LITTLE PIM BLOG
International Day at Emmett's School
On Friday night my family went to International Night at my son's school - this was sort of a glorified potluck dinner for the whole school with dishes from all over the world and a music performance. Because we live in Battery Park City (at the tip of Manhattan) which has a very international population to begin with, there were at least 10 countries represented. The fact that Emmett goes to school with kids from Korea, India, Australia and China is one of the things I love about his school. Even though Emmett is in one of his "picky eater' phases (OK it's more than a phase) where anything that isn't fish sticks, white meat chicken, pasta, yellow pepper or pizza meets with a resounding "no thank you!" I was happy we could share this international experience. His little brother Adrian was slightly more experimental, taking a crack at some chick peas with yellow rice.
The kids, who helped organize the evening, (along with a parent volunteer committee) drew colorful maps of each continent which hung on the walls, and the food was grouped by region. That way, as you went down the buffet line you could sample empanadas from Spain, fried ravioli from Italy and then move on to Samosas from India and sushi from Japan. Each dish was numbered so we could vote for our favorite one at the end.
We had a great time and it was a fun way to bring some of these countries my kids have not had much experience with to life through the foods they eat (we've been doing a lot of spinning our globe lately and learning about where it lands). There were also signs up all over teaching kids how to say "hello" in a variety of languages! Of course I loved that! All that was missing was Little Pim himself.
Does your child's school or daycare have an "international night" or activity? if it did, would you attend?
The iPad -- is it good for your kids?
David Pogue’s son is six years old. He’s a musician, an amateur filmmaker and loves brainteasers. It’s not that he’s a genius, it’s just that he loves the iPad. In fact, according to his father, he’s addicted!
This was the subject of a recent blog post on the NYTimes.com, and like any self-respecting parent, Pogue (tech columnist for the NY Times) is somewhat concerned by his youngest child’s newfound infatuation with his father’s toy. He’s concerned, yes, but he’s not worried.
Pogue makes a critical point: his child uses the iPad mainly for learning purposes. He plays mostly educational and creative apps: a program that lets children create animated short movies, write their own songs, or solve challenging spatial awareness puzzles. To parents who remember a world before computers, this may admittedly feel a little foreign. But the technological devices can be an invaluable tool for educational entertainment when used in conjunction with other, non-screen activities.
There’s good TV and bad TV, so why shouldn’t electronics be the same? There’s little doubt that technology like the iPad can be interactive and collaborative, and actively encourage children to think, learn and create.
Poll: What are your rules for electronics or TV?
Toy Fair 2011: From Bubbles to Blocks to Floating Fish!
We had a great time at Toy Fair last week. It was fun to reconnect with owners of some of the 800 book, toy and gift stores that carry Little Pim and make new friends and partners. Read on to see some of the cool new products we found this year. Little Pim’s Booth:
And our team (including our French distributor, Jean-Bernard Tanqueray, on left).
Why didn’t I think of this? Kids love silly hats and these new “Air Hedz” take the cake. Pirates, frogs and nurses… and great for water gun fights! Here I am as a pop star, complete with microphone.
Crocodile Creek has come out with new lightweight travel “pouch puzzles.” I especially like the World one, great for young global citizens!
Who doesn’t love bubbles? Who doesn’t hate the mess? Finally a bubble machine that doesn’t leak. In fact, it whirls and emits bubbles in a 360 degree spin. Wish I had this at my son’s third birthday party last week! Ours made a gooey spill that was a slip hazard, but the kids had a blast popping them so it was worth it.
Haba’s new “Animal Upon Animal” game is for kids four and up, and reinforces hand eye coordination, fine motor skills and just plain old silly fun of seeing cute wooden animals come tumbling down! Plus the game rules come in 6 languages! (English, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, French).
This new “Clock” from Zazoo Kids tells your toddler when it’s ok to get up … long before they know how to tell time! Invented by a mom, of course. It’s also nice that its 7" LCD screen turns into a digital picture frame once you get past that particularly unpleasant stage where your kids wake up before six am (I wish I could say we are past it in my house). You can program your own customized image for your child (it can even be his or her picture). I got one of these for my three year old.
A remote control fish swimming around the Toy Fair (actually a remote helium balloon). A great party trick!
BAM Kids Film Festival: Light of the River
This weekend I took my son Emmett (now six) to see a wonderful Japanese animated film called “Light of the River” at the BAM Kids Film Festival in Brooklyn, NY. We loved this charming film about a family of displaced river rats who use their smarts and family bonds to escape many perils while trying to get back to their beloved river home. The BAM Kids Festival is in its 13th year and introduces kids to 66 films from 23 countries -- a terrific way for young ones to “travel” and learn about other cultures.
Before the movie started, the festival organizer asked the kids to think about 1) what they liked about the movie, 2) what they didn’t like about the movie and 3) why. This film was for 4-7 year olds and the organizer pointed out to parents that these three questions provide the seeds of “critical thinking”. Taking young children to well-made films like this – and then engaging them in talking about what they saw – is an excellent way to get children engaged in analytical thinking at a young age, and build up media literacy skills. Plus, in watching “Light of the River” Emmett got to see Japan (in animated form) and hear Japanese for 75 minutes (a talented actress read the subtitles out loud right in the theater). He loved the movie and we are still talking about it two days later!
You can watch a trailer for “Light of the River” below. Sorry, there are no subtitles here, but after a few sessions with Little Pim Japanese your kids should be able to help you out!
Julia's Response to Amy Chua's "Tiger Mom"
A recent Wall Street Journal article "Why Chinese Mothers AreSuperior" has generated a significant amount of buzz and controversy lately (if you haven’t heard of it, you must not have talked to anyone over the age of four in the last two weeks. Go make a date with a girlfriend!). Mother and writer Amy Chua documents her hard-lined approach to parenting, forsaking playdates and sleepovers in favor of math drills and marathon music practices.
The article prompted an "East vs. West" battle in the blogosphere. Author Homa Sabet Tavangar of “Growing up Global: Raising Children to Be at Home in the World” points out that we’re suddenly being presented with two polar opposite views. On one side we have mothers like Amy Chua, arguing the possible benefits of being more of a “Tiger Mom” and on the other, the new documentary "Race to Nowhere" that questions America’s culture of achievement and the negative effects it may have on our kids.
So which is it? Should we be more strict and achievement-oriented, or will our children pay too high a price on a social and emotional level?
As parents, we all struggle with finding a balance between arming our children with tools for future success, and pushing them to the point where they never experience the "child" part of their childhood. Whenever possible, learning for children – especially young children – should happen in a context of fun and discovery, not “shoulds” and drudgery. In the case of foreign language learning, dry teaching and endless memorization is why most Americans did NOT learn a second language in school, and bailed on that requirement as soon as they could! Here at Little Pim we are trying to make that tired learning model a thing of the past, so kids equate a second language with pandas, kids just like them, and fun games and activities that entertain them and give them the opportunity to show off those new words.
At the end of the day, every parent has to choose a style of education and child rearing that works best for his or her family. These decisions are undoubtedly culturally influenced, but whatever we choose, the only certainty is that when our kids get older, they’ll turn around and tell us we should have done it differently!
Remarks at 2011 CES by Cisco's John Chambers, GE's Jeffrey Immelt and Xerox's Ursula Burns
The Consumer Electronic Tradeshow gave me a great chance to meet other mommy entrepreneurs in the Mommy Tech Summit**, and to hear the provocative remarks of Fortune 500 Chief Executive Officers of Cisco, Xerox and GE on a keynote panel. Of all the issues they could have spoken about, they wanted to address the need for better education of our students to prepare them to work in a global economy.
This is a topic that resonates with most parents raising their children to speak a second or third language, often doing so for some combination of cultural heritage and desire for their children to have that extra advantage in the future.
All three CEOs said our educational system is not doing enough to prepare our children for the global marketplace. Their companies need people who are able to work across borders, engage in cross-cultural teamwork and communicate with people of other cultures. Ursula Burns also noted that we are closing down our borders in the U.S. (accepting fewer immigrants and asking international students to leave) right at the time we need more international brainpower to drive innovation and execute on the entrepreneurial abundance here in the U.S. "The future of big tech is going to be compromised if we keep pushing out international talent."
The fact that fewer students from abroad can get educated here will also mean fewer bridges between our country and others. Two CEOs pointed out that they do business with people running major companies in other countries who were educated in the U.S. and therefore understand the American way of working. Personal relationships are key, and many are formed in undergrad, grad and business schools, when international students study abroad. Fewer international students today may mean fewer American CEOs at international tables in the future.
CEOs love facts and numbers and these CEOs were no different. They reminded us that there are 6 billion people in the world, only 300 million of whom are in the U.S.
- All successful big businesses are selling to and working with the international marketplace.
- Over 50% of the revenues collected by their three mega corporations (total of over $80 billion) came from OUTSIDE the U.S.
- International sales are currently the biggest growth area for most U.S. Fortune 500 corporations.
Our K-12 schools are not doing enough to prepare our kids in math, reading, science and language, so what can we do to prepare for this shift?
- Globalization is here to stay (Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, notes he revived the entire company by going global), so as leaders we need to have a "healthy paranoia" about getting left behind in the global economy. We need to pay better attention to what is happening in other countries and make sure we remain competitive.
- Companies in the U.S. need to step up and partner with the government to improve schools and provide more educational opportunities (one such example is the "Change the Equation Foundation" that helps kids improve in science and is funded by the private and public sectors)
- We need to rethink how we teach kids using new technology at our disposal (John Chambers of Cicsco mentioned his two year old granddaughter's seamless use of the iPad and questions how tablets, e-readers, and other new such devices are going to be integrated into the classroom)
Ursula Burns ended the keynote panel by saying she felt the most important question we need to be asking as a nation is "what are we going to do prepare our children to participate in the global economy?" She feels this means more science and math, and more exposure to the tools that will help our kids become global citizens.
We know that speaking a foreign language will give our kids at least one of the tools they will need... Do you agree with their take on where things are going? You can post your comments to our Facebook or Twitter page.
** Mommy Tech Summit http://www.mommytechsummit.com/
Digital moms' influence as the “chief decision maker” for their families, extended families and friends continues to grow. In turn, the Mommy Tech market has grown into a $90 billion dollar marketplace driven by tech-savvy women who are recognized as both powerful consumers and advocates for new technology.
Blogging Live From the Consumer Electronics Tradeshow (CES) in Vegas
I've spent most of my time in the "Mommy Tech" section checking out stuff that might help us keep our lives running more smoothly and wanted to share five of the interesting products I've seen... from the useful to the whimsical to the laughable.
Now you can recharge in style with the HyperJuice portable batteries, that allow you to recharge your Mac devices on the go and come in great bright colors! The smallest one is about the size of a Tic Tac case but will allow you to power an iPhone or iTouch eight times! These are great for when your toddler's iTouch runs out of juice in the back seat or on a long trip. Now they can watch Little Pim until they learn all the words, not until your phone dies!
Being a mom of two boys, it was mandatory that I stopped by the Hot Wheels booth to see how they're changing the future of toy car racing. Hot Wheels has given us a sneak preview of a race car that is also a video camera! Your child or even toddler just switches on the button and this little racer takes moving video while zipping across the floor! You can then upload it to your computer where your five-year old can turn it into a little movie. Welcome to the cars of the future!
VUniversal Moblie Neklit - here I am modeling this string around the neck where you can just stick your phone on to it and pull it back off, with the ease of Velcro (it's not). I think it would be great to have one less thing to look for in my bag (otherwise known as the bottomless pit!).
Eye-Fi Wi-Fi: Memory card and built-in Wi-Fi
Upload your pictures without messing with a bunch of cables. You just put this chip in your camera and it allows your computer to download the pictures you just took via wireless upload. This is perfect for sending birthday party pictures to grandma from a remote location (or pictures from a tradeshow for your blog).
Dry-all – First Aid for Wet Electronics
For phones that have gotten wet (let's face it, our phones are living in a high risk environment around cups of orange juice, baby spit and bath time!), this genius idea zaps moisture using high tech absorbent pellets. Leave your phone in this box for a few minutes and presto, it's good as new!
I also liked that the demo video at the booth features the president of sales' 20 month old putting her phone in the toilet. Has that ever happened to you?
TV Hat – your personal theater
I had to model this one too... if you see someone on the beach wearing this hat you'll know they are actually catching up on Desperate Housewives re-runs!
Kristof asks, "Primero Hay Que Aprender Espa ol. Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen." Why not both?
Nicholas Kristof was already one of my favorite New York Times journalists*, so I was thrilled to see him taking up the topic of foreign language teaching to kids in his recent column “Primero Hay Que Aprender Espanol, Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen” (translation: First learn Spanish, then study Chinese). If you missed it, Kristof makes the case that even though we are seeing a huge increase in parents teaching their young children Chinese, parents should really be encouraging their kids to learn Spanish. He notes that by 2050 our nation is on track to be 29% Spanish speaking and we are increasingly doing business with Latin American countries. He also makes the sobering case that more of us will be retiring to Latin America, where the living is cheaper. He says Chinese is more of a “specialty” language that will only help our kids if they become proficient and choose to work with China. which should remain in the foreseeable future one of the world’s economic super powers.
Here at Little Pim we have also seen the rising popularity in Chinese (it is our second best-selling language, neck in neck with French, after Spanish) and have noticed another trend – that more and more parents are choosing to introduce their children to TWO languages in addition to English. Thousands of parents in the United States are getting their babies and toddlers going on some combination of Chinese and Spanish or Chinese and French.
We field many calls and emails about this each week. Often parents explain that the Chinese is to give their kids what they think will be a competitive advantage in tomorrow’s economy, and the romance language is to honor a family heritage, or because one of the parents speaks that language and can help with it at home.
The benefits to kids of learning more than one language during early childhood are widely documented (it improves memory, advances verbal and math skills and analytic thinking). What about the benefits of two? Research shows that a child can learn up to three languages without any confusion. The learning results are even better if one of the languages is spoken at home, and if the languages have a different base, such as Chinese, which is tonal, and French, which is a romance language. A child will never confuse “sourire” with xiao' or '笑'. But they might confuse “sonreía” (Spanish) and “sourire” (French).
Ultimately choosing a language, or languages, for your child is a very personal choice that takes into account your hopes for your child’s future (will she be part of a multi-national company someday? Will he be able to travel, work and live abroad? Can she communicate with family members who don’t speak English?). But whatever language parents choose, their children will be getting a huge advantage over their monolingual peers. Spanish is by far still the leading language being studied in the U.S., with 88% of all foreign language classes in schools in Spanish (per the Today Show – link to the home page video here?).
Picking up a THIRD language is much easier once a child has learned a second one, so rather than dwell on “Which Language is Best,” debate, parents should just dive in and know their children may make their own choice later about what language they want to learn, and it will be fairly easy for them to make that change if they have a solid base in any language.
My own sons, Emmett and Adrian, have been learning French since they were babies, because of my family connection to France (I know Spanish or Chinese might be more “useful” in their careers) but if they get to high school and decide they want to learn Chinese or Spanish I will happily let them change, and know they will have a much easier time understanding the grammar rules and acquiring new vocabulary thanks to their years of French.
What do you think? Are you considering introducing your child to two languages? Do you know people whose kids are studying Chinese and a romance language? We’d love to hear from you. Take our new QUIZ on our homepage about which language/s your child should learn, if you haven’t chosen yet.
*Kristof is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist, who writes powerfully about pressing international women’s issues, such as inadequate maternal health care and the shameful ongoing slavery of young girls, notably in his book Half the Sky, written with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn. Kristof resides outside New York City with his wife and their three children: Gregory, Geoffrey and Caroline.
5 Tips for Managing TV Time During the Holidays
It’s the holidays! That means fun things like family, treats, presents. But for many of us, it’s also darker, shorter, colder days. If you are like me, you might be asking yourself, “How are we going to keep the kids busy all day when they can’t play outside?”
Then it’s school vacation! What to do? When you have run out of the art projects, cooking projects and sorting through old toys to make room for new ones, you might be tempted to resort to TV, the computer or handing over your iPhone/iPad. Or maybe you just want to sleep in, and the TV makes a pretty good babysitter between 6 and 7 am.
This can bring up feelings of guilt and questions about how much is too much “screen time”. I recommend a great book on the subject called “Into the Mind of Babes” which helps you sort through some of the best information – and misinformation – out there about the effects of TV on your little ones’ minds. In the meanwhile, here are some of my tips for keeping screen time in check and using media as a positive force in your kids lives.
5 tips for managing screen time during the holidays:
1. Decide in advance with your partner how much “screen” time is OK to have each day. Tell the kids what that is, and everyone needs to stick to it. If the kids ask to watch their second show you can say “we all agreed to one hour a day and you’ve already used that up, sorry!”
Make sure they know that screen time includes TV, computer and digital media players (iTouch, iPad, etc). That can seem obvious to us, but not always to them.
2. Teach your kids the expression “mush brain” from watching too much TV. This will help them realize there is a such a thing as TV overload (my kids have used the expression on their own since I taught it to them!)
3. Don’t only use TV as a babysitter. Make sure to watch special made for kids movies with them during the holidays (we recently watched “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” as a family and had a great time).
Make sure to talk about the movie with them after viewing. Movies can be great springboards for conversations about emotions and things kids think about. (How did Charlie Brown feel when they made fun of him? How would you feel if you had spell a hard word in a spelling bee?)
4. Use TV time for “soft teaching” – let them watch TV, but try to mix up the “eye candy” entertainment with videos about science, nature, language learning or music. Many parents feel good about Little Pim because their kids are having fun “watching TV” but parents know they are learning a new language.
5. Use TV time as a special reward (“after we read these 4 books… “ or “after we clean up your room”).
Happy Holidays!
3 Tips For Using HubSpot's Blogging Application
Tip 1: Embedding Video into Your Blog
To embed a video like the one above, you'll need to do the following:
- Most video sites like YouTube have an "embed" source code that you can copy and paste. For YouTube, this code is listed just to the right of the video itself, under a person's username.
- Open up the HTML Editor in HubSpot by clicking the "HTML" button in the toolbar. Then, paste in the source code at that point of the article you'd like the video to show up.
- Save! This tip will work on the rest of the CMS as well, not just in the blog. Just click on "Add Module", and add an HTML module. You'll be able to paste in the source code directly, and the video will exist as a stand alone module on your site.
Tip 2: Automate Your Social Media Publishing
If you use the HubSpot blogging platform, then we'll be able to automatically publish your content for you. To set up Social Media Publishing, complete the following steps:
- We need to add your social media credentials before we can automate your blog publishing to their feeds. Under the Promote tab, open up HubSpot's Social Media application.
- Click the "Social Media Accounts" button. When prompted, add your credentials for the social media sites you'd like to publish to.
- Once your credentials are entered, head back to your blog's homepage and click on the "Options" link (to the right of the "Create Article" link).Your blog options will appear.
- Click on the Social Media Publishing tab. Under Social Media accounts, check off the boxes of the social media feeds you'd like your blog to publish to automatically. Remember to click "Update" at the bottom of the screen.
- When publishing content to your networks, you’ll need a line of explanatory text to let people know what they’re seeing. To write this line, write your slug in the "publishing slug" field, directly above the list of your social media acccounts. This is the text that will appear in Facebook and Twitter along with a link to the blog article. For example, you might write "Check out my new blog post!"
Tip 3: Text Formatting 101
You can edit the fonts of your website by going to Settings > Template Configuration in HubSpot, and then click on "Advanced Configuration". Throughout this list, you'll see places where you can change the font of your different headers.
One caveat to this, however: The fonts you can use on a website are dependent on the fonts that are available on a visitor's machine. If you try to name a font that the user does not have on their computer, it will default back to something standard (usually Arial or Helvetica).
Most machines are preinstalled with dozens of fonts, so the trick is knowing which fonts are likely to be installed on which computers. For a list of the fonts supported on most browsers, view this article on Success.
