A Well-Lit Path: A Blog from Westtown School

The shorter days and longer nights of the season offer the perfect time to read aloud with your children. Even if your child  is reading independently, it is still important to read aloud together. It is good for children to hear fluent readers and reading aloud offers the opportunity for them to learn more challenging vocabulary and content.

When reading picture books together, make sure to take time to look at the illustrations or photos together. Talk about what you notice. Search for the visual details that add so much to the story. This helps develop visual literacy skills that are important for children. Academic skills aside, reading together is a cozy way to spend a chilly evening with your child!

Have you ever been in a conversation about sustainability or environmental stewardship and immediately felt judged by those around you? Perhaps you perceived judgment from others, even if nothing was said. Think about how that was a turn-off. Did you feel defensive? Did you feel ready to cooperate with a group in which you felt judged?

No question, our children are precious and we want the best for them. Grades, athletics, community service, and test scores are all important, especially when considering college admission. Important but urgent? Life-or-death? Make or break? No way.

I am the Dean of Students at a competitive independent school where college is most definitely the end point of high school, and not just any college, but a “good” college according to the new experts, Mr. Forbes and Ms. US News and World Report.  I am here to suggest that we, as parents,  need to step back, take a few cleansing breaths, and relax. Anyone who has weathered a real crisis, the kind where you lose your job and have no money in the bank, or the sort that rubs up against near death, or even worse, death, and suddenly worrying about about an SAT score, or an 82 versus a 92, seems like a luxury of the mink coat variety. 

Here are four reasons to encourage the use of perspective when considering your teenager’s high school experience:

Anticipation of conferences with teachers creates a whole range of feelings for parents:  nervousness, excitement, curiosity, uncertainty. The most successful conferences are based on dialogue – a back and forth of sharing what the teacher and the parent know and hope for the child. You, as the parent, know the child as no one else. You are the advocate, the realist, and the holder of aspirations.  

The teacher knows the child as a learner. How does s/he approach the tasks of learning?  How does the child learn and play within a community of other children? The parent sees the child as one, and the teacher sees the child as a unique one in relation to many other children. When those two perspectives are combined, the strongest partnership between home and school can be built.  

The Top Six Myths About Boarding Schools

 
There are common misconceptions about boarding schools. Movie depictions of boarding schools might lead you to believe that they are havens for rich kids who misbehave, are full of uniformed-clad elitists, or are homes for wizards. These notions are far from the reality. Let’s dispel the most common myths about boarding schools:

Being needed, wanted, and adored is the parenting trifecta that gets us through the sleepless nights, the relentless demands, and the bodily functions of early childhood.  The helpless dependence, passionate attachment, and jubilant ardor offset the challenges associated with parenting youngsters. Moreover, we are in control. If our child isn't complying, we usually can "make them." This sense of control, coupled with those wonderful feelings, define what parenting is typically about before the tween and teen years. 

Even though we all know adolescence is inevitable, we often remain under the delusion that somehow our wonderful parenting or our child's easy-going disposition will prevent the door slamming, sullen silences, reckless button pushing, poor decision making, and disrespectful dialogue typical of the teenage years. We hope that through studied intervention we will remain in control throughout our child’s at-home years.

It truly takes a village…and at some point in your little one’s life, school and teachers will become a part of yours. As we approach Labor Day, many of you are preparing to send your child to school for the first time. By now you will have received your child’s class assignment and teacher. There probably have been excited (and exhausting) trips to pick out the required school supplies and a new backpack. As a mom myself, I know what the frenzied days leading up to that first morning can be like, and I want you to be armed with some tools to help you (and your child) survive that first day “outside the bubble.”

Whether we’re in a hammock, on a boat, in a beach chair, or on the back porch swing, a book is often our summertime companion. Summer is the time to catch up on literary treasures and, of course, our guilty reading pleasures.

Teachers and school staff especially relish time to read books that are not job related. We asked the faculty and staff at Westtown School for some of their favorites.

Here’s what they said:

The Tween years are perhaps the most volatile and complex years in human development. While the child is at an age in which the focus is on trying to figure out self-identity in relation to others, it can be a phenomenal time to foster global awareness.

By now, your not-so-little-one will have developed a sense of intentionality. By that, I mean the ability to generate an idea they wish to pursue and the capacity to act with focus and persistence in order to make it happen. They can look into the future and understand the effects of their actions. Thus, it is a ripe age for pushing forth toward global awareness.

So, how can you capitalize on your child’s new sense of self in order to engage with the collective global village? Here are a few suggestions: