Highlights from our recent study, including lots of pictures and graphs. The purpose of this research is to evaluate student and teacher perspectives on the effectiveness of the “Dream It! Playbook” to improve social-emotional learning skills of self-awareness (including optimistic thinking, growth mindset, mindfulness, hope and grit) among elementary school students.
If you’ve been reading our website, you’ve learned that we spent a great deal of effort learning educational theory, cognitive development and psychological theory, and combining it all with our own life experiences to form a comprehensive, evidence-based process for learning how to dream and turn those dreams into reality. However, one aspect of the book that is not apparent by reading it is all the work we’ve done learning how to work within the bureaucracy of the school system, connecting with community leaders and implementing educational programs.
Here is an award-winning story by our co-author, Sara, that she wrote when she was in the 4th grade. As you can see, Sara always had the dream to be a children’s author. Even as a child, she had impressive talent and took the steps of action to make her dream real. Here is her original story with some new illustrations. Sara credits her fourth-grade teacher with having the vision to guide her through the creative process with lots of exercises all leading up to the final story. She also says that her favorite authors, including Beatrix Potter, Roald Dahl and Lucy Maud Montgomery, were part of her inspiration. I think you’ll notice those flavors in her writing style.
Wow! What another big honor. We got a story in the preeminent blog for psychologists. This article gives a great breakdown of the dream process and all the concepts are highlighted, so you can really dig deep. You also learn more about our philosophy that drove the creation of the book. Yay! Below is an excerpt.
During the creation of our first book, we spent countless hours researching. And we also ran our own research project. During the way, we ran across a lot of great ideas that got lost, so we thought we should begin collecting the best of the best articles we have read.
We were honored to attend the American Psychological Associations 2018 annual conference to present the results of our study. This is a new analysis of our data that, essentially, says that young students perform better when they are taught the basics of socioemotional skills, like passion and goal setting, first before more academic subjects, such as reading, writing and arithmetic.
…And ours too! We’re excited to post this story about one of the most surprising gifts we ever received. We had to sit at a table with our eyes closed waiting for what could have been anything. But it was a 3D bust of the main character of our book — and, believe it or not — it is a chocolate cake.
Sara is a child psychologist, and Scott is an author and graphic designer. Together, they wrote Dream It: A Playbook to Spark Your Awesomeness an imprint of the American Psychological Association. Scott drew all of the illustrations by hand. They both love traveling and inspiring others to take adventures — they believe that encouraging children to dream is the best adventure of all!
Thanks for your support, everyone. It has been a great debut for our new book “Dream it!”. We actually earned Amazon’s “#1 New Release” in the “Dreams” category. Hopefully that is a foothold in having the book go mainstream and change the world. I really do think that if the next generation of kids all have inspirational dreams, the world will inevitably become an awesome place.
As with most aspects of a children’s book, vocabulary — or should we say diction? — or should we say word choice? — can become a complex topic, especially if you want to teach them new concepts, like how to dream. Even the word “dream” has two very different meanings. Let’s dive a little deeper into this topic and have some fun along the way.
This is a big topic ranging from educational psychology to cognitive development and from teaching styles to learning styles and much more. But to put it simply: We believe that kids are driven by passion and that they learn by doing — playing. And we believe the concepts, activities and games should be evidence-based, meaning tested and proven in the real world.
Happening all week Dream It! is on display front and center at the Magination Press booth at the NYC Book Expo 2018. Please stop by. Or wish us luck! And look what showed up in the mail yesterday. The Magination Press 2018 catalog featuring our very own Donkeycorn. We’re thinking we should make a plushy.
Here is an easy backyard adventure that I have done 3 times already. You can easily spot the International Space Station flying overhead. It looks a lot like a fast airplane except that’s a lot higher and traveling thousands of miles an hour.
As part of our ongoing research, we’ve tested “Dream It!” in about a dozen schools and programs. We had so much success that the facilitators starting calling it “The Dream Club” because most people thought that “The Dream Workshop” didn’t sound like any fun.
The Dream Playbook was tested by the University of Cincinnati in a year-long study called “Promoting Optimistic Thinking in YMCA After-School Students” as part of community service and outreach program.
First in our series of Backyard Adventures is the Photo Safari. “Safari” is one of my favorite words. It means “adventure” or “journey” in Swahili. And while I was riding my bicycle through East Africa, people would often wish me, “Habari Safari,” meaning, “Have a good adventure.”
