April is National Poetry Month, and we wanted to share resources that will be sure to put an extra spring in your step as we celebrate the flowers and our knowledge blooming!  At Victory Garden Kids, we believe that creativity is a vital part of every child's education. That's why we're thrilled to celebrate National Poetry Month with our students and families. Throughout the month of April, we will be offering fun and engaging resources to help children explore the world of poetry. We have compiled a list of our favorite poetry books for children of all ages. These books are available for check-out at our VGK Library! 

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Did you know that 1 in 3 adolescents report experiencing chronic anxiety? By engaging with these ideas to navigate supporting your child through anxious feelings, both your reactive and proactive responses can be calm and child-need-filtered. Remember, what works for you may not work for your child, so always use your child-specific filter.

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Welcome to Parents’ Conversation Corner, Back to School edition! If you follow us on Instagram, you’ll know that this week we’ve shared Morning Drop Off and Afternoon Pickup conversation strategies. Often in the rush of the school car line, we miss opportunities for impact or can even unintentionally foster stress or a lack of independence within our students. These statements and questions are easy ways to help the moments right before or after school with your student be impactful and intentional.

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At your wits end? Feeling like throwing up your hands in defeat and walk out of the ring? Wondering why you wake up with the best intentions as a parent, only to end the day feeling defeated? Questioning why you are even calling it a ring, as if your parent/child relationship were a prize fight? Parenting is not easy, we know from experience. I’ve gone to bed numerous nights wondering how our two beautiful creatures landed in our home and into the care of an incompetent monster of a mother. I’ve also looked at the sleeping, peaceful faces of those two beautiful creatures and wondered how, only moments before their slumber, they’d been behaving like creatures from the black lagoon (sorry, H and B), their black reptilian eyes surfacing from under the blanket of whatever murky waters they’d been swimming through that day that lended itself to their presentation of their most animalistic selves that unsuspecting evening. The answer is simple—we are humans, they are humans, and humans have a behavior/response relationship. We respond to behaviors we intake both internally and externally, and then transfer our responses to affect the behaviors and responses of the humans around us based on the emotions we feel need to be tended and served.

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When our sweet little angels are born, we look upon them, seeking their future through the portal of their little eyes and wondering what babies think about inside their tiny, new minds. As they grow to be toddlers, our eyes lock with theirs as they stumble toward our outstretched arms, taking their first step, and we offer butterfly kisses with our eyelashes. As their brains grow to produce their first words, the corners of our eyes wrinkle with joy when we hear the sounds we’ve been modeling meld together to form a recognizable syllable. We look into their eyes and reinforce and ask for more. And so it begins. Syllables become words, words become sentences, sentences become higher-level thought concepts. And then comes the day that we tell our kids to do something and their response is something we never would have expected from our little doe-eyed, babbling and bubbly babies. Th ey look into the weary, weathered eyes of their grown-up and say the no-no phrase that is the bane of every child-rearing adult on Planet Earth: “If….then….”

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As another semester has begun, your students, their friends, their teachers, and YOU are embarking on another "unconventional" semester. We are living in unprecedented times. And I daily am in awe of the power, bravery, and courage your families are exhibiting. This season of learning, let's not focus on the hardships our kids and families have had to endure, but let's celebrate the joy for the exponential growth our kids have experienced, all the power they have conjured, and the perseverance that our kids have found in their souls that they didn't even know they had!

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I recently read the classic novel, Travels With Charley, by John Steinbeck. I’ve read stacks of American Literature novels, both as a lover of reading, and in preparation for teaching high school Lit courses over the years.

I’m a book nerd and proud.

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Confidence begets confidence, joy begets joy, worry begets worry, fear begets fear. What we give our kids is what they will feel. If we teach our kids that they are capable, they will be fruitful and share that brilliance with the world.

So many circumstances in our world have us wondering when things will “get back to normal”. Let’s create a new and now mindset for our children starting today where they aren’t seeking the past, but are creating the future, right now! Let’s grow our children up to be confident world changers by focusing on the change we can grow!

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You know those unexpected moments that change they way you view the world and how you want to behave within it? Our encounter with the owner of Valentino Market in San Francisco did that for us. Elie Chahwan reminded us of our purpose and our mission as humans, to share warmth and love with others to help make the world brighter and kinder. Read about him and his mission here!

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Listen up Future World Changers! Wait! Why do we say “Future” World Changers? Teenagers! You are the “NOW” World Changers! YOU are the strong, powerful, connected voice of what this world needs, not in the future, but RIGHT NOW! And you want to know the secret to being a teen that has the most power, the highest level of leadership, the strongest impact capability? Because I know the secret, just lean in and listen.  Are you listening? Good! Because that’s the big secret!

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Sometimes as moms we need to take a minute outside of our own heads and enjoy what our kids might have to teach us. Today my man-child taught me a great lesson about joy when I stopped to view the world through his beautiful eyes instead of feeling sorry for myself about him growing up. He taught me to enjoy the ride. 

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The words our children hear are the words they will speak internally to themselves. What interactions and feedback are these little humans that we’ve raised receiving from their external world? As parents, we should be champions, not challengers, of our kids’ self esteem.  We are human, and so is everyone else in our kid’s daily life, so naturally, there will be days when someone says something negative that our child takes to heart and nurtures as truth.  We, as the protectors and warriors of our families, must be a shield against the arrows of other humans that provide feedback for our kids.

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Parenting. Sigh. Sometimes… scratch that… often we feel so unprepared, so unequipped, so inadequate. No one person has all the answers, and no two children are the same. Unique, one of a kind children are given at birth to unique, completely untrained parents. In a world where every move we make has preparation attached to it; we go to college or a trade school to do our jobs right, we get instructions to run a simple coffee pot; what in the world was God thinking when He decided to drop living, breathing little humans into our laps and say, “Here, this is yours. Don’t mess up.”? Yet, despite the absolute terror of the unknown and foreign world of raising a child, we keep procreating….on purpose.

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Listen up Future World Changers! Wait! Why do we say “Future” World Changers? Teenagers! You are the “NOW” World Changers! YOU are the strong, powerful, connected voice of what this world needs, not in the future, but RIGHT NOW! And you want to know the secret to being a teen that has the most power, the highest level of leadership, the strongest impact capability? Because I know the secret, just lean in and listen.

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It’s always an unexpected joy for my husband and me when we are in a position of secret observation of a child engaged in imaginative play; not in a creepy, voyeuristic way, I promise. It’s not like we go hiding behind hedges, peeking our eyes over the top in search of children we can spy on. It’s those natural moments of pure thoughtful childhood freedom that we are honored to observe; those moments when a child is playing, fully engaged in an imaginative world where there are no boundaries or rules or obligation.

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Are you concerned about your high schooler’s study habits? Worried they’ve fallen into habits won’t help them do well on exams and required assignments? Here are five easy study habits your high schooler can use to help them on exam day! If they can embrace these easy steps, they will have a more effective study time and will see results that make them feel successful!

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“So glad I didn’t have to deal with this when raising my children!” was a comment one mom posted on Facebook in response to an article in the New York Times on how social media has infiltrated our children’s world. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Kik…the list is endless.  And once we, as parents, have even the tiniest grasp on one or two of these platforms, another Gen Z’er becomes a billionaire from the creation of the newest Claptrap, PeepingTeen, SnoopScoop, CheapChirps platform that allows us to be “social”.

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Raise your hand if you already knew that parents receive lessons when their kids go off to college. We send them on their way to receive a higher education, and what happens? Every waking hour we are being schooled. At least that’s what’s been happening around this nest….

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