Your Child's Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them | 
 enlarge | Author: Jenifer Fox M.ed.
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $3.04
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 2907
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0670018767
Dewey Decimal Number: 372.21
EAN: 9780670018765
ASIN: 0670018767
Publication Date: February 28, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION.
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Product Description
An essential book for parents and teachers that explores how childrens individual strengths create success
With this groundbreaking work, educator Jenifer Fox is poised to change the conversation about education in this country. For too long, parents and teachers have focused on identifying and fixing kids weaknesses to improve academic performance. Passionately written and informed by Foxs twenty-five years of experience, Your Childs Strengths turns that flawed paradigm on its head. Foxs strengths-based philosophy provides the tools to prepare kids for the future in a world that demands greater adaptability and creative thinking than ever before.
Your Childs Strengths will give parents and teachers the tools to discover strengths in three main areas: Activity Strengths, the tasks that make you feel engaged and energized; Relationship Strengths, the things you do for and with others that make you feel valued and competent; and Learning Strengths, the unique ways we approachand understand new information. All three strengths work in tandem.
Pairing inspiring firsthand accounts of success with practical workbook tools and an outline of the award- winning Affinities Program Fox has implemented at her own school, this much- needed book is a user- friendly guide for parents, teachers, and administrators that will improve individual performance and an indispensable road map for young people and society to a future that plays to strengths.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Your Child's Strengths by Jenifer Fox July 15, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
What an excellent book for parents, educators, and just about everyone else too. "Your Child's Strengths" by Jenifer Fox is a well-structured, logical, and methodical plan for bringing out the best in children, while inculcating resiliance and responsibility to help them face the ups and downs ahead of them.
Fox uses well thought-out plans, exercises, and examples to help her target audience learn how to re-focus their senses to work WITH children rather than trying to work ON children. Her approach is designed to assist the parent or educator in acting as a guide to the child who discovers their own strengths. I'm sure anyone who has ever had or worked with a child can verify that truths which come from within are much more powerful and have much more staying power than those others 'teach' TO us. Learning to recognize your own strengths vice talents can be compared to recognizing small epiphanies that occur in your life when you are happy, pleased, and self-confident. In this respect, the book is a manual for recognizing personal strengths in ourselves as well as enabling our children to learn to recognize and work with their strengths.
Fox is careful to explain the both the concepts behind this strategy and the actions needed to carry it out. The first part of the book explains the reasoning and successes of this method. The second portion provides descriptions and examples for recognizing strengths and how to delve deeper than mere words by utilizing all our senses to pick up what children can't or won't say. The final chapters are literally a textbook with exercises, suggestions, and charts each reader can use.
Even the appendices have structure and use as they detail lists and writings to implement this process individually, in the family, in groups, and grade-by-grade in schools. There are also success stories and contacts available for readers.
As both a mother and an educator, I'm very encouraged after reading "Your Child's Strengths". Both parents looking for guidance and educators screaming for help (although maybe I should phrase that the other way around!) can use the truths laid out so diligently in Jenifer Fox's book to combat the negativity so prevalent around us and infecting our children. I'll certainly be recommending it to my fellow educators and close friends. After all, with so much to learn the target audience need not be restricted to parents and educators. Personal growth is not, and should not be, only a childhood experience.
 One Way to Overcome No Child Left Behind June 18, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
Education isn't getting much play in the 2008 presidential election coverage. I suspect that with all the hoopla around the politics of politics, as well as the state of the economy, the Iraq war and Eliot Spitzer's future career plans, there won't be a lot of campaign coverage about how to create better schools that meet the needs of our kids.
So, as with many things, looking out for the best interests of our kids' education is up to us parents.
One author is trying to lend us a hand on that front with her new book, Your Child's Strengths.
Author Jenifer Fox has presented a theme I really agree with -- old ways aren't always the best. Old ways in teaching our children, old ways in preparing curricula, old ways in not worrying whether we inspire our children or focus on what they're best at when they're at school because teachers are too focused "the test."
For the most part, we, as parents, don't really have a role in choosing things that impact our children's formal learning. And with outdated ways of assessing children's strengths at school (if they are assessed at all), how are parents supposed to help?
Your Child's Strengths confirms what I suspected -- that the atmosphere in schoolrooms, with standardized testing and the No Child Left Behind mandates -- are doing a lot to kill our kids' natural love of learning and sense of curiosity. And isn't that precisely the information anyone needs to figure out where our individual strengths lie?
If we want to give our kids a shot are being something more than learning automatons, parents need to play a more active role in figuring out what our kids are good at and what makes them excited and inspired. I n her book, Fox gives us a new arsenal of tools to do that.
Some of her advice is common sense -- spend time with your children, focus on what they love, then nurture and encourage those strengths. If your child is a bit more inscrutable about revealing their passions, she's got a series of questions, tasks and activities that can help discover the things that energize and engage our children.
Initially some of the advice may seem overwhelming, but on second glance, much of it is based on parental assessment that comes from everyday life. For example, what household tasks do your kids do and not complain about or really like? I'm not sure what this says about her, but PunditGirl LOVES to mop the kitchen floor (am I a lucky mom, or what?!)
While some of the self-reflection required to do the suggested activities and assessments may be harder for some children than others, we as parents can use this advice to become more tuned in to the clues and signals our kids send us that we can then use to steer them toward things that will make them excited about learning.
As for eight-year-old PunditGirl, we're having a hard time narrowing things down at the moment -- but I think she's leaning toward being a poet, an Olympic ice skater, a babysitter or a pirate.
Middle School Teacher Raves March 13, 2008
23 out of 25 found this review helpful
As a career middle school teacher, I know how challenging it can be to manage a classroom full of diverse learners. It is easy to focus on "fixing" what is wrong with kids. What Fox does in this book is offer a practical program to build on students' strengths. She shows us how to discover them with great activities and exercises and also makes a strong case that building on student strengths lays the groundwork for students to improve their performance overall. In this age of standardization, this book provides a refreshing reminder to teachers and parents that kids are not problems to be solved but mysteries to be discovered. I, for one, am looking forward to sharing this book with the parents of kids I teach and using the exercises and ideas in it to partner with them to see our students in a new light. Great book, groundbreaking.
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