6 Tips for Keeping Your Kids Busy by Vielka McFarlane

“You have to motivate and stimulate their minds and bodies,” says Vielka McFarlane, a long time educator and CEO and Founder of Celerity Educational Group. “You have to provide them with choices and opportunities to expand on the classroom knowledge they gained during the year,” she explains. Although she maintains that how you keep a child busy depends on their developmental stage and grade level, there are nevertheless key activities that will enrich a child and preoccupy their minds.

 

1. Build – Have them build a kite, a bird house, a boat or even a Lego structure. Building accesses spatial temporal reasoning and improves fine motor skills. More importantly, most kids get absorbed in the process of creation. 
2. Cook – Have kids help in the kitchen or become Chefs for the day. Cooking utilizes reading skills, math skills and basic judgment. The finished product will produce pride and self-confidence. It also gives the parent a mini-vacation. 
3. Chess and Scrabble – Chess accesses math and sequencing skills. It is an excellent way of Athat meet so your child will have the opportunity to compete. Additionally, Scrabble is an excellent way of building your child’s vocabulary and perfecting their dictionary skills. You can also compete with your child to keep their skills agile. 
4. Art – Summer art projects can be great for keeping your kids busy. Get them outside and have them work on landscape paintings or drawings. Or have them work on a found art project. Looking for components for their project can become a treasure hunt. The art supplies you provide can be minimal. The point is to give them ideas for their creation. 
5. Write – Activate your child’s story telling abilities by reading them a portion of a story and having them finish the story in their own words. Younger children can also illustrate their stories. Writing flexes the entire brain and is beneficial for a child’s development and success in school. 
6. Take A Tour – Taking tours can be fun and educational for you and your children. Contact your local newspaper or TV station and ask about arranging a tour. Learn about the inner workings of the media industry. Go to a museum or see an art exhibit to find out exactly how art imitates life. Take a trip to the zoo and take in the sites and sounds of the wildlife. Spend a day in another world while experiencing life first hand.

These ideas may seem basic, but they utilize key mental and physical skills. The best way to keep a kid busy is to get them absorbed in a task and to almost trick them into learning. These six tips, with some preparation on your part, can keep a child active all year.

A Conversation with Vielka McFarlane – Originally Posted At Hotchalk.com

A Conversation with Vielka McFarlane

In 2005, Vielka McFarlane funded the first Celerity charter school in South Los Angeles by mortgaging her own house. Her mission was to give her under-served community access to a high-quality, research-based education. So far three Celerity schools have opened under her tutelage.  Name: Vielka McFarlane Title: Executive Director, President, Founder & CEO of Celerity Educational Group Education: B.A., Economics, CSU Los Angeles; M.A., Educational Administration, National University  Q: How did you find staff that you knew would have the necessary commitment to your project? By being honest when we recruited. We needed teachers who could say, “I believe so much in this project and in this population that I am not afraid to give up my tenure and my guaranteed job and paycheck to go to this charter school that hasn’t even opened.” If a teacher could say this, we knew it was someone could break from traditional blaming the victim, who has experience with our population and understands their challenges. Q: What practical qualities were you looking for in your teachers? We needed a mix of new teachers and experienced teachers who would help brand new educators to structure their classrooms. We also needed them to be fully credentialed, experienced with technology, understand project-based learning, and have the ability to give our students authentic assessments.  Q: In what ways did your staff help create the plan for Celerity? The months before we opened, we were working with them in terms of teaching them what our curriculum would be but as a team we were also creating what would be our school’s culture. Because we were all new together, there was no culture to speak of. We spent the summer envisioning the culture we were going to create not only in theory but physically as well. We worked together to make our vision our reality and this was a team effort. We target and recruit the lowest achieving students; our test scores are not necessarily the highest. But we create an environment of hope by expecting a lot of our students. We have high expectations but they are realistic expectations. Some of our sixth grade students come in reading at a first grade level. We don’t expect them to be caught up by the end of the year but we do expect them to up a year or two.  Q: How did you convince your community to get on board? Before the school opened, we went to where the people of our community hang out; we looked for mothers because they are the primary caregivers. We went to churches and grocery stores and parks and beauty salons and then we went door to door and we had heart-to heart conversations with parents.While we were recruiting, the warehouse that was to house our school was a hardhat area. We set up shop literally on the sidewalk with fold out chairs, a 12 x 18 foot table, a cell phone and a computer. That was our office. Parents would come and we would say “Let me give you a tour of the facilities.” We would bring them into this gutted out building and say, “Just think about the possibility of a school in which you have some say in how the curriculum is designed and which skills your child will learn.” A week before school was set to start we had 100 students enrolled. By the days our doors opened, we had 331. Q: What’s been your greatest challenge? Our greatest challenge is at the same time our greatest success. We recruit students who come from single-family homes, most of them below poverty level. Our students have had trouble in school for a long time, multiple times. And our neighborhood has all the challenges that come from poverty. We ask so much of our students’ parents, who are very involved. We ask them to understand that we don’t make excuses for ourselves so we don’t allows our students to make excuses. We expect our school community to take responsibility for their own learning and themselves and for the community and for the rest of the world.But we make a bargain with our students and their parents. We say if you’re going to come to school, we expect you to come ready to learn. We expect you to do your homework on time and every day. If you do that, we’re going to give you the highest quality education you can have.      Dawn Friedman lives and writes in Columbus Ohio. Her work has appeared in Utne, Salon, Greater Good and Brain Child. POSTED ON HOTCHALK.COM

Vielka McFarlane – Bridging the Educational Divide

Bridging the Educational Divide, Vielka McFarlane

Making a difference in L.A.’s inner cities Vielka McFarlane, founder Celerity Educational Group is doing just that. She’s turning the tides on a failing educational system.

In the midst of an ailing LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) educational system is an idealist whose methods are inspiring change. Vielka McFarlane, Founder and Executive Director of Celerity Educational Group, has taken a stand in an effort to revitalize the educational system in L.A.’s inner cities.

While others talk a good game Ms. McFarlane, a veteran educator and administrator is hip deep in a solution. Her plan was to open a charter school in an economically deprived area and improve education. When she unveiled her plans for her project to financiers, she was told her model was too large, too expensive and failure waiting to happen. She knew the only way to fix the problem was to meet it head on. So she put her money where her mouth is, literally by mortgaging her own home to open Celerity Nascent Charter School. She could’ve chosen an affluent location. Instead she selected an adverse area notorious for poor education standards, South Los Angeles.

Her agenda was to change how children were educated, to offer them choices. “It’s about being able to walk away with a choice. To decide what you want to do whether it’s going to college, trade school or straight into the job market. With choice anything is possible and students are more likely to succeed,” says McFarlane.

Celerity is comprised of approximately 70% African-American and 30% Hispanic students all of which are largely considered ‘at-risk’ students. Celerity has turned the tables on a failing system by scoring a 664 on the Academic Performance Index (API), outperforming the schools it draws most of its students from. Their Average Daily Attendance (ADA) is 98.1% which is unheard of in the school system and Celerity is making it happen in the inner city.

How are they succeeding? “By providing an atmosphere of high expectations, engaging, standards-based accelerated curriculum with challenging learning activities,” says McFarlane. One of the most important tenets at Celerity is teamwork. It’s a key factor for their success. Ms. McFarlane credits a devoted staff to helping her reach students. “The faculty’s dedication and determination empower students and families and provide an atmosphere of higher learning,” says McFarlane. She plans to expand her ideas to include two additional charter schools this Fall. In an area synonymous with educational failure, mellifluous echoes of happy children now ring through the halls. Vielka McFarlane has taken a stand and turned the tides of a failing system. She’s made the notion of change, in an impoverished area a reality. It’s the now blueprint for future Celerity Educational Group charter schools and an example other schools, nationwide should hastily follow.

Vielka McFarlane – Listening To Her Gut Led To Helping Kids Thrive In School

 

Originally Article From Redbook Magazine

Vielka McFarlane

Listening to her gut led to…
Helping kids thrive in school
Vielka McFarlane, 45, Los Angeles

“I know that every mom wants the best for her child, but what if the only education available is in a failing school that has a crime rate higher than some U.S. suburbs? I worked in the Los Angeles school system for 15 years — I started out as a teacher, got promoted to principal, and eventually became an administrator. The whole reason I got into education was to change children’s lives, but in every job I had, I was never quite sure if I was making a difference, and I had a deep feeling inside me that I could do something more. That feeling got even stronger when I’d think about my 13-year-old son, who’s a special-needs kid, and the fact that even with my connections it was hard to get him into the best classrooms — so I couldn’t imagine what it might be like for other parents. I began daydreaming about starting my own school, and once I started thinking about it, I couldn’t stop. Within a month after the thought first entered my mind, I had written a 180-page application to open a charter school.

“I mentioned it to my supervisors at work, but they all discouraged me, saying that with 60 percent of kids dropping out of schools in our community, it was too large a project, too expensive, and a ‘catastrophe waiting to happen.’ I looked for grants and investors, but no one would touch me. But I knew in my gut that I couldn’t keep working in a failing school system, so I made a drastic move that nobody thought would work: I took out a second mortgage on my home to get the money to build the school! Then I went to two friends in the community and convinced them to do the same! I hired a core staff, and less than a year later, in September 2005, we opened our doors to 120 eager students, grades kindergarten through 8. Within a month, we had 330 kids.

“In that first year, supervisors taught, teachers supervised, and we all acted as custodians, but I somehow knew that we would succeed, in part because I had acted on instinct before in my life: I emigrated from Panama when I was 20, but I went back for a visit after I found out that a friend’s sister, who was dying of AIDS, had put her infant son in an orphanage. My intention was just to visit them, but that ‘feeling’ came over me when I saw the boy, and for absolutely no other reason than a sense that I should, I adopted him right on the spot. He is the light of my life, and every single time I look at him, I know that I can always trust my intuition.

“Since 2005, we’ve opened two additional schools, serving more than 700 kids in our community, over 90 percent of whom are poor. These parents used to have no choice but to send their kids to bad schools, and I’m so proud that we’ve given them another option. Our schools outperform all of the other schools in the area on academic tests, and average attendance is 98 percent, something that’s unheard of here. Imagine how things would be if I didn’t believe that I could make a difference! What do I know in my gut? That the world turns because people do good things every day, for no other reason than that they have a feeling that they can.”