New World Kids

When my son was born two years ago, I read nothing but parenting books. This was not just because I had no idea what I was doing, but because I genuinely enjoyed reading them. Today, you'll still find me with the parenting books and magazines although I do make time to read other things as well. One of the most fascinating parenting books I read recently was New World Kids: The Parents' Guide to Creative Thinking.

Written by Susan Marcus and Susie Monday, this is a handbook for developing young minds to learn and grow in a future requiring visual literacy and innovative skills. It's built on decades of applied research and offers a new approach to childhood education that encourages creative thinking. The basic concept is that the world as we know it is changing and thus the way we teach our children must change too, in order to create innovative thinkers for the 21st Century. We all possess unique creative abilities and this book acts as an important resource to unlock this potential in our children.

New World Kids is chock-full of activities that we can do with our children to develop their creative growth. It also has wonderful photographs and illustrations. One of my favorite sections was the Sensory Alphabet. I loved reading and learning about each element: line, color, texture, movements, sounds, rhythms, space, light and shape. I felt I actually viewed the world differently and appreciated it more after reading this section. The whole book kept me interested the whole time I was reading it - in fact I pretty much read it all in one sitting because I just couldn't put it down. Here is everything you'll find in the book (taken from the website):

• 208 easy-to-read full-color pages, beautifully illustrated and filled with pragmatic ways to understand, acknowledge and support your child’s individual strengths

• a map of creativity based on more than half a century of theory-to-practice in education, the arts and cognitive research that deconstructs and makes accessible this very big subject

• a step-by-step guide for parents to mentor their children through the idea-to-form process using everyday occasions and materials

• more than 200 investigative activities for parents and children to do alone and together to help you uncover and exercise unique perspectives and talents

• real life examples that help you connect the dots from child’s play to innovation, mastery and success in the grown-up worlds of business and technology, art and science.

I am really excited to be sharing these ideas with my son. To order your own copy, you can head on over to New World Kids or stop by Amazon. There's also an interesting blog you can read - it looks like the publishers just came out with a second book called New World Kids at School: The Teacher's Guide to Creative Thinking, which looks just as fascinating.