Thanks to all the wonderful people at Responsive Classroom, you’re now seeing a new-year, new-decade look for my blog, Yardsticks4-14.com. You’ll find that it’s now easier to post and find comments from other readers on any topic of interest related to child development, parenting, teaching, school, and educational issues. It’s also now easier to be in touch with me directly if you have particular questions to which you’d like a private answer.

Parents, I hope, will be pleased with—and will take frequent advantage of—the new “Just for Parents” page. I’ll sometimes post specific entries of particular interest to parents on that page, but it’s also a place for you to speak out—to pose your observations and questions about your child’s growth and development and about home, school, peer, and sibling issues.

Entering the new year and decade, I’d like to link you back to a series of entries I posted last year about the “Positive Attributes” of children. More and more, I think we gain strength as parents and teachers by being able to see and appropriately appreciate our children’s and students’ strengths and the interesting ways they learn from daily adventures and challenges.

As I wrote in the post to introduce the “Positive Attributes” series:

As parents and teachers, we are keenly interested in knowing and understanding everything we can about our children as they grow and mature. We cannot help but wonder if certain behaviors are typical or normal at the age or grade in school our children are currently navigating. Often we may find ourselves most attentive to what we may perceive as negative or inappropriate behavior or possible deficits we suspect in learning abilities or personality and social or emotional development.

As we compare our children (or students) to others in their same age range it is natural for us to create a kind of mental ranking about where one child falls in our understanding of what is appropriate at a certain age or grade. Is she behind or ahead academically? Too shy or too bossy? Is he “keeping up” with his peers socially? This normal way of observing and measuring sometimes keeps us from seeing more of the strengths children are exhibiting and developing and from appreciating all the positive aspects of the social and cognitive learning challenges that they face.

If you didn’t have a chance to read these posts last year, if you’re a new visitor to Yardsticks4-14, or if you just want a boost from reading about the great things you can expect to see in your child or the children in your classroom this year, you can read these posts right now under “Positive Attributes”  in the “Categories” list on the right side of this page. You can also look for the new “Growing Strong” series in the Responsive Classroom newsletter. Starting February 2010, each issue will feature the positive attributes of children at a different age.

Welcome or welcome back!  Chip