Chapter Contents:Play for Success
:How to raise imaginative and creative children and have fun and appreciate your children at the same time
.Chapter Contents:
Modes of Play behavior
Understanding the Nature of Character
Establishing the Kind of Family You Want
Don't be Evaluative About Your Child's Being
Types of Debriefing Extentions
Setting Up A Time To Relax And Create
What Does This Method Have To Do With Imagination?
Physicalizing And Vocalizing As A Way To Express Yourself
Teaching Your Child A Vocabulary For Communicating Internal processes
Play Behavior
Modes of play behavior.
The most important mode of play behavior is performance mode. In performance mode your child demonstrates the ability to behave as if he or she is somebody else. He may hop like a rabbit, moo like a cow, talk like a cowboy, or sing like a rock star. Initially, your child may enter performance mode for as little as ten seconds at a time. Gradually, the concentration, focus, and skills necessary to extend the time period will develop. Your job is to encourage your child to change the way that he or she walks and talks as a way of understanding character and expanding social consciousness. The social philosopher George Herbert Mead said that the most step in becoming a social being is the ability to take the role of another person towards yourself. This means that a child must learn to put himself in another person's shoes and from that stance, observe himself. Performance mode play behavior is an important step in developing this social consciousness. In addition, performance mode behavior is an important ingredient in what sociologist Erving Goffman describes as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman tells us that an important social skill is the ability to engage in impression management, that is the ability to have people respond to us in a particular way. Successful trial lawyers, for example, can get a jury to have a particular impression of their performance as a lawyer. So performance mode behavior is an important skill for many reasons. Initially what you see in performance mode are very short scenes and characters that are inconsistent from scene to scene or from activity to activity. One day, firefighter Frank might talk in a low voice and take big steps. The next day, firefighter Frank might talk in a high voice and run around in circles. This inconsistency is to be expected as children try on various aspects of characterization. But at some point, you might want to encourage your child to recall yesterday's performance and re-enact a character similar to the character that was enacted yesterday. Once your child is able to do that, this is a sign of the beginnings of grownup creativity. When your child can recall the image, the voice, and the walk of firefighter Frank, that's creativity. You can actually see some of this in a five or six year old child. But you should not expect to see that in a three-year-old child.One of the niftiest aspects of performance mode is what we call rehearsal for life. In a safe environment together with a parent and another child or two, children get to try on characters, relate in different ways to their parents and peers, without any fear of failure or reprisals. Children get to find out how they like to be and what kinds of things others value and respond to positively.
Narration mode. Narration mode is the primary mode of young children in which they simultaneously play and tell you about what they are playing. For example, a two or three year old will say "I'm Allegra and I'm a firefighter, watch me" and pretend to drive a firetruck for about ten seconds and then look to her parent for approval. Your role is to participate with your child to keep the narration going and to try to extend the transition into performance mode. Allegra, for example says "Allegra is dancing" when the tape of Baby Rock comes on. She narrates what she's doing because she doesn't think her performance is strong enough to communicate to her performance to you in a way in which you will understand it as meant it to be understood. As she gets older, she will have more confidence that you understand her performance and she won't need to narrate it. Another thing that happens with three and four year olds is that they begin to enter performance mode and then switch to narration mode to assign roles to other participants. For example, Allegra is tucking in her stuffed animal and saying "good night sleep tight" and then she says to Natty "you lay in bed." She is assigning her brother an action. Later on, she will assign her brother a role -- eg., "you be daddy."
Planning mode. Planning mode is when kids actually spend some time figuring out what they want to do before they actually do it. You can encourage them to do that. For example, if you say to your child, "Here are three hats. I'll wear this cowboy hat, you wear that baseball hat, and Natty will wear the firefighter hat." Then you ask the group "what could the three of us talk about when we are wearing these hats?" An early expected response is if each person independently described their job. eg. "I'm a firefighter and I put out fires. I'm a baseball player and I play baseball. I'm a cowboy and I rope steers." A six year old response might be "let's show each other how we do our jobs." A grown-up response, in contrast, might be "well here we are at the unemployment office. There just don't seem to be many openings for cowboys firefighters and baseball players these days."
Preparing to play
Many of these activities require that you bring props, costumes, magazines, and other stimuli to do the activity. The act of preparation is something you can do together with your child. For example, the exercise Animals requires that you have close-up pictures of animals. As a method of preparation you have several choices. You can plan a trip to the zoo. You can get a zoo video. You could go through magazines and cut out and save pictures of animals. You can look through an animal storybook and talk about the animals. The preparation builds anticipation and excitement about doing the activity. You need to be a scavenger, to search out thrift shops, craft stores, and garage sales to find many of the stimulating objects described in these activities
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Understanding the nature of character
Initially when children enter performance mode, they try to duplicate the behavior of the character. For example, they bark like a dog, meow like a cat, hop like a rabbit. At about five or six children may be able to understand the concept that if a cat could talk his voice would sound like_???. Here they can understand the concept of being "catlike." You can help them develop this overlaying of two very different characters by taking them to the play Cats, by readings tories like The Three Little Kittens and using distinctive voices that suggest the sound that the animal makes.
What this does is that it helps kids understand characteristics of people in general. They can understand that a person can have some animal types of characteristics. And an animal can have people-like characteristics (like they can love you, be loyal etc.)
One thing that parents often worry about is that if they go into the imagination realm, their kids will never come back. Research suggests that you don't need to worry about this. One procedure you should always do, however, is to establish when you are playing and when you are not. When you move into performance mode, a good side coach might be" Let's all play X." Or, "why don't we imagine that we are Y." Or "what would happen if we Z (e.g. all laid down on the floor.)" These kinds of statements do several things. They establish the performance mode. They help kids entertain possibilities. And they give kids permission to do what they are already doing--playing
.A good way to end the performance mode and to re-enter reality is to say something like "let's all be ourselves now. Let's finish up this exercise. or What was the name of the exercise we were doing." Statements like this legitimize what the child was just doing and help him or her transition back to reality mode.
Children really like repetition. They like to hear the same story over and over, they like to play the same games over and over. If you are going to make a change, then as historian you need to say "remember we used to play the game like this, now we will play it a different way." The good thing is that they know that you know and you know that they know so you have a shared secret--a shared view of the world.
Secret sharer is a very important sub-role. The two of us have the same experience and we can talk about it and we can use it as a template by which to compare a current experience. You can develop this relationship in early childhood. It's a relationship that becomes very meaningful right up to old age. At an old age home, the old lady may say, "remember when the two of us used to eat ice cream etc." It also reinforces the child's sense of the reality of the world. We both experienced this with our senses and we can talk about it and bring it back from our memory storehouse. Note: we must make up an exercise called the secret sharer. This kind of activity in which children have special knowledge over and above everybody else is very empowering. A good example is in a play in which the good guy is being attacked by the bad guy. The good guy doesn't know that the bad guy is going to get him but the audience of kids knows it. They say look "look look behind you." They look at the person seated next to them and the two of them share that knowledge. This can also give the child the power to question something his teacher says -- to extend knowledge in new directions. The emotional component of that experience is "I know something that an expert may not know."
We're going to include a chapter for parent's exercises. One of the most important concepts is the expressive modeling of voice. We will describe how to listen to the sound of your voice and record it and listen to it.
Another thing is that we want to mention the importance of being a smiling modeler. We will write about the importance of developing smiley children in terms of teacher and peer preferences for smilers.
The literature on creative families attests to the fact that many of these families, siblings, as well as kids and parents, describe a secret world that only those admitted to it know about. Developing such a world with your child can help draw you closer together, help your child see the child in you, as well as help the two of you make boundaries between reality and imagination. As your child gets older, you can add to this world, play in this world, and when this world is abandoned, reminisce fondly about the imagination of childhood. We know many college students who take their childhood toys away with them to their dorm to help them get back to this world when adulthood becomes troubling. Helping your child develop a private family world of imagination is an extremely positive objective
.It's important when you create spells or magic potions that you not set up the activity so that the magic potion can't work within the boundaries of the activity. For example, you don't want to have your child drink a magic potion in order to fly unless you can establish that this is magic flying not reality flying. Children can never fly or disappear, or turn into animals except in an imaginary world that is created by the two of you. This distinction must be carefully made. Your child may ask, for example, "Will I really fly?" You may answer a two-year-old by saying, "you can pretend fly". You can answer a three-year-old by saying, "we can fly in the world that we imagine." And you can answer a four or five year old by saying "how can we make it look as if we are flying? You know of course that we can't really fly."
Establishing the kind of family you want
A family is a system that has boundaries that separate those inside the family from everyone else who is outside the boundaries of the family. The boundary is in part created by those activities that go on within the family. These activities can just happen willy nilly or be part of a clear plan to establish how you want your family to be. Those families that value learning knowledge, creativity and imagination, do things in the family that inculcate these values. Many of the activities in this book can help to create a strong sense of belonging to a special family. Family stories and family myths also create a strong family identity. The experiences shared through doing the activities in this book and recorded in the journal that you will keep from a rich storehouse of stories that give the family a unique history. Sitting down together and talking about "the time we made that magic potion..." is a mechanism for creating a cohesive family, a family to which your children will want to return and participate in even after they've passed through their teenage years.
DON'T BE EVALUATIVE ABOUT YOUR CHILD'S BEING
If your child says to you "these seven objects are magic" you can't say, no they're not. You can say
It's important for children to learn to think on their feet. This is an improvisational skill. Children may not know how to answer at first but in trying to formulate an answer they will figure out a way to know. You don't want to "grill" your child and make them feel foolish if they cannot provide an answer.
Some activities stand by themselves. Others are part of a series of activities that involve doing the activity, debriefing after the activity, and using the activity as a stimulus for other creative projects
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In the fifties, families gathered together in front of the television to watch the Ed Sullivan Show. Today many lament the lack of family values. One way to inculcate these values is to institute shared activities. In our family we use the "Sunday Salon's" to create a special time together. During the weekend we talk about the performance the children will put on for the family on Sunday Evening. This Salon is the culmination of an activity series. Later, when your children go to school, they will have a similar experience when their teacher does a culminating activity as part of a class project.
Setting up a time to relax and create
One of the best ways to help your child relax and reflect on the day's activity is to establish a bedtime ritual. This paragraph should be about your child and be said in exactly the same way every night so the child knows that this is the time to relax and go over various parts of this day or previous days. Also you should not use this story at any other time of the day and it should be a private story between you and your child. Here's the story that we use that we started when our kids were two years old.
"Once upon a time there was a little girl names Allegra Heart Epstein and there was a little boy named Nathaniel Henry Epstein and they were twins. You know how I knew they were twins? They had the same mommy and the same daddy and the very same birthday. And they had the same nanny named Nita. And they lived in the same house and they had the same phone number. And do you remember what the twins did today?"
Sometimes they don't say anything and I tell the story. Sometimes they tell the story. This helps them get into the right frame of mind and go over what happened during the day. One of the things that this activity is doing is building the storehouse of experiences that children will be able to draw upon for later imaginative behavior. You can't create or imagine with an impoverished storehouse of experience. So you are providing fertile ground for later imagination and creativity
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Images rarely remain static for more than a fraction of a second. Imaging occurs when you or your child begins to move your images and form associations between them and other images. Both you and your child are imaging during simple everyday activities. Deciding which of two toys to play with or selecting a shirt to go with your blue pants, or picking the donut from the case in the donut shop involves imaging strategies. An important characteristic of imaging strategies is their variety. The strategies you or your child selects from your repertoire of strategies can be very different from one day to the next. Your selection may be based on your mood, time of day, or the room conditions. Different children and adults also favor different sets of imaging strategies. The most important aspect of imaging strategies is that you can help your child expand, extend, and practice these imaging strategies
.Some kinds of imaging strategies that you can practice with your child are:
Let's pretend we're in grandma's house. Let's open the front door. Let's walk into the living room. See all the many little knickknacks grandma has. These are very breakable. Let's go into grandma's family room. There's lots more room here and things don't look so breakable. This is a good room to play in. Let's go into grandma's kitchen. It looks good too. Lots of bowls...
You can put stuff around to help kids experiment on their own. When they spontaneously do something you can point out what they've done. For example, when your child put the small box inside the bigger one you can say, "wow--isn't that neat. This little box can fit inside a bigger one. Maybe this big box can fit inside an even bigger box. Let's look for a bigger box that this one can fit into. You might say "Allegra, here's the yellow box. Yesterday we put the yellow box into an even bigger box. What color was that bigger box? Let's find it." That way you are asking the child to develop an imaging strategy of the experience.
One of the primary objectives of the Play for Success method is to teach your children how to observe. Many parents think that children observe in a passive way -- that people just naturally remember the way things are. Our method takes a different stance. Our position is that observation is active and that thinking and knowing about the way the world is can help children find regularity and predictability in their world as well as prepare them to make changes in it. The series of exercises called I am a Camera focus on observing the world, making changes in the world, helping children use their senses to get information and to retrieve their images almost as if they were viewing images of their daily activities. While we were writing this book the famous photographer Alfred Eisenstadt died. All of the news programs presented retrospectives showing Eisenstadt's many photographs recorded forever. One way to help kids think about their memory is to show them famous photographs and to tell them how like a famous photographer, their images of their experiences are forever etched in their minds eye, to be retrieved, to be re-observed, to help make decisions, and to connect them with their past, present and future.
Assisted Cognition
The Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget wrote prodigiously about his observations of the development of children's cognitive abilities. Piaget was trained as a biologist and wrote about cognitive development in ways that parallel physical development. Through careful observation and participant experimentation he learned about the stages of cognitive development and the intellectual abilities that children were capable of displaying at different ages. Although he did not set rigid standards for behavior at a given age (e.g. a child can count only when he gets to be four), he did describe the natural progression of cognitive abilities and give rough estimates of the ages at which you are likely to see these occur. We believe, however, that with particular experiences such as the activities provided in this book, children can react in ways one would not normally expect to see. They can also think about things they might not otherwise have thought about. These experiences are important because they shape the ways in which children process new experiences. For example, if a child has done "I am A camera" he has learned that certain experiences are indelibly etched in his mind. Compared with a child who did not have this experience, he may pay more attention to details knowing that he has the capacity to remember them, or recalling how much he enjoyed remembering them. To give another example, when our children went on their first "Treasure Hunt" walk with us, they learned that the block on which they live is filled with interesting and very special things that they never before had paid attention to. Now they look for these things when they walk with us. Children's growth is highly influenced by interactive events in which they play an important part in eliciting the reactions they experience. A child who has learned to observe and be curious is likely to make comments to an adult that elicit very different reactions than the reactions a non-curious child is likely to elicit. We therefore believe that doing these Play For Success activities can have the potential to build an early learning foundation that can enrich your child's later experiences in very important ways
.Another aspect of Assisted Cognition is that you as parent are helping your children learn to think and providing the text of what they say to themselves when they think. Even as little children kids talk to themselves. What you are doing when you talk your children through these activities is providing them with the external text that has the potential of being internalized and externalized when necessary for the next activity. For example, starting at a very young age, we said to Allegra "Look at that beautiful ___ (sunset, flower, tree etc.)" Soon, Allegra started saying these same phrases. She might say "Look at that beautiful blanket. I love it." This sensory enthusiasm shapes the way she approaches the world. One of the cornerstones of the Play for Success Method is its emphasis on sensory experiences. In contrast to abilities that have not yet developed, young children have fairly well developed sensory abilities. They can immediately experience the world in a sensory dimension: they can see, hear smell, taste touch etc. In fact, what usually appears to be immature behavior is the result of children reacting on a sensory rather than a thinking level. But the parent can capitalize on this tendency of children and use these senses to develop rich imagery
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Our method consists of providing children with a series of rich and varied sensory experiences that stimulate the imagination. The other critical ingredient is the overlay of adult verbal input, which the child could not do by himself. This combination of adult-provided-words attached to the child's sensory experiences helps the child learn to focus or know what to say to himself as he captures sensory experiences
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Many traditional "educational" methods either leave out physical development entirely or consider physical activities to be calisthenics--getting in shape. We, however, believe that young children are not encouraged enough to focus on how their body moves through space and consequently have a very limited kinesthetic storehouse of images. Some children, particularly those with natural physical abilities, such as agility and coordination, may have spontaneously focused on understanding how they move in space. But most children seem often disconnected from their own bodies. It's important to provide children with simple physical activities, coach them to focus on the physical here and now, and help them expand their repertoire of kinesthetic images
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Getting Children Energized
Sometimes the activities don't work in exactly the way described. They do, however, make "something happen." This "something" that you are seeing can be described as energizing. When your child is energized, he seems to have a particularly mobile face, be focused on the activity at hand, is physically very animated, and most importantly, doesn't seem to want to leave the activity. We can give you an example from out pilot testing of the activity entitled "hats
."Prior to this activity we would have to say that Nathaniel, our two and a half son was a pretty "take it or leave it guy." Sometimes, he would participate, sometimes he would be enthusiastic, but for the most part he gave over the limelight to his twin sister, Allegra. During our first run-through of hats, however, Nathaniel came into his own. He loved trying on hats, walking like daddy whose hats these were, changing hats, and putting hats on other people, and being generally enchanted by the entire activity
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Physicializing and vocalizing as a way to express yourself
In the mid sixties, Polish director Jerzy Grotowski took the theatre community by storm. His works entitled Towards a Poor Theatre described a profoundly physical and vocal series of techniques designed to focus on the actor and his voice and body instead of elaborate props and costumes. At the core of his method were a series of physical and verbal and vocal activities that helped energize actors. Although we are not suggesting that we are doing Grotowski with children, we do see the value of developing activities that seem to spark and focus the energy of young children. This connection between physical activity and emotions is also an underlying theme in the psychotherapeutic approach of Alexander Lowin, which he calls bioenergetics. In that approach, a person uses physical gestures and vocalizations to get in touch with deep-seated emotions that he otherwise would be out of touch with. As before, we are certainly not doing bioenergetics with children
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Get it in your head, do it, talk about it, and then re-do it.
Building mental models: Using Technology to demonstrate internal processes
A good way to help your child develop his understanding of his mental imagery processes is to use analogies from equipment that he already knows. Your child already knows about a camera, a tape recorder, and a VCR. (The discussion that appears under the heading below needs to be divided into two sections: half of it will go under this heading and the remainder will go under the next heading.)
Teaching your child a vocabulary that enables him to communicate his internal processes.
One of the most important things that you can teach your child is that he or she has capabilities that combine the skills of zillions of modern technological devices. The simplest example and the first should be explaining how a person is like a camera. You can do a whole days activities based around the notion that a camera takes pictures of things outside of itself, stores it, and prints it out at a later time. An idea camera experiment might include a Polaroid that takes a picture of something outside of itself, holds it for 6o seconds, and then prints it. You can also use a regular camera. You can experiment, for example, with taking pictures of the same object from next to it, above it, beneath it, and then having these pictures developed and saying that the camera took pictures from a variety of different perspectives, just the way people do. You can have your child, for example, lay in the position of where the camera was so that the child can see that object from many different perspectives. Another thing you can do with a camera is take a picture of a transient object, like a flower. You can buy an amaryllis and take pictures of the amaryllis at various stages of growth, and then look at them and explain that the camera recorded the various stages of growth of the amaryllis, just the way your child can. And even when the amaryllis is done blooming, that amaryllis lives forever in the child's mind, just the way the amaryllis lives on in the photograph. (do an activity called amaryllis) When you say to your child "here is the photo", you can say that photo is what the camera had inside. Inside your head are a whole bunch of photos just like the ones that were inside the camera. (name of activity is rooms of the house.) I just showed you this picture that the camera took of an amaryllis. That picture duplicates the image that the camera had inside it. Now I want you to shut your eyes and tell me about the picture that you have inside you about X (like a room in the house.) Look real hard inside your head and tell me the picture that you have inside your head. The more that you retrieve an internal image, the sharper that image gets.
Wilder Penfield did research on ESB --electrical stimulation of the brain. He demonstrated that you could take an electrode and pass a mild current through a very specific location on the brain and what would happen is that it would trigger off a memory of a very specific image, which could be visual, could be olfactory, could be auditory etc. So he demonstrated that these memories, in various modalities are stored in the brain and given the right form of stimulation, they can be retrieved. What you are trying to give your child is a whole bunch of images to store and then to teach him ways to retrieve these stored images.
Another good example of a machine that records something outside itself, stores it inside itself, and then externally plays it is a tape recorder. You can do a similar days experimentation with a tape recorder, recording your child's voice, music, outside sounds. You can show your child the cassette, label the cassette, and then find it a few days later and play it to show that this cassette stored sounds. You can store a conversation, for example, of a visitor and then play it back when the visitor has departed to help you have that person "always recorded." You can also play back a tape at a very low volume so that it's hard to hear what's stored on the tape. But then you can turn up the volume so that you can clearly hear what's on the tape. You can use this lesson to teach your child that you have to really concentrate very hard to turn up the volume in your mind's ear to hear the image that's stored there. Some tape recorders allow you to play recordings at twice the original speed. You do this in your mind when you try to find a spot in a song you know or a poem you know. You do it internally in your mind or externally by saying it out loud. You can create an activity called "last la-la." The child has to sing the last few bars of a familiar song saying la la. The point is to make him race through the song in his head to get to the last part of the song.
A VCR is a useful demonstration tool to help kids understand how they manipulate visual images in their mind. Fifteen years ago I first used this demonstration on my then three year old friend Zak, and to this day he still remembers it, comments on it, and describes its usefulness in understanding his imagination. At that time, I was trying to explain to him how people froze live action stills in their mind, how they rewound events to play them over and over again in their mind, and how they fast forwarded visual images in their mind so they could get to the one they were looking for. As I was describing these mental imagery strategies to Zak, we both said at the same time, "I know, it's just like A VCR player." And we raced to the VCR and went through Zak's favorite tape to demonstrate these mental imagery strategies and how Zak's brain was just like a VCR only better because Zak could think about the experience and the VCR could not have feelings about the experience.
There are also a lot of other technological devices that help children understand mental imagery abilities that they posess. The next ones that we talk about don't keep a record that's available for playback--they are just sensors like our sensory abilities. Their noses are like smoke detectors in that they can smell even the subtlest fragrences. A thermostat is like their tactile sense that tells them when they are so hot they have to take off their sweater or so cold they have to put one on.
The concept you are trying to impart is that the object that they are taking a picture of is outside them and that it is stored inside them and it can stay inside them until they need to use it in some activity that is outside them--like drawing, or talking to somebody about it, or writing about it. It's important to have the child see this as an object that they can draw upon to do something useful with. You want your kids to have the experience, to store the experiences and then to retrieve them to use for important tasks.
Finally, you can tell your child that he can do things that no machine can do. He can record images of sensations. If you want him to be able to recall the kinesthetic image associated with spinning around and getting dizzy, he has to have words to describe that sensation
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It is important for parents to remember that the Play for Success Method is an externally imposed method that helps parents structure their children
=s sensory awareness, observational skills, and focus. It is important to realize that focus, concentration, sensory awareness etc. are skills. All children have some degree of these skills that they are born with. The skills exist on a continuum. It is analogous to physical skills that kids have that may be manifested in activities such as throwing a ball. All kids can throw a ball without any coaching. Some naturally do it well and others do it poorly. But all kids can benefit from coaching in learning to throw a ball better. Likewise, the Play for Success method coaches children in how to observe better, how to focus better, how to become more aware of their sensory experiences etc.To continue the analogy, kids may spontaneously throw a ball against a wall and catch it. They also go to little league practice at 4PM on Mondays. In other words, ball playing can be a spontaneous activity but it can also be a scheduled activity that is externally imposed on the child. The Play for Success method assumes that the parent is in charge of time, space, and activities chosen. Just like in baseball practice, parents hope that children will master these skills and be able to use these skills when the coach or parent is not present.
The Play for Success method is not merely a series of activities. The play for success method is an approach that can help parents reframe all their play interactions with their children. Although we provide you with a series of activities, we are not suggesting that these are the only activities that you can do with your child. They are provided as models of ways that you and your child can play together.
Play For Success activities have a certain degree of
Aartificiality to them in that they are parent initiated and parent structured activities. They must be artificial because they involve goal directed play. The goals are those listed in the imagination strategies and play behavior sections. When we conduct these activities with our children we behave differently than we do when we join our children in their spontaneous play. For Play for Success activities, parents need not follow the directions in the activities very rigidly. We have written these activities with precise directions and with statements of what to say to serve as models rather than requirements. We present each activity in the format that we would conduct it. We give you the directions that we would use if we were setting up these activities. We give you the lines that we would say to children if we were conducting the activity. These directions and these play leader lines reflect our personalities and the way we feel comfortable interacting with children. But each person has her or his own personality and style of interacting. We believe that having seen how we would set up these activities, you can then adapt them to suit your own style. Some of you may want to start out imitating the way we do things. As you gain experience doing some of these activities, you will change them to suit your style.We also need to point out that the Play For Success activities are not aimed at producing
Asuperchildren.@ In contrast to that sort of activity, our exercises are developmentally age appropriate. We are not asking you to train children to memorize times tables or facts about world history and geography. Instead, we are orienting you to the cognitive processes that are involved in specific play activities that you can set up for your children. Our field-testing has demonstrated that children regard these activities as play rather than Ahomework.@ Parents often structure their children=s play activities. They say to their child Awhy don=t you sit here and draw quietly.@ Or they say Awould you like to play with your dolls and your dollhouse.@ Or AHow about playing with these puzzles.@ In these activities, the parent typically assumes one role only--that of coach. She tells her child what to do and probably observes and encourages the child. What we add with the Play for Success activities is an emphasis on the addition of roles of Travel Guide and Historian. We often ask parents to set the context of the activity (eg. In the exercise AGreetings talking with your child about how people say Hello. That is an effort to have the parent as Travel Guide focus the child on something that they may not have noticed. We also have the parent in that activity say to the child Aremember how Grandma said hello last time you talked to her.@ Here we are having the parent act as historian. But having a child remember these things and try to conjure up the image of grandma saying hello is a developmentally appropriate, if somewhat artificial play activity. Nonetheless, we believe that it will pay important cognitive dividends.RETURN TO ACTIVITIES PAGE