3 year old toddler give you any of these troubles?

Says NO automatically when you ask him anything
Doesn’t listen to or ignore what you are saying or asking (multiple inconsistent messages)
Throw things, tip over things, hit things… hard!
Flip over her bowl of food or throw it away completely
When he’s tired / hungry, doing all the “forbidden” things no matter how stern you tell him you don’t want him to do that

These are some of the troubles we’re facing currently. In this post, I’ll specifically talk about 4 – “Flip over bowl of food or throw it away” first, as it’s one of the main behavior I need to correct right now.

When I first started writing this post, the title was actually “RIE is really making a difference in my child”! After we started doing our “parents organized playgroups” and learning about RIE, I had seen such a big improvement in my relationship with my son! It was like we had become soul mates! Oh how naive I was to think that I had figured things out! I guess as a first time dad, your relationship with your toddler is like when you dated your first girlfriend when you were 15 years old. :) Anyway, here’s the story.

Up until a few months ago, I had relied on my wife and domestic helper to take care of L. Although I knew I wanted to use the Reggio Emilia Approach to raise my child, I didn’t think we need to start until L reaches 2 or 3. I thought that as he gets older and starts to understand more, I’ll let him have lots of freedom to explore and construct his own knowledge. Now I know that this thinking was wrong!

What happened with L was, all this time, everyone has been denying him of a few basic rights because “he’s a baby” and that has caused some behavioral issues now that he’s 2 years old. Let me use meal time and his current “throwing bowls and plates away” problem as an example. How did things escalate and reach this stage? Here it is, a step-by-step montage:

Since baby, we locked him into a high chair and force fed him until he finished the whole bowl of baby food
He began to realize he was full or didn’t want to eat anymore, complained with sad face but was ignored
Discovered “self” and really began to dislike being force fed. Began to struggle to get out of the high chair
Used hands to stop the spoons and the bowls from coming near his mouth. Found out that if he caused the bowl to turn over, the adult will finally stop!
Throwing food away to indicate “I don’t want to eat anymore” became a habit
Dad came in and try to solve the “problem” by offering him choices. Asked him to bring his own table and chair and we’ll leave him to eat by himself
Helper afraid he would make a mess, tries to help him, but he now has a short fuse and if he is even slightly displeased with something the helper did “for” him, he would swipe at the bowl, sending it to the floor!

Now at this point, our moms would say he’s a bad boy, and that we should spank him! But has anyone actually trace back and find out why the boy is acting this way? Do you still think we should spank him after reading the above story of how things developed?

The truth is if we had respected L’s will early on and let him control how much he wants to eat, then he wouldn’t have developed the throwing problem at all! Throwing the food away to indicate end of meal is so ingrained in him that now even when I let him eat by himself while he’s calm and content, he would still turn over his plate when he finishes!

By not trusting our baby and forcing something on him, we have created behavioral problems that are exponentially harder to correct! So much so that even my wife considered if she had to resort to spanking (On a different behavior.)

Don’t just take my word for it, watch this amazing video of babies behaving gently and maturely! It can be done! (Janet Lansbury – Gentle Discipline in Action, Seeing is Believing[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0IK2SlHn7o?wmode=transparent]

With our 3 month old daughter now, we know better and we can see that even at 3 months old, she already has the will to “construct her world view”, and deserves our respect rather than treating her as a baby doll! The interesting question is with our boy, what should we do to correct these problems? Especially when he has another issue with listening because he grew up with our helper’s constant nagging so he has learned to tune out his ears already!

What would you do?

July 7th & 14th Playgroup Updates

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 15:44:00 +0000

Last weekend, we went to the Kadoorie farm for our playgroup, the place takes up an entire hill side, with lots of trees and homegrown vegetables, animals and even a river to supply its drinking water! It was awesome! But since it was the first time L has been there, he was keen on running around exploring the whole place, so that didn’t leave him and C much “uninterrupted play time”. As a result, I couldn’t observe any breakthrough in his learning, hence no diary was written. (Diary entries are only written when “events are considered to have new significance, when it arouses surprise in its characters and is likely to increase knowledge.”)

Today, we had another excellent playgroup at my apartment. I didn’t see a lot of new learning, but there were a lot social, interpersonal dynamics between C and L that were interesting. Since they were still very much into the books, I brought out some extra books I had bought from the Montessori playgroup L has been going to. It’s from a Korean company, and we discussed about how the Koreans love the structured, categorized methods, that’s why they love the Montessori method. And how Montessori is different from Reggio Emilia. (Good topic for another blog post.)

After snack time, we went to the park and the kids had fun re-exploring the exercise machines. We talked about how some Reggio are chaos - no scaffolding, no boundaries! Most parents nowadays want to provide the opposite for their children - controlled, structured teaching. Both are extremes. Meanwhile, the two of us are doing Reggio inspired learning but often worried about if we are still directing too much of the play. I think it’s good we have that in back of our minds.

Not a moment later, we went to wash L’s feet and C happily played with the water, drenching himself from head to toe and spraying water everywhere! If it was my son doing this and I’m alone with him, I would be quite conscious about how other people would say my son is naughty or even tell me that I should stop him! (I’ve had these unrequested advices from random old ladies before, may be they see a guy and think I must have no clue how to take care of my child?!) I ignore all those people, but it goes to show again the kinds of pressure you’ll get from people around you simply by giving your child the freedom to pursue learning on their own!

Sense of guilt, misbehavior and punishment

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 15:59:00 +0000

In the morning, I sometimes let our helper look after L while I catch a few more minutes of sleep. Today, L came back inside the room, I sort of remembered him playing with my glasses and when I woke up, my glasses was gone! I asked L where my glasses were and to my surprise, he was hesitant to answer with his baby talk! He had that guilty look in his eyes and avoided my question! When I pressed on, he then tried to show me what he was playing and gave some baby talk about balls. I asked one more time and he finally walked to the end of the bed and pointed toward a plastic bag there, then he went to climb up the crib, trying to get into it. I checked the bag but didn’t see my glasses (I couldnt see very well), I looked around the room and then finally, I went back and picked up the bag and lo and behold, my glasses, with one arm broken off. I was a little mad, I showed it to L and asked him why he did that, and that I was not happy about what he had done. (I got a feeling that I shouldn’t be asking “why did u do that”, coz I myself didn’t answer this question truthfully as a kid! Why did I do it? ‘Coz I wanted to explore! So I think I should just stick with telling L my own feelings – sadness, frustrations, etc.)

Anyways, the fact that L showed a sense of guilt means that he already knows when he had done something that he thinks I will not be pleased about! I thought that was pretty amazing and was secretly pleased about it at the time. However, thinking back now as I’m writing this, I wonder if this is actually a bad thing. I’m worried that this will grow into hiding, lying or reluctance to share troubles with us, his parents. Perhaps what I should’ve done is to remain positive and calmly let him know that it isn’t nice to break other people’s things, but then show him that I can fix it!

Another big incident this morning happen during breakfast. Perhaps because L played with toy eggs yesterday, he said eggs when we asked him about breakfast. I asked our helper to boil an egg. When it’s done, she cracked the shell, wanting to peel it for L. (Very typical, I wish she would understand my way of teaching!) I quickly stopped her and brought the egg out in a plastic bowl, with a ceramic plate for holding the shells. L was immediately interested but he reached out cautiously, so he already expected the egg to be hot. He touched it, quickly removed his hand from it and said “Hot!”. Next I peeled the shells off and put them in the ceramic plate, L started playing with them, touching them, feeling them, trying to put them back on the egg! (That was cute.) But soon he had run out of things to do with the shells, in a blink of the eye, he tossed the plate off the table! It made a loud noise and shattered spectacularly on the floor! I could see that he was stunned! I was pretty damn frustrated and I asked him that stupid question again, “Why did you do that?!” I realized what a stupid question it was and went back to feelings & reasons mode again, telling him I wasn’t happy about the throwing and breaking of the plate, explained to him how the sharp pieces will cut his feet if he walks on the floor now, and “this is why we don’t throw glass!” I’m not sure if he really got it, but I could see that he was completely absorbed in watching the helper clean up. Afterwards, I took him to the garbage bin to show him the pieces, I took out a particularly large and sharp looking piece and showed it to him, he seemed quite scared of it.

To me, the toughest part of the whole incident is when my mom yelled at me for “not teaching my child!” (slap / punish him) I got beaten by my mom quite severely as a child, and I could never (still can’t) see the benefits of it. In this incident, I could see that he was stunned and was still observing the resulting consequences. I think if you hit a child at this point, they’ll go from the “Oh shit! That was scary! Those pieces of glass look dangerous, and the plate is gone! I can’t use it again!…” thinking, discovery mode to the “Oh fuck! I’m getting beaten again! WTF? That hurts! What can I do to make mom/dad stop hitting me?!” mode. :P

Asian parents are very afraid of “losing face” when their child misbehave, worried that others will call their children 冇家教 (no home discipline) behind their backs! But I think expecting a 2 year old boy to “behave” is more unreasonable! Still, dealing with this social pressure is one of the challenges a Reggio parent will need to face here in Asia.

The Diary of Laura

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 17:43:00 +0000

The Diary of Laura is a small book published by the municipality of Reggio Emilia in 1983 that represents a milestone in the experiences of Reggio Emilia educators and stated many principles of their educational philosophy. I’ve just finished reading “The Diary of Laura – Perspectives on a Reggio Emilia Diary” and I would like to share some of the key points (to me) of the significance of a Diary or Documentation in Reggio Emilia. Almost everything below is excerpt from the first 2 chapters of the book, the actual diary is for you to discover yourself if you find the excerpts intriguing.

Educators connect with Laura’s diary in a powerful way, no matter what age group they teach, and it suggests new ways to use pedagogical documentation in early childhood programs, teacher education and to promote a family-centered, relationship-based approach to services for very young children and their families.

The diaries were used by the teachers to plan and motivate activities, to make explicit the “whys,” the reasons behind choices, the real or presumed motivations, and particularly the precise description of events.

The diary is a documentation that can offer detailed descriptions, rich with diversity of visual and photographic images, as a testimony of the epistemological event pertaining to the child as well as the teacher.

Highlights of description and commentary of microepisodes, or microstories, that give continuity to individual experiences. Laura’s diary used microstories to connect the relationships between the individual story of each child, and the story of the peer group. The peer group gives context to the individual stories, and vice versa.

Children are rarely captured isolated, the teachers’ efforts to not document the child in isolation but to consider the context surrounding the child gives rise to a contextual documentation, describing the “where” and the “how”, and also hypothesizing the “why”.

Documentation is useful to educators as practice in observation. The diaries are “ecological”, open to the constant change of conditions and to capturing situations in their richness and complexity. A precious element is the teachers’ subjective reactions to the events and lived experiences, they are passionate and engaged participants of the context, rich in emotions. The reflectiveness necessary when writing and reading (individually or in groups) is what transforms the stories into knowledge.

The diary becomes the key to a progressive curriculum development and to better planning of new spaces and activities. The environments change on the basis of those annotations, and the stories become evidence of the child and the group’s learning process.

The writing strives to capture not so much the child but the event that takes place between the child and the educator, the child and the children, the objects and spaces. Those notes are not all on the child, nor the adult, but on the dynamics that arise in their relationships. The appropriately timed use of photos and sketches with the notes are together aimed to record the significance in the captured situation. The diary is only compiled when events are considered to have new significance, when it arouses surprise in its characters and is likely to increase knowledge.

Image of a child – a child who knows and is able to do, who knows and is able to discover, suggest, involve, whenever the adult is also able to listen, see, suggest, relaunch, provoke, wonder, make hypothesis, and relate, and whenever an adult is able to document and fix in time the child’s own curiosity, hypothesis and questions, creating projects and contextualizing hypothesis and possible answers.

The current focus of the diary at Reggio Emilia’s infant-toddler center is both a child with whom it is possible to dare, because he wants to dare, as well as a child we can read in his relationships with materials, the environment, with us, with peers, a child who daily constructs his knowledge through the many languages that we are learning to value.

Laura gave us testimony of how each child possesses relational associations, knowledge, and research strategies of his or her own, strategies that are supported and valued by the environment, environment as network of relationships as well as structural environment.

If you like what you’ve seen here so far, do check out “The Diary of Laura – Perspectives on a Reggio Emilia Diary”. As a practitioner of the Reggio Emilia Approach, you’ll get a lot of push back from traditional academia. I think rereading this book and your own diaries of your children will help renew your spirit, knowing that you are on a totally different level of relationship with your children! (I certainly needed it today as I butted head with my mom about Lucien’s education!) :(

Nick

Diary - The First Reggio Parents Playgroup

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 02:38:00 +0000

Sorry about this late blog post, I just came back from Cambodia for the first Startup Weekend SE Asia Organizer Summit.

Before I left for Cambodia, we had our first parent organized Reggio playgroup in my apartment in Prince Edward on the 23rd of June. I was lucky enough to have found a Reggio Emilia educator, Sarah, who is also a mother and has been teaching with the Reggio Emilia Approach for over 6 years. Like me, Sarah worries about her own 2.5 yr old boy C’s education, so we both have good reasons to do the “parent organized playgroups”. This post is my first “diary” post for documenting the “relationships” in the playgroup.

We didn’t have anything planned out. Sarah said she could bring some watercolor and clay. The plan was to just let them play, go to the park and have lunch together.

We started off with painting on wet paper, L had never tried painting with watercolor before, we could see he was completely absorbed in it, following what C and Sarah demonstrate! We also had the clay out, which C tore into pieces and L tried painting on. This was a behavior Sarah had never seen before, perhaps because L has never had hands on play with clay or soil before, he is afraid to touch it with his bare hands, hence he used the paint brush to interact with it.

C went around to explore our apartment and found some books he’s like to see, he signaled his mom to see if it was ok to take a book out. I gave him the permission and he took one out and started to read. L is normally not too interested in the books but he followed C’s lead and picked out a few books himself.

After clean up, we went to a nearby restaurant to have lunch, one incident taught me the biggest lesson of the day. C tipped over a flower arrangement and caused the waitresses to come over and tell him “No!”, while Sarah expressed her frustrations at what happened. C felt sad and went underneath the table to cry. Rather than “fixing the problem” to get the child to stop crying, Sarah acknowledged C’s feelings, that he was sad he couldn’t play with the flowers, and asked if he needed to cuddle. C came back up to hug his mom and then he was all fine again!

After lunch, we walked to a soccer field. L ran to show C the flags, they collaborated to play with the exercise machines in the playground designed for seniors. They also got a soccer ball which L threw into the bush and couldn’t get it back, he tried to get C to help him pick up the ball but C was busy playing with the exercise machines. It was interesting to see that L got distracted and played with C on the machines, but the ball remained on the back of his mind and he tried several times to get C to follow him to where the ball was. Finally, C noticed L was signaling to him about “Ball!” (L’s favorite word) C was tall enough to see the ball, he was hesitant for a second there but decided to plunge into the bush! After he got one foot in and knew it was safe, he took another step and retrieved the ball.

When the owner of the ball took it back and left, both C and L chased after it. While I explained to L that the ball belonged to the other girl and tried to “fix the problem” by telling L that we’ll bring our own ball next time, Sarah once again just acknowledged C’s feelings, “yes, I like that ball too…” This was the biggest lesson for me – don’t solve their problems! Just acknowledge their feelings and let them deal with the problems themselves. I’ve heard and read about this before, but this was the first time I saw someone put it into action. As a Dad / guy, we tend to want to just “solve the problems” and move on! Seeing Sarah acknowledges C’s feelings taught me to allow L to deal with and internalize his problems himself.

Playing in mud can make your kids smarter!

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 14:25:00 +0000

I grew up in Hong Kong in the 70’s & 80’s, back then, almost all playgrounds were covered in concrete! My most “precious” memory of it was I tripped while running up some metal bars, fell, and my new mechanical pencil, which I kept in my pants pocket ‘coz I loved that thing soon much, poked into my thigh and hurt like hell!! (I was seriously worried about dying from lead poisoning afterwards, I was may be 6 years old!) Anyways, nowadays they use soft rubber mats instead, which to me means kids are wussy these days! Either way, I think kids would like to play more on a lawn or on tree bark (used in playgrounds in Seattle area) than on concrete or rubber mats, but how about mud and dirt? For sure the parents won’t be liking the aftermath - mud soiled clothes! So when I was living in Japan, I was really surprised to learn that kindergartens in super clean Japan actually have a “Doronkoasobi”, literally “mud play” activity for little kids to play in the mud!

Reggio Emilia Approach is all about letting the children experience and construct their own image of the world. Playing in wet mud on a hot summer day is a pleasant sensory explosion! The feeling of cool, wet mud between your fingers, between your toes, on your face, your body, and the smell of earth… kids love it, but parents may be against it due to the hassle of cleaning afterwards. Well, for those of you who are against your kids playing in dirt, consider that there’s scientific proof that playing in mud can actually make them smarter!!

Mycobacterium vaccae is a natural soil bacterium which people likely ingest or breath in when they spend time in nature. Previous research on M. Vaccae showed that it stimulated growth of some neurons in the brain that resulted in increased levels of serotonin and decreased anxiety. Serotonin plays a role in improving learning. - source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100524143416.htm

Arnold “Shuwa-chan” playing in mud to relief stress while the Predator tries the skin him

I doubt the person who mandated Doronkoasobi in kindergartens across Japan knew about these scientific facts, but I can imagine he made that intuitive choice based on his own childhood experience - probably grew up in poor post-war Japan and remembered whenever he played in the mud, he felt calm and relaxed afterwards. His body had told him long ago what scientists had recently proven! Concrete and rubber are logical decisions made by adults too lazy to deal w/ kids. I applaud the intuition of Japan to keep sand and mud in the playgrounds!

Ultra Water Stomp!!

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 01:09:00 +0000

It rained heavily yesterday morning so I brought extra clothes for L and went to the soccer field. At first he did his usual thing, chasing the birds and checking out the flags. Eventually he stumbled into this big puddle of water, it was deep enough to submerge up to the top of his feet! He stood there for a few seconds, experiencing the new sensation. He moved his feet in the water, first slowly, then faster, until he found out that he could make a BIIIIIIG splash by stomping into it! Boy did he have a great time! I stood there and watch him stomp around in the puddle for over 15 minutes! Afterwards I had to change his clothes before we could go home!

Parents, domestic helper, child relationship dynamics

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 17:52:00 +0000

Recently, our 22 month old boy L has been throwing tantrums before meals. He cries and demands milk, and would throw away the spoon and swipe at the bowl if you try to force food onto him. Our helper doesn’t know what to do so she would promise him milk after the meal, give him fresh milk in a cup to go with the meal, and sit there painfully spoon feeding him! Trying to get him to eat.

A few days ago, he woke up late from his nap and we were having lunch already. Our helper immediately started talking to him and said it was lunch time. Like reflex, he started demanding his milk! I think that was the first mistake, we shouldn’t be constantly offering things to a 2 year old toddler, especially when he had just woken up! Now I hold no degree in childhood education, but I try to look at nature and how other mammals, (including earlier humans) raise their children. Parents nowadays shower their kids with attention, but in nature or in the old days, adults are predominantly occupied with work - hunting for food and looking out for predators. Although we don’t have to hunt for food any more, we should still be modeling ourselves for the children to follow and learn from!

As for dealing with tantrums, one thing I learned from a “daddy support group” is to face it with Zen-like calm. I told our helper to continue doing her work and not respond to my son, then I smile and calmly answer his cries saying: “milk time is at 3 o’clock, it’s lunch time now, Daddy needs to eat his food now and you can eat yours on your own table.” Of course, kids at this age don’t relent easily, they’ll try things to influence you. In this case, I believe meal time should be strictly observed so I don’t give in to his demands. Whatever he does, I simply smile at him calmly, sometimes repeating the “meal time, milk time” thing. Eventually, after he has tried everything he could, he climbed up the table and took a spoonful of his food! So I helped him bring his food to his little table and he sat there and ate all by himself! The helper was surprised and impressed!

If we just look back at nature, there’s so much we can learn about the adults children relationship dynamics. I think we just need to remember that parents should act like the alpha male and the matriarch, we need to become their role models instead of following their lead! Just by understanding this alone will make a huge difference in the dynamics in your relationships with your children.

What is the Reggio Emilia Approach?

Thu, 17 May 2012 04:16:00 +0000

Hailed as the best pre-schools in the world by Newsweek magazine in 1991, the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education has attracted the worldwide attention of educators, researchers and just about anyone interested in early childhood education best practices.

Loris Malaguzzi (1920-1994) founded the ‘Reggio Emilia’ approach at a city in northern Italy called Reggio Emilia. The ‘Reggio’ approach was developed for municipal child-care and education programs serving children below six. The approach requires children to be seen as competent, resourceful, curious, imaginative, inventive and possess a desire to interact and communicate with others.

The Reggio Emilia philosophy is based upon the following set of principles:

Children must have some control over the direction of their learning;
Children must be able to learn through experiences of touching, moving, listening, seeing, and hearing;
Children have a relationship with other children and with material items in the world that children must be allowed to explore and
Children must have endless ways and opportunities to express themselves.

But enough official mumble jumble, what does Reggio Emilia mean to me?

To me, first and foremost, Reggio Emilia is a culture that values children, and that culture is created by parents. The parents of Reggio Emilia (the city) built the first school themselves after the war! It’s a community effort! At the time, a lot of the families had both parents working, but because they truly value their children, they created this system to raise their children together, literally “takes a whole village to raise a child”! Nowadays, most parents are too busy with work and with their own lives, they simply send their kids to school and expect the school make them learn. I think that’s the wrong way to do it. I actually imagine a new way of work / life adjustment for the whole society, scaling back work to 4 days a week, then 5 ~ 6 families together can take turns taking care of each others’ kids!

Secondly, REA means we as teachers don’t directly “teach” the kids. Loris Malaguzzi wrote “The Hundred Languages of Childhood” (http://www.reggiokids.com/about/hundred_languages.php)), a beautiful poem that reminds me everyday not to take 99 away from my kids, because as adults, we’re used to giving that “one definite answer”. In REA, we don’t teach kids “there’s only one correct answer”! Instead, we simply provide “seeds of ideas” for the children to construct their own knowledge with! We setup the environment, put them in conditions for discovery and learning, give them a hand or “scaffold” them when they are stuck and are about to get frustrated. Finally, we document! Documentation is one of the key things teachers do in REA.

So… “The Reggio Emilia approach to education is committed to the creation of conditions for learning that will enhance and facilitate children’s construction of ‘his or her own powers of thinking through the synthesis of all the expressive, communicative and cognitive language’” - Edwards and Forman, 1993.

Finally, REA is about culture and nature to me. It’s important to pass on your own cultural identity, your family’s culture, but also to be cross cultural, allowing the kids to grow up in a “world’s environment”, because we are all shackled by our language, a broader cultural upbringing means a broader mind. REA also emphasize outdoor play, which is something that is sorely missed in Hong Kong. I think it’s obvious that human’s removal from nature in the industrialized age is creating what may become the biggest disaster in human history! Our ways of life simply isn’t sustainable and we’re beginning to see the nature’s food chains collapsing in the eco-system. Our children are going face this unprecedented crisis, and I believe we need to put them back in nature’s environment and let their intuition teach them how to rise up to it when they grow up.

I first learned of the Reggio Emilia Approach from Sir Ken Robinson’s RSA talk on education reform, I highly encourage you to watch it as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

Why I think the education system is harmful for our children

Fri, 11 May 2012 10:03:00 +0000

I cannot say it any better than Sir Ken Robinson, if you haven’t watched his TED talks, please watch them here:

The current system of education was conceived during the intellectual culture of the enlightenment, and in economic circumstances, the Industrial Revolution. It’s modeled on the interests of Industrialization, based on a social structure of “a few elites at the top of the pyramid and a majority of low class laborers at the bottom”. Hence schools are all about conformity and standardization, getting children ready to be a slave in the system.

This used to work, in my father’s generation, it used to be that if you did well in school, you would have a job, and if you went to college, you would become management! This model is now broken. Now, civil engineers are waiting tables, masters of psychology are also waiting tables! People who have jobs are disgruntled about their dead end jobs, and young people are completely disenfranchised! As a parent, we need to open our eyes and see that schools are doing our children a disservice by herding them into this linear, overloaded system.

Here’s one frightening example on “Divergent Thinking”.

“Divergent Thinking” is an essential capacity for creativity. It’s the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of ways to interpret a question, to think laterally and not just in linear or convergent ways.

In the book “Break Point & Beyond”, scientists did a longitudinal studies of divergent thinking. A test was given to 1500 kindergartners 3 - 5 years, 98% scored above “genius” level. They retested the same children 5 years later, at the age of 8 - 10, now it’s down to 32% at or above genius level. And again, 5 years later at the age of 13 - 15, only 10% scored above genius level. Finally they did a control test to 200,000 adults, 25 years or older, only 2% scored at genius level.

We all had this capacity to think divergently, but the education system systematically educates children out of their capacity of creativity and imagination. What I hope to accomplish is to build tools that will allow us parents to more easily take charge of our children’s education, so that we can ensure their young minds can remain inquisitive and they themselves filled with confidence to explore and solve the world’s problems!

Who am I?

Fri, 11 May 2012 09:45:00 +0000

My name is Nicholas Wang. I was born in Hong Kong and went through its dreadful education system until I was 15, when I moved to Washington State in the US of A. I attended high school in a small town called Issaquah, and then went on to study at the University of Washington. For 8 years, I worked at 2 of the largest internet companies in the world, MSN.com and Yahoo.com, until 2007 when I successfully outsourced my own position to India and I was laid off. This marked the end of my corporate life, working as a “gear” in the grinding machine.

While living and working in New York, I grew more and more discontent with the inequality placed upon us “commoners” by the super rich, top 1% of our society. I wanted to challenge the incumbents and help shift the power back into the hands of the people. When I was laid off in 2007, I decided I will no longer work for corporate America and began to create a web community that will allow people to collaboratively share information about evil businesses. By chance, I met the founder of CUUSOO, Mr. Kohei Nishiyama. He started CUUSOO.com back in 1997 to let people collaborate and submit their own product designs, and if enough people want to buy that product, then factories can make it for the people! It was a revolutionary idea! And I thought if I could help bring this system out of Japan, it has the potential to change the world! Flipping the “mass-manufactured in China” business model around and giving the power back to the independent designers and makers! I moved to Japan to led the creation of the awesome “LEGO models by everyone” site, so now if 10,000 people like your model, LEGO will make it into a real, official product!

While working at CUUSOO in Japan, I created an open source project called “Open Hippel”. My idea was that if we could provide the CUUSOO system free of charge for anyone to use, then people can use it for their own communities. Users can submit issues and ideas, the top ones will get voted up so that resources can be distributed more intelligently. Then, if one of those ideas is a product, it can be sourced back to CUUSOO to be manufactured. I contacted one of my friends in Hong Kong who is a products engineer, we started Makible.com with the idea that it’ll receive product designs sourced from CUUSOO. In 2011, Makible was launched as a startup business and I moved (back) to Hong Kong to join full time as co-founder.

Here’s a talk a gave at Pecha Kucha Tokyo about “Changing the World with User Innovations”:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTqlA3I86lQ?wmode=transparent]

We also used our own system to crowdfund the “MakiBox” 3D printer project (which gathered USD $150,000+ in funds!). Our idea with the 3D printer is that currently, all the 3D printers out there are hobbyists projects that are too expensive and too intimidating for the average consumer. There hasn’t been any groundbreaking objected made with a 3D printer because only hardcore engineers are using it. What we need is to make a 3D printer for the masses. Something that is cheap like a Nintendo or Playstation, and well designed so it doesn’t look like a scary pile of metal bars bolted together! By doing these, I believe we can get our 3D printer into the hands of the gamers, the kids, the dads, the average Joe who has lots of ideas! I believe we can jump start innovations once I put this tool in their hands!

I’ve also been helping my friends at Peer-2-Peer University early on, participating and leading courses, improving its overal community’s user experience.

As you can see, I’m passionate about the “collaborative economy”, enabling users to innovate and solve problems together. I’m now starting this weekend playgroup that emphasize on “child initiated, parents framed” learning, because I think this is one of the most important thing (if not THE most important thing) we can do to change the future! You can read more about my ways of learning in the Reggio Emilia Approach page.

A Child Initiated, Parents Organized Playgroup in Hong Kong

Wed, 09 May 2012 09:05:00 +0000

The world’s population surpassed 7 billion last year, with 50% of that living in cities. Across the world, people are losing their jobs and college graduates can’t even find jobs. The system we live in is breaking at its seams, it can no longer employ and sustain the rapid expansion of human population.

So, are you satisfied with just sending your children to school to get “educated”, and hope that they’ll do OK when they grow up?

How do we educate our children to take their place in the economies and ecologies of the 21st century, when millions of people have already been marginalized by the system right now?!

I share these same concerns with you because I’m a new dad of a 21 months old boy and a 2 months old girl. Even though I’m not an educator by profession, I’ve been learning a lot about Early Childhood Education methodologies like Montessori and the Reggio Emilia Approach, and using it in my own home! So much so that my wife and I have earned a Reggio Emilia educator certificate. (My wife and I are the only 2 in Hong Kong as far as we know!)

As a concerned parent who have been working at the forefront of online collaboration, creating systems that enable user innovations like the official LEGO crowdsource model creation site, and my own internet startup Makible that sells the most user friendly 3D printer in the world, (You can find out more about me and my experience in “User Collaborative Innovations” here.) I’m now starting a parents organized playgroup on the weekends. Besides wanting to provide the best for my own children, my goal is to create a simple system for parents around the world to collaborate and form their own parents led playgroups for children from 1 to 6.

This is an effort that requires parents to be highly involved, if you share the same values as I do, and have a child of similar age as my son (~2 yrs old, “trouble 2” beginning to emerge), then let’s do this together! We can meet at my apartment in Prince Edward, where I’ll provide an environment with “seeds” for exploration. Throughout the sessions, I’ll be taking pictures and documenting the children’s every discovery, trouble and growth. Parents will receive their kids’ documentations after each session.

If you’re interested in it please tell me a little bit about yourself on this form.

Looking forward to meeting other amazing parents and kids in Hong Kong!