If You Can Company

IF... the fun educational adventure game that teaches emotional intelligence with SEL. Download our iPad game on the AppStore today!

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Teach empathy as a life skill, not as a lesson plan.

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The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.

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“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” 

― Oscar Wilde

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Join the #ifrevolution!

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Reflection is an opportunity to realize that relationships are our life’s blood.

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So Much Worry About Science: SO Little About Relationships~ Alain de Botton

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This is Bumble, he’s a Fisherdog!

Bumble is a caring friend with a kind heart. Sometimes his imagination can get ahead of him, but he loves nothing more than fishing with friends. Don’t let him eat the bait, though, that’s meant for the fish.

Bumble helps kids understand teamwork, as well as managing stress and recognizing one’s own behavior under pressure. He teaches compassion, sensitivity, calmness, and a healthy sense of humor.

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IF… the award-winning SEL educational adventure game, endorsed by both parents and educators, encourages children to explore and master their own emotions by role-playing social situations with their game character. Each chapter uses concepts and lessons take from an established Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum to help children develop their emotional intelligence. Research proves that SEL skills are key to children’s happiness, health and their ability to succeed. 

Reviews about IF… I’m a Education Technology Coordinator at a Charter School in Brooklyn, NY and I wanted to thank you for your Emotional Intelligence app “If…”. The interactive game has allowed my students to not only build SEL skills but has given them exposure to a virtual world that is fun and easy to navigate. Students are also practicing their reading and comprehension skills, while acquiring VIMs. It’s pretty fantastic! - Laticha S.

I’ve got to be honest, your game is refreshing as it’s a very valuable learning tool. - Carolyn P. 

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Should Character Be Taught? Students Weigh In

Last month we announced a new feature: the The Learning Network Reading Club, an opportunity for students to read, and discuss online, a relevant, provocative long-form Times article.

We kicked off with a New York Times Magazine article by Paul Tough, “What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?”, about “essential traits of mind and habit” that can collectively be referred to as “character,” which some schools have begun to try to foster in their students.

We wanted to know what teenagers thought about initiatives to develop student character, so we put a call out, and we started the conversation by providing question prompts and posting the first comment, courtesy of our college intern, Susannah. We required that subsequent comments respond to her comment, or another person’s.

What developed? A real conversation, lively and thoughtful, with a staggering 536 comments made by students willing to “listen” to the earlier commenters before responding. They challenged one another, drew from their own experiences and details from the lengthy article we asked them to read in its entirety before posting. We let the conversation run for 18 days. Had we left the post open to comments beyond that, students may well still be writing.

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What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?

For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is 49, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes in the high school soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and to middle school are “a patently unfair system” because they evaluate students almost entirely by I.Q. “This push on tests,” he told me, “is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”

The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained as we sat in his office last fall, is character — those essential traits of mind and habit that were drilled into him at boarding school in England and that also have deep roots in American history. “Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.”

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Uninstalling ‘Curiosity,’ the Video

The cover story of this week’s education issue, “The Character Test,” by Paul Tough, discusses an unusual curriculum taught at two very different schools in New York. Educators at KIPP Infinity, a charter school in Harlem, and Riverdale, a prestigious private school in the Bronx, are using special lesson plans to improve the character of their students. To illustrate the piece, we wanted to show the two school environments as well as express the idea of teaching traits like optimism, grit and curiosity.

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Ch 2 launched today and is being featured in the @AppStore for both Education and Kids! #ifgame #selgame #ipad We love Apple!

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This just in: Chapter 2 & Parent Dashboard launched today.

Check out #IFthegame in @AppStore 

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10 Characteristics Of A Highly Effective Learning Environment

Wherever we are, we’d all like to think our classrooms are “intellectually active” places. Progressive learning (like our 21st Century Model, for example) environments. Highly effective and conducive to student-centered learning. But what does that mean?

The reality is, there is no single answer because teaching and learning are awkward to consider as single events or individual “things.” This is all a bunch of rhetoric until we put on our white coats and study it under a microscope, at which point abstractions like curiosity, authenticity, self-knowledge, and affection will be hard to pin down.

So we put together one take on the characteristics of a highly effective classroom. They can act as a kind of criteria to measure your own against–see if you notice a pattern.

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EXPLORE Ziggurat! Make PEACE between CATS & DOGS! SAVE the WORLD from DARK ENERGY! JOIN the ADVENTURE today! Download our iPad game on the AppStore: bit.ly/1qDdNd1