I saw this book recommended for teaching kids a growth mindset and went straight to ordering it without really looking into it too much. I wanted to share that I find it super off-putting in case anyone else tends to order things as impulsively as I do sometimes. 🙈 As a parent to a kid with several learning disabilities this book seemed almost entirely written just for him to make him lose confidence in himself. For example,
"Smart is reading, writing, spelling, but it's also storytelling." Hello, my dyslexic kid can't read, write, or spell with any sort of fluency yet. What a kick in the gut.
"Smart at matching shapes in pairs, like hexagons and big blue squares. Counting all the way past forty, being sorry when you're naughty." He has dyscalculia, AND is color blind, never mind that we don't call people "naughty" which means the same thing as "bad." We all make poor decisions sometimes, that doesn't make our very nature bad which those words tend to imply.
"Smart at drawing very pointy stars." Wow, again, a kid with learning disabilities like dysgraphia is gonna find this one a gut punch yet again.
I could go on and on about each of these pages. Not only do I not believe in telling kids they're smart to begin with (we celebrate problem solving, fortitude, ingenuity, etc.), I truly thought this book was about turning that label on it's head, but this book repeats the word "smart" ad nauseam AND ties it to accomplishments/achievements rather than effort, persistence, and good heartedness. Those things are actually the manifestations of a FIXED mindset, when you believe that your accomplishments are tied to how smart you are and not to how much hard work you put into it. I know it tries to steer away from that at the end, but it's a major flop in my opinion. Also, studies have shown that children under the age of 6 years old cannot extrapolate a lesson or moral from a story. So an entire book, or movie, or what-have-you that tells them one thing and then tries to tell the opposite at the very end with a lesson/moral is totally lost on kids below that age range, which of course has some give and take to it.
I hope this helps someone. I was rather shocked and disappointed when it just showed up in the mail.
- Hardcover: 32 pages
- Publisher: Scribble (15 October 2018)
- ISBN-10: 1925713431
- ISBN-13: 978-1925713435
- Product Dimensions: 22.2 x 1.2 x 28.6 cm
- Boxed-product Weight: 358 g
- Average Customer Review: Be the first to review this item
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
10,998 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1355 in Literature & Fiction for Children
