Marianne’s Column Tag

Always a pleasing experience, dinner at Bistro V offers delicious food, and very friendly waiters and staff. The restaurant is a favorite of Party with Moms. On a very hot and humid evening, we decided to share everything, starting with crisp and refreshing Caesar salads. The calamari appetizer is a meal in itself – lightly fried and served with both chili and aioli sauce, both delicious and providing an alternating taste experience with each bite....

  Written by Marianne Riess  Most day camps for younger children end by the beginning of August. Inevitably parents contemplate thirty-odd days of blank time and wonder, “What will they do? How can we keep them amused? Or busy, or learning?” Actually this is a great time for young children. It is the way summer used to be generations ago, when the season stretched like an endless blank slate, and there were few organized activities available. What did...

  Written by - Marianne Riess Some recent Moms of the Week have described their favorite part of the day as the time spent cuddling and reading bedtime stories with their children. Besides the obvious closeness of the experience, reading to children offers so many benefits. Children gain a rich vocabulary, learn that print tells the story, and most important find out that books open up exciting new worlds to them. You cannot overestimate the value of...

  Written by Marianne Riess Many of us find ourselves with more time to read, as we are isolated from other pleasures such as movies, restaurants, or shopping. I was excited to order Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents. I had enjoyed her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award (non-fiction) and several other prizes. That...

  Written by Marianne Riess While we can complain about many unpleasant, frightening, sad and depressing 2020 developments, we certainly can’t complain about the weather in the Northeast. We have been blessed with lots of absolutely beautiful sunny days, and warm, but not really hot temperatures. And thank goodness for that, because it allows us to see family and friends in the relative safety of the outdoors. This summer, we had lots of visits with our children and...

  Written by - Marianne Riess T. S. Eliot started his famous poem “The Wasteland” with the line “April is the cruelest month.” We can only hope those words hold true, and that the worst of Covid-19 will be behind us as we enter May and look forward to summer. The virus has turned lives upside down, even for those lucky enough to avoid catching it. Who could have imagined children missing 3 months of school before...

  Written by - Marianne Riess  We are in unknown waters. “Unprecedented” is a word we hear on the news every two minutes. We don’t know when children will go back to school or when life will return to some kind of normalcy. We are stuck at home and all the places we like to go are closed. What good can we take from this time of social distancing and home time? Oddly enough, as I FaceTime with...

By Marianne Riess Your high school junior daughter is invited to a party, but she has a big test the next day. Will she forego the party to study for the test? Your college freshman son has a paper due, but would prefer to watch a football game in the lounge with his friends. How confident are you that he will make the right choice? The ability to stick with an unattractive, but necessary task rather than...

By Marianne Riess Most parents understand that children learn primarily through play. Yet, when their child attends a play-based nursery school, they may wonder whether he or she is being challenged, being thoroughly prepared for elementary school, being exposed to “academics.” Studies show that rote learning at a young age does not stick. Children may develop a temporary edge over their playing peers, but it is just that, temporary. And while they are being taught and drilled,...

By Marianne Riess Most parents are aware of the importance of building confidence and self-esteem in their children. How to do it effectively? One way is to listen when they talk and then respond, letting them know you take their ideas seriously. Ask their opinions at times. Whenever possible, give them choices about what they will eat or wear. Spend uninterrupted time with them to show you enjoy their company. Building self-confidence too often involves a lot...

  Last week the N.Y. Times published an article entitled “Why Are Our Most Important Teachers Paid the Least?” Nursery school teachers have been dismissed as glorified babysitters, paid low hourly wages with few other benefits, and expected to put up with chaotic working conditions. After all, they were only teaching preschoolers. They had no need for academic expertise in any field. Perceptions have changed. First, brain research done at Harvard with Project Zero showed the importance...

  The holidays are around the corner. As I leaf through the toy catalogs this year, in search of the perfect presents for my grandchildren, I am amazed by the number and variety of STEM toys. They are everywhere! Build your own robot or lunar lander or drone. Make electricity and learn about circuitry, magnets and gears. Learn coding to remote control your (fill in the blank). Take on an engineering project, simple or complex. I...

  Written by Marianne Riess It seemed like a no-brainer. At a charity auction, on the spur of the moment, we purchased a photo shoot at Venture Photography in Riverside. “We’ll get some good pictures of the grandkids,” my husband said. The logistics were not as easy as you’d think, with three children in Greenwich and two in Manhattan. It took six months to get them all together in one place on a non-holiday. Venture was nice...

  It’s that time of year again, when children go back to school, or start at a new one. Many of our youngest will attend school for the first time, and at a very young age. Two and three-year-olds who have never been to school before are in for what can initially be a traumatic experience. There is a happy ending, however. Starting nursery school means watching your mom or beloved caregiver walk away and leave you...

  My brothers and I grew up in a Long Island suburb. After graduate school, I came to Greenwich to teach, and stayed. My children grew up here, and now I have grandchildren in town as well. But I also have two grandchildren who live in New York City, and I have concluded that city kids lead very different lives. Suburban kids go everywhere in cars. They are driven to their destinations by parents and nannies, do...

  Having worked in a nursery school for 36 years, I was part of many attempts to encourage young children to be charitable. Whenever the efforts involved giving toys, they inevitably failed. Parents and staff would initiate a “Toys for Tots” kind of effort. After explaining that some families could not afford to buy toys, parents would take their child to a store and encourage him or her to pick out a toy for an underprivileged...

  Written by - Marianne Riess  … so much that he became a wonderful teacher, an unusual teacher, because he didn’t love books, and he didn’t love homework. He certainly didn’t love computers or video games. What he loved was to show children how to enjoy the outdoors, as he had, growing up. So he founded a nursery school and created outdoor experiences for very young children. In a program called Smokey’s Bounders, children made campfires and enjoyed...

  Just before Christmas, Party with Moms republished one of Anne’s classic columns, “What Do Children Really Want?” Her point is that children relish the time and attention of a loving relative. I was reminded of the truth of her concept last week when our two grandsons came to our house for a late Christmas, and ended up spending 24 hours with us. The first evening was taken up with exchanging presents and having dinner with friends...

  Before leaving on a recent trip to Spain, we were warned: Spaniards don’t eat lunch until 2, and no one eats dinner before 9:00 PM! Since my husband and I are early risers, and not big breakfast eaters, I knew some adjusting was going to be in store. But I couldn’t help thinking how convenient such a schedule was for parents. Basically they could feed their children dinner, and get them into bed before going...

  I read that Albert Camus, French author, philosopher and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, afterwards wrote a thank you letter to a teacher from his elementary school years in Algeria. Camus told Louis Germain that when he won the prize, he thought first of his mother, and then of him. As a child, Camus’ prospects for a successful life had been dim. His father died in World War I; his mother...

  [caption id="attachment_7437" align="aligncenter" width="288"] Marianne Riess is the former head of the Putnam Indian Field School in Greenwich, CT. She has 40 years of experience in working with young children.[/caption] Our annual vacation to Block Island this year had a new twist: my NYC grandsons (Axel, just shy of 10 and Owen, 8) were traveling with us. I wondered how to keep them amused during the 2½ hour car trip to the ferry. Knowing that they...

  Many 3 and 4-year olds enter nursery school with no concept of cleaning up. At home, they have dolls, art materials, costumes, trains, trucks, balls, puzzles, games, books. They play everyday. Why are they so unfamiliar with clean up? One answer? Someone else is doing it for them. For other children, cleaning up means throwing things into a toy box with every item jumbled up with everything else. So when they start nursery school, and the...

  Most parents are well aware of the value of reading aloud to young children. When they are read lots of good stories, children fall in love with books and become lifelong readers. Yet parents can go further and turn passive listening into involved participation, just by using a few reading tricks.  Use the illustrations – as you read, you can ask your child questions about them. For instance, “Look at his face. How is he feeling?”...

  Ages ago, when I was an English teacher at what was then Central Jr. High, the rule of thumb for our department was that you never chose a book for the class which featured a girl protagonist. The theory: boys would not read about a girl, but girls would always read about a boy. So the classes got to know Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Travis of Old Yeller, Jim of Treasure Island, Gene and...

Thanks to all who responded so positively to my column on Bev Bos last week. As a follow-up, here are some of the beliefs that she stressed in her writings and presentations. They can guide us all as we teach or parent young children. (My thoughts in italics) On the Importance of Socialization "Kids have to be social by six. If they’re not social by six, if they don’t know how to give and take, if they...

On February 4th, Bev Bos died in her sleep at her home in California. She was a giant in the field of Early Childhood Education, a mentor and inspiration to 40 years of nursery school teachers, and a gift to children everywhere. Bev gained national notice when she was featured in a segment of ABC’s 20/20 in 1991. It was an eye-opening twenty minutes in an era when the “push down curriculum” was subjecting young children...

I always believe the best presents for children begin with ‘B:’ Books, Blocks and Balls. All can be enjoyed independently or with others, in many different ways. I’ve named some favorite children’s books in previous articles. A few new ones found their way into my pile of gifts this past holiday season. Boy and Bot by Ame Dyckman is a cute book about friendship between two unlikely characters, and appeals to the 3-4 year old set....

  In the Reggio Emilia schools, they say children have 100 languages. They don’t mean languages in our usual sense of the word, but symbolic languages through which children express their questions and ideas about the world. The Reggio educational philosophy goes beyond speaking, writing and numbers to encourage pre-school children to illustrate their thinking through drawing, painting, sculpture, dance, dramatic play, construction with all sorts of materials, gestures, music, physical activity, map-making, etc. All are...

  The annual Book Fair is one of my favorite events of school life. And a most enjoyable job for me was advising parents on which books their children would love. The classics and the favorites were easy. But every once in a while, we would encounter a book that flew under parent radar, but that children responded to in fresh and authentic ways. Mem Fox is an Australian author of many wonderful children’s books. Two of...

  Most parents understand that children learn primarily through play. Yet, when their child attends a play-based nursery school, they may wonder whether he or she is being challenged, being thoroughly prepared for elementary school, being exposed to “academics.” Studies show that rote learning at a young age does not stick. Children may develop a temporary edge over their playing peers, but it is just that, temporary. And while they are being taught and drilled, they are...