The Key To Raising Brilliant Kids? Play A Game

We all want to raise smart, successful kids, so it’s tempting to play Mozart for our babies and run math drills for kindergartners. After all, we need to give them a head start while they’re still little sponges, right?

“It doesn’t quite work that way,” says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and co-author of Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children with Roberta Golinkoff. She’s been studying childhood development for almost 40 years.

So how does it work? NPR Education reporters and Life Kit hosts Anya Kamenetz and Cory Turner talk with Hirsh-Pasek about the “six C’s” that kids need to succeed — collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence — and why raising brilliant kids starts with redefining brilliant. Learn More

The QUILS™ (QUICK INTERACTIVE LANGUAGE SCREENER) – Now adding QUILS:ES!

Funded by the Institute for Education Sciences with a grant to Roberta M. Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Jill deVilliers, Aquiles Iglesias, and Mary Wilson, Brooks Publishing has brought out our new language screener, developed to find children (ages 3 through 5) with potential language problems. As language is fundamental to children’s success in school and in life, we hope it will be adopted by schools to find children with potential language issues who might linger unnoticed in classrooms. It can be administered on any touchscreen tablet or computer and identifies children for referral.  Learn More

QUILS™ has a monolingual English version and a bilingual version for children learning both English and Spanish (the QUILS: ES) will be coming out soon!

Stay tuned for our screener for 2-year-olds, Baby QUILS™!

Check out Kathy in ABC’s 20/20!

Kathy and her lab colleagues appeared on ABC’s 20/20 to discuss “How toddlers react when parents look down at their phones”– they replicated an experiment asking parents to focus on their phones for two minutes while their toddlers played nearby.

Watch the episode

Check out what is happening with Learning Landscapes

At the intersection of the global cities movement and the movement to optimize early education in and out of school, lies Playful Learning Landscapes. Twenty-first Century Learning models will need to embrace a breadth of skills that allow children to succeed in a world of increasing uncertainty and change. Projections suggest that by 2050 over 70% of the worlds’ children will be living in urban areas and that most of these children – over 825 million – will reach adulthood without even the basic secondary skills required to meet the workplace of today and tomorrow.

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