Customer Reviews

Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Our Children Really Learn--and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

You know how it goes. You hear another mommy in the playgroup or a mutual friend talk about how they are teaching their one-year-old to read or how their toddler just got in to the spanish immersion pre-school and you feel that twinge of guilty panic, wondering if you're doing what is right to make your child as smart as possible. This book is INCREDIBLE and will calm you down and help you realize what is truly important: children do not learn from boring drill-and-kill experiences. They learn from play and enjoyable reading.

My favorite quote from this book is "Put away your credit card and get out your library card". That is the theme of the whole book. The authors explian why most expensive "educational" toys MAKE your children play with them a certain way and don't allow for creativity so they should not be the only toys your child has. (You can have them! They simply suggest you also have creative toys like dolls, blocks, dress up, kitchen & tool sets or Legos.) They go on to explain that access to toys like these encourage unstructured, imaginative play that help children learn about numbers, physics, geometry, the world and their feelings.

This book tackles our most pressing questions, like how we will teach our children to read before pre-school and how we will teach them the concept of number symbols standing for actual quantities of items. Moreso, they explain to parents exactly how children learn and that parents are not the sole architects of the perfect baby brain. Mother nature has already created a brain that loves to learn and drilling children with flash cards or worksheets can kill a love for learning that is naturally there.

As you can tell from the title of the book, flash cards and demanding, there's-only-one-right-answer educational toys are a fairly new trend but geniuses have always existed. Most intelligent people in the past were allowed to play and leisure read freely - and experiment with things around them - which contributed to their intelligence the most. Parents reading to children and free play are a must! (By the way, I have a psychology degree and I learned in college that children under 1 cannot really see words well unless the letters are FOUR INCHES TALL! Even better if the words are red, not black, to attract the eye to focus. No flash cards look like this! Two year olds still need three inch letters. Adult print is simply too small for their developing visual pathways to read! How bored and agitated would you be looking at small, blurry letters all day? It's like a constant eye-chart test set at 20/10!)

I loved this book and nearly every paragraph is supported by research completed all over the world on child development. The back of the book organized the cites and references by chapter so you can look in to the research if you want to arm yourself with facts! In fact, I have talked so positively about this book, my friends are lining up to borrow it and I'm encouraging everyone to buy their own copy because you will want to keep this one on-hand. I'm buying one for the gal that lives up the street that just won't quit talking about how "smart" and "advanced" her one year old is because she buys educational toys exclusively!

Honestly, you're going to find the answers you are looking for about how to both encourage creativity and teach the fundamentals your children need for Kindergarten. If nothing else, it will assure you that a relaxed, unstructured play day at home is one of the best things you can do for your child!

it is so amazing to watch my 21 month old daughter learn. it's fun to watch her explore things and figure them out and see the lightbulb go off in her head. and this book is partially responsible for allowing me to sit back and notice those little steps and appreciate them. if she is interested in figuring something out it can hold her attention for a pretty long time. for instance, she'll get bored with the insanely complicated shape sorter I got her pretty quickly right now...but put her in front of her car seat or stroller and she will spend a good five minutes or longer trying to get the buckle snapped without getting frustrated. and once she gets it done she wants you to undo it so she can do it again.

this book argues for the merits of "play" and theorizes that by pushing kids too hard you can end up hampering their natural tendencies to experiment and explore. basically the authors liken a child's mind to a highway and if you cram it too full of information at one time you end up with a traffic jam. they also explain the different stages of learning and how a child's mind works at different ages and give a lot of good experiments to do with them to monitor their development. I rarely recommend reading baby books because i find them to be alarmist and one-sided, but this is one i highly recommend every parent read.

I was concerned that I wasn't doing enough for my toddler. While I sit and play with him at times during the day, he primarily plays by himself while I'm nearby. We don't do alphabet drills, I don't run addition flash cards, and I prefer to have him play with blocks to watching an "educational" video. And yet, now at 24 mo, he has an extensive vocabulary, speaks in full sentences, counts to 10, creates wonderful stories for me, and loves to play with his trucks and trains.

This book confirmed to me what I always felt was right - involve your kids in your everyday activities. Talk to them, reinforce what they learn naturally, and spend time with your kids. You don't need to entertain them, enroll them in "enrichment" classes, or hire personal tutors. Children learn naturally through play and open, unstructured activities.

By no means does this book advocate ignoring your children, or failing to get them assistance if they are developmentally delayed. It does argue, rather compellingly, that over-teaching our kids is not only unnecessary, but is also harmful to their long-term development.

I love this book. It takes a lot of the pressure off parents to "create" an intelligent child -- love your baby and play with him or her. Learning should be fun, not rote memorization.

I like that the authors explain in plain English the science behind their theories and provide real-life examples. They also provide practical exercises to put their approach to work. Definitely worth a read. I plan to wear my copy out as I'll refer back to it while my little girl grows up.

My kids are relatively self-entertaining. Some moms in my MOMS Club® talk about how they have to sit down and play with their kids constantly and their kids cannot seem to entertain themselves. For a while I second guessed myself and had those common thoughts: "Am I a bad mother?" "Shouldn't I spend more quality time with my kids?" "Oh my, all the other kids are in preschool and I haven't even thought about it." "My kids only goes to story time at the library and ballet class. Shouldn't I put them in swim school, gymnastics, ...?" After reading this book I am confident in my mothering skills, and I actually think it is good for the kids that I do not spend too much time entertaining my children. I think it's good that I don't have every hour of the day mapped out for them. One section of the book brought an image into my head of my great grandmother, who lived on a farm, working in the kitchen, with my grandpa sitting on the floor. Great grandma Goldie didn't have a washing machine. She had to put forth sweat on a washboard. My mental image didn't have Goldi teaching little Rex his ABCs whilst she worked. And you know what? My grandfather is one sharp dude. The best thing about this book is that it reaffirmed my parenting style and helped me feel confident with it.

As an early childhood teacher I truly love the research based message of this book. You have no idea how misinformed parents are when it comes to how children truly learn and the programmed, hyper way they believe they must "challenge" their children...if I had a dime for every time I hear the word "challenge"...oh brother...now that we are beginning to see how the brain functions through MRIs and other technologies and because of thorough research many of these hyper myths are being debunked...

As for one of the reviews below that somehow talks about how we can all program young children to read in just a minute a day is off the mark...the problem is that reading isn't just decoding words...it's understanding the message of print...unfortunately, I've seen children who have been pushed by these so-called canned reading programs and "hyper-parents" at an early age...they come into class lacking motivation and then the parents want us to continue to push them because of this same lack of motivation..it becomes a terrible cycle for these children...here's the reality...

talk to your children, get down with them, engage them at an early age...help them make sense of the world and expose them to print in a very natural, purposeful way...remember, the children of many foreign nations with the best reading scores do not expose their children to phonic instruction until the age of 7 or 8...when they do read in a more systematic way they then have more life experience to make sense of print and then...what do you know...they have more natural, internal motivation to read...

Oh, and by the way, the new research is showing that free play actually "recharges" wiring in the brain allowing children to work better and with more focus...

Find a "hyper-parent" and slip them this book...give their kids a break...

I wish I could just absorb this book and automatically incorporate its ideas into my everyday parenting. The information is very well presented and convincing, and the suggested activities are specific and useful. It's serious advice to parents of babies and young children that their child's best learning moments are in play! It doesn't encourage parents to take to the sidelines, but rather to use play and everyday experiences to foster their child's love of learning.

Now as I watch my son, I can truly appreciate that "Play IS learning!" Just the other day he was carefully moving his trike back and forth, turning the handle bars and watching the wheels turn and move as he manipulated it. Now he confidently rides his trike through narrow paths between obstacles, backing up and steering as needed. Not too long ago he would get frustrated and immediately cry for help to get out of a jam.

This book drives home the idea that you really shouldn't "try to teach" your young child so much as expose and guide him/her through different learning opportunities. Children are wired to learn, which doesn't mean we should try to feed as much info into their growing brains as early as possible. It's not meant to be work...it's play.

Parents have so much information to sift through it is hard not to second guess yourself. I have a Master of Arts in Teaching and I still find that I get confused when making choices for my 3 year old son. You often wonder, will this decision change his life forever. The authors of this book offer a lot of information that you can use when making choices for your family and your children. We are all hurrying along in life so much that we are missing the simplest things and not enjoying parenting. Our kids are stressed out from their full schedules and do not have adequate time to play. I already shared many of the same philosophies presented in the book but it is comforting to have some research to back up my gut instincts. After all raising a child is a precious gift.

Haven't we all intuitively known this? That kids can learn from playing. We all knew, but never had the evidence to back up what we always had known in our hearts. Well now I have the evidence. Now, I won't feel guilty for teaching my kids that learning through exploring is just as valuable if not more so than shoving facts into their already crammed heads. Let kids be kids. Let imagination reign. Lets stop carting the kids to every activity we can possibly sign up for. Moms like me can now breathe, and know that our children will turn out just fine! Thanks for this book!

Ultimately, this exciting book is about time. It's about time this important subject was objectively studied. It's about how you spend your time with your children and how your children will enjoy their time with you. In teaching us to spend our time creatively with our children, Kathy Hirsh Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, use their vast clinical research experience to show us that educational childhood development does not have to be a race, but rather a creative journey. Enjoy!