Description:

This book comes with access to a downloadable (.pdf) Study Guide written by the author exclusively for this special NAEYC edition.

How can we help children thrive in life and as life-long learners?

As a faculty member at Bank Street College of Education, researcher, and president of the Families and Work Institute, Ellen Galinsky has spent her career pursuing the “essential life skills” children need to cope with modern life and achieve to their full potential.

In Mind in the Making, Ellen Galinsky has grouped this research into seven critical areas that children need most:

1. focus and self-control
2. perspective taking
3. communicating
4. making connections
5. critical thinking
6. taking on challenges
7. self-directed, engaged learning

For each of these cognitive and social and emotional skills, Galinsky shows what the studies have revealed, and she provides numerous concrete things that teachers can do in their classrooms, and can help families learn to do at home—starting today—to strengthen these skills in young children.

These aren’t the kinds of skills that children just pick up; these skills have to be fostered. They are the skills that give children the ability to focus on their goals so they can learn more easily and communicate what they’ve learned. These are the skills that prepare children for the pressures of modern life, skills that they will draw on now and for years to come. From Harper.