Starting School: Wemberley Worried, Chicken Chickens, Kindergarten Diary, The Kissing Hand, My Name is Yoon

New school nerves
BETWEEN THE LINES Annie Ho (familypost@scmp.com) Jun 24, 2012
As summer approaches, I think back to that summer before my elder daughter started school. I was pregnant and on bedrest, so a summer holiday away from Hong Kong was out of the question. To give my daughter something to do besides building forts out of sofa cushions in our living room, I signed her up for a summer session at a kindergarten that had just opened near our home. It turned out to be a good idea because the session was like a dress rehearsal for the kindergarten where she'd be spending the next four years. That summer, my daughter spent her weekday mornings playing unaccompanied at school, while I logged on from home to the school's webcam to observe her activities. And in the afternoons, we would play games and read books about starting school, such as Kevin Henkes' Wemberly Worried and the Chinese translation of Valeri Gorbachev's Chicken Chickens Go to School. By this time, we were both used to my limited mobility. In hindsight, this also helped to build my daughter's independence and school readiness. With its story told in the course of the first day of school, Chicken Chickens is easy for a two-year-old to understand. It starts with mother hen taking her apprehensive twin chicks to school and ends with mother hen at after-school pick-up, seeing two happy chicks that can't wait to return the following day. Wemberly Worried is a brightly illustrated book about a little mouse who worries about "big things, little things, everything". So it's no surprise that her list of worries about the first day of school is long - and written out in extra-large font. The endearing writing style made it easy for a reserved girl like my daughter to relate to little mouse Wemberly. Since that summer, we've read more stories about school, and it's interesting to observe my daughter's growing command of narrative. This translates to highly interactive storytelling sessions where she will point out things in the background of a scene, or relate an illustration back to her own school experience. Kindergarten Diary by Antoinette Portis is written in first-person diary form by a little girl who is starting kindergarten. Written in the language of a five-year-old, Portis gives an amusing view of those first few weeks of school. I'm always looking for books that are not girl-focused which I can introduce to my friends with sons. I recently discovered a good one: The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn. Although it is a story about a boy raccoon starting school, the theme is separation. Mrs Raccoon shares her "kissing hand secret" with her son. And that kissing hand secret can be used to comfort children whenever they need to be separated from their parents. This summer, I plan to read aloud Helen Recorvits' My Name is Yoon to my daughter, to prepare her for her upcoming school year with new teachers and new classmates. This heart-warming story is about a girl who moves to a new school in a new country where everyone speaks a new language. It isn't until she makes her teacher laugh aloud that she feels a connection to, and finds her place in, her new environment. All of these stories point to the big difference a special new friend can make in helping a child ease into the daunting experience of being on his own. When my daughter was at summer school, that special someone was a young American teacher with flowing honey-coloured hair. The teacher always gave long hugs to my daughter and my daughter believed her teacher to be a real princess. And in the case of her early weeks at her current school, it was the bathroom attendant who made my daughter feel special. She always called out my daughter's name whenever she saw her, giving her encouragement with potty training. In fact, people like these treat all children with warmth and sensitivity, but have the ability to make each child feel that he's been given special attention. When I'm reading aloud to my elder daughter, my younger one often puts down whatever she's playing with to clamber onto the sofa and join in the fun. She seems particularly interested in these stories about going to school. Fortunately, I have another year of mother-baby activities before my younger daughter starts going to school on her own. "Between the Lines" will take a break over the school holidays and resume in September. Have a happy summer. Annie Ho is a board governor of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong, a non-profit organisation devoted to improving children's literacy through reading aloud bringmeabook.org.hk

Father's Day - Raising Boys and Strong Father, Strong Daughter

How to be a heavyweight champ
BETWEEN THE LINES Annie Ho (familypost@scmp.com) Jun 17, 2012
When I told my husband I wanted to write about fatherhood, and, more specifically, the parenting styles of fathers, he issued a challenge: "I'll bet you can't write about fathers without some anecdote about our kids and me." With that said, I threw down the gauntlet and accepted the challenge to refrain from personal experience. Fathers have come a long way from the distant stereotypes described in history. There is now a new breed of father. Author Steve Biddulph calls them "lightweight good-time dads". LGDs appreciate the importance of devoting themselves to their children and will gladly give up time and money to express their devotion. And yet when it comes to really parenting, LGDs tend to leave that to their partners. I see LGDs around Hong Kong all the time. They carry the diaper bags and spend their weekends at the playground. They edit family photos to post online. All this is undertaken with genuine pride and enthusiasm. But can they spend weeks trying to get their child to behave, or even pack a diaper bag? We all have a clear idea of what "mothering" means: to care for, protect or act maternally towards a child. That is a dictionary definition. But when it comes to "fathering", I think of the phrase "to father a child". To me, that just sounds like begetting or procreating. Of course, fathers do a lot more than beget children. The experts say that we cannot underestimate the role of fathers beyond being LGDs. Their role has become even more important in our complicated modern society. For fathers of sons, Biddulph's Raising Boys explains the importance of nurturing boys to help them develop emotional awareness and empathy. For fathers of daughters, Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters by Dr Meg Meeker is a best-selling book that underscores the need for fathers to strengthen the bond with their daughters because this relationship will determine the course of a young woman's life. Meeker's research shows that fathers have a much stronger impact on girls than mothers. Even an absent father plays a role in a daughter's view of herself and other men in her life. Biddulph also emphasises the great influence of fathers on their sons, especially so between the ages of six and 14. His book gave me a rare insight into how different little boys are in their physiology and mental capacity compared with girls. Both of these books seem to suggest that children take it for granted that mothers will just carry on with their mothering. But children turn to their fathers for guidance on the kind of person they ultimately become. Although research seems to confirm that being a mother is a thankless job, it has also found children can truly benefit from fathers who move to the heavyweight division.  Happy Father's Day. Annie Ho is a board governor of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong bringmeabook.org.hk a non-profit organisation devoted to improving children's literacy through reading aloud to them

Picasso Exhibition at Heritage Museum in Sha Tin, Hong Kong - When Pigasso Met Mootisse

Master's strokes prove too abstract for preschoolers
BETWEEN THE LINES Annie Ho (familypost@scmp.com) Jun 10, 2012
My four year-old daughter refers to Pablo Picasso as "Pigasso". It's not a problem with her enunciation because even I say Pigasso when I'm speaking to her. That's because her first exposure to the great artist came from a children's storybook, When Pigasso Met Mootisse, by Nina Laden. Laden illustrates the characters and their environment in the styles of Picasso and Matisse. Pigasso's friends have misshapen eyes and the apple tree in his yard has flat geometric facets. Mootisse's friends have bright red monochromatic bodies and his garden has rows of paper cut-outs of leaves. In this storybook, Pigasso the pig and Mootisse the bull are famous painters who want to escape the demands of their growing fame, so they move to neighbouring houses in the countryside. They become friends but have a disagreement that "escalates into a monumental modern art mess". In the end, they realise the importance of their friendship when they accidentally create a masterpiece artwork together. The real life story of Picasso and Matisse's lifelong friendship is told at the end of the book in language aimed at young children. For primary school children, Laurence Anholt's Picasso and the Girl with the Ponytailis another well-written and well-illustrated story about a little girl who was Picasso's neighbour. She overcame her shyness when she posed for him, and grew up to become an artist herself. This book is one of a series by Anholt. Each title showcases reproductions of an artist's work woven into a true story of that artist and a child in his life. When Pigasso Met Mootisse was a wonderful way to introduce my daughter to Picasso before our visit to Sha Tin's Hong Kong Heritage Museum to view his work. I surmised, correctly, that the exhibition would not attract the attention of a pre-schooler, especially one who is enthralled by the wide variety of illustrations in quality children's picture books. In any event, it was an outing for myself as much as for my daughter. In the eyes of an adult, a painting that evokes emotions, positive or negative, through its interpretive quality is a good painting. In the eyes of a child, a painting that evokes positive emotions through straightforward depiction is a good painting. Picasso once said: "I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them." So when viewing a painting from his Cubist period, my daughter could not grasp why an "auntie" would be drawn with triangular eyes and a nose at her temples. Perhaps the reason my daughter was less enthused by the exhibition than I was is that children have an undeveloped "theory of mind". Theory of mind is the ability to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own. The ability to appreciate abstract or conceptual art requires theory of mind. I enjoyed the Picasso exhibition because I was able to see so many paintings and sculptures beyond his trademark Cubist style. There were Van Gogh-influenced portraits and still-life paintings, and proportional rotund nudes in a neo-classical style. The one painting that captivated my daughter was a colour-dotted work in the style of Georges Seurat's pointillism. It seemed that every parent and child who visited the exhibition that day paused to study and discuss that painting. This technique of painting involves small dots of colour applied in patterns to form an image. It was fascinating for the children to have a close-up view of the coin-sized dots that filled the large canvas, then step back into the middle of the gallery to take in the whole image. For my daughter, the highlight of the visit was playing at high speed and high volume in the museum's Children's Discovery Gallery. My younger daughter also joined in the fun and games. The Picasso exhibition will be at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum until July 22. Annie Ho is a board governor of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong bringmeabook.org.hk a non-profit organisation devoted to improving children's literacy through reading aloud to them and providing easy access to the best children's books for underserved communities across Hong Kong.

Bilingual Children: Patricia Kuhl, Early Language & Brain Development Expert

They're the brainy bunch
BETWEEN THE LINES Annie Ho (familypost@scmp.com) Jun 03, 2012
People raising children in Hong Kong recognise the importance of bilingualism. Local parents hope for their children to speak English fluently, and expatriate parents appreciate opportunities for their children to learn Chinese. We want our children to be bilingual so that they can understand another culture, communicate with a wider group of people and improve career prospects when they enter the workforce. What if I told you that bilingual kids have better brains? This is the finding of cutting-edge research by Professor Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington who was in Hong Kong last month to talk about how early exposure to language alters the brain. Kuhl is internationally recognised for her research on early language and brain development and on studies that show the unique way young children learn. I found it very reassuring to see scientific evidence back up our general sense in Hong Kong that we should expose our children to different languages. Most of us are aware (perhaps from the painful experience of trying to learn a new language in adulthood) that the ability to learn a new language decreases with age. But what I didn't know until Kuhl's talk is that babies learn a language more easily and more organically than the rest of us because their brains are implicitly and automatically taking statistics of which neural connections to strengthen and which to "prune". Of particular interest is Kuhl's finding that children who are bilingual have greater mental flexibility than those who are monolingual. This translates to the ability to adapt to new situations quickly, to switch from following one set of rules to a new set of rules - even beyond childhood. That said, the big surprise of the evening, which drew gasps from the audience, was Kuhl's finding on the effect of watching television on babies' brains. Using a multimillion-dollar machine that maps out brain activity, she found that watching a television show in a foreign language had absolutely no effect on babies. In short, your baby may be staring at the screen as if they are absorbing every detail from that DVD which promises to make your baby a genius, but there isn't much brain activity happening. Kuhl's recommendations: teach in a social context (children learn from people, not machines); promote mental flexibility through bilingual education; and read to children every day. Many English-language children's books come in bilingual editions. Felicia Hoshino's Sora and the Cloud, in English and Japanese, specifically introduces children to common Japanese expressions. Mantra Lingua, a British publisher, has a number of bilingual children's books in English and every language under the sun. For parents who want to introduce Putonghua stories to their children but are themselves are non-speakers, I recommend the picture books of Lai Ma. Not only do his books come with English translations as well as a CD of readings in English and Putonghua, but he is also my favourite writer and illustrator of children's books in Chinese. Now Do You Know Who I Am?is a story in which 33 animals get ready for day-long outing. Each two-page spread shows all 33 animals in their shared activities, with so much for the reader to explore, from learning to count to finding specific animals. It's a zany and high-octane picture book that my elder daughter asks for again and again. You're welcome to contact me for additional Chinese picture books that comwith English translation as well as a CD of readings in English and Putonghua. Annie Ho is a board governor of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong www.bringmeabook.org.hk a non-profit organisation devoted to improving children's literacy