Skills

4 Ways to Nurture a Growth Mindset in Your Children

There’s been a lot of press recently about supporting a child’s growth mindset. But what does this mean? In short, the growth mindset is one in which failure doesn’t define you, but is rather an opportunity to learn something new. For kids with a growth mindset, effort is the reward, whether they fail or succeed. Here are four ways you can help encourage this attitude in your child.

1. Be the change you want to see

First and foremost, model the growth mindset yourself. For example, talk to your kids every day about what you learned, what mistakes you made, and what you learned from those mistakes. Then talk to them about everything you put effort into, whether you completed it or not. Before long, your kids will be joining in with their own answers and will unknowingly be using a growth mindset themselves.

2. Praise your child’s effort – not their ability

You should praise your child but if you praise them for being talented or intelligent, then you’re putting them into a fixed mindset in which those factors can be changed, whether they make good or bad choices. Instead, focus on how much effort they’ve put into things, and complement the strategies they use.

3. Work with your children to reframe their thinking

A person who’s truly adopted a growth mindset never asks, “Is it possible to do this?” they ask “How can I do this?” Encourage your kids to work on processes that test their abilities. Some of the coding classes at CodeREV Kids are especially good for helping kids learn how to think critically and solve problems.

4. Don’t sugar coat failure

If your child fails, praise their effort and move on to helping them find ways they can improve the next time they’re in that situation. If you don’t acknowledge the failure at all, then you’re going to take a mistake and turn it into a way of life.

Most people have mixed feelings about following a growth mindset and in encouraging their children to do so. The bottom line is that of course it’s up to you how you encourage your child. At CodeREV Kids, we just think it’s smart to learn from mistakes and find other ways to move forward. To learn more about the many classes we offer for kids, reach out to us or stop by one of our classrooms today!

Skills

5 Simple Tips to Help Your Kids Ace Their Next Test

Every parent wants their child to do well in school but not all of us know the best way to help them accomplish that goal. At CodeREV Kids, we’ve compiled five simple tips you can follow to help your kids be prepared for their next test.

1. Make a plan for studying well in advance

Deadlines have a way of sneaking up on all of us, regardless of age. Teach your children to make a study plan as soon as they know the date of their test. Then check with them daily or weekly to see that they’re on track. There’s simply no substitute for studying over time versus cramming in the day or two before the test.

2. Be ready for the format of the test

Many students concentrate so hard on learning the material on a test that they forget to work on the format of the test. For example, if your child isn’t used to essay tests, then you may need to help them learn how to organize them. If they don’t know the best strategies for multiple choice tests, then you may need to help them.

3. Remember that it’s not all about school

You do want to help them focus but you don’t want them so stressed about their tests that they end up worrying themselves out of a good grade. We recommend fun activities that help improve their critical thinking skills overall, like coding classes.

4. Attitude matters

A single test isn’t going to make or break your child’s entire educational career. You do want them to do well, but if they don’t, let them know that you can learn from that experience. You don’t want to pressure your child so much that they aren’t able to do their best on a test.

5. Overall health is important

Make sure your child gets a good breakfast the day of their test, and plenty of sleep the night before. Regular experience can help boost brain activity too. There are of course many reasons to try and ensure your child is healthy but improving their test scores should be one of them.

At CodeREV Kids we are in the business of helping kids succeed. As their parent, there are many things you can do to help them learn to excel, including the tips above. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to know more about how coding can be a part of this strategy.

Skills

Are Electronic Devices Good or Bad for Your Kids?

Every generation of parent has a unique issue to worry about. Today’s generation often wonders: is technology, and the resulting electronics, good or bad for my kid? In a world where tablets are made for children of all ages, this isn’t an unreasonable question. At CodeREV Kids we have a strong opinion on this.

First of all, we believe that every parent is the best judge of what can help their child. That said, we also believe that technology can be incredibly helpful to children. Remember that your job as a parent is to prepare your child for the world. That world you’re preparing them for is filled with technology. If you want them to be ready for it, then they must be comfortable with technology.

Not only will a familiarity with technology help your kid be comfortable in the world, but it can help them thrive and stay a step ahead of their competition. You’d be amazed by the things kid can create today! All they need is to know some basic coding. The best way for them to get this knowledge is through hands-on coding classes that help them learn through games, apps, and even robots.

If you’re still not sure why this is a good thing for kids, take a moment to learn why coding can be so helpful for kids. We love the fact that they can both build cool things, but they can also learn skills that are important in the larger world. Some of the traits that learning coding can help kids build include:

  • Having an active mind that’s ready to learn anything.
  • Learning how to form strategies and follow-through on tasks they begin.
  • Practical STEM skills that help in a variety of subjects.
  • Problem-solving skills.
  • Hands-on skills.

Now, does this mean that it’s a good idea to plop your child down in front of a computer and let them play without supervision for ten hours a time? Probably not. Again, it’s up to each parent to set limits. Some parents allow their kids an hour of screen time a day, in addition to the time they need for their coding classes and school classes. Other parents allow their children more flexibility.

If you have questions about how to best prepare your child for tomorrow’s technology, feel free to reach out to CodeREV Kids. We are here to spark a passion and drive in your children and we look forward to speaking with you.

Education

4 Tips to Improve Your Child’s Test Taking Skills

Is your child struggling with tests? While helping them to learn the material on the test itself is an important part of test prep, don’t forget to actually teach them how to take tests. CodeREV Kids is here with four tips that can help boost your child’s test taking skills.

1. Don’t wait until the last minute

This may seem like obvious advice, but remember that your child will do best if they don’t cram in the days before the test. Study after study has shown that spacing out study sessions is much more effective than a single, long study session. To teach your child to do this, encourage them to group topics into different sessions, show them how to take on smaller chunks of material, and make sure they’re covering each topic more than once.

2. Practice several test formats

Just ensuring that your student knows the material on the test won’t help if they don’t understand the format of the test. Teach your child strategies to eliminate wrong answers on multiple choice tests, have them practice essay questions, and practice allotting time so that your student doesn’t spend half their test-taking time on a single question.

3. Encourage the right attitude

Do you want your child to do well on their test? Of course you do. But this single test isn’t going to make or break their entire future. Make sure that they understand that preparing is what sets them up for future success. Studying, like learning to code, builds a child’s confidence – which improves all sorts of school performance factors. A child who’s too confident is likely to rush through a test, while a student who is under too pressure may have trouble focusing. Help your child understand a middle ground.

4. Remember that overall health will have an impact

Of course you want your child to be rested every day they go to school, and you recognize that a good breakfast is important, but it’s even more important on test days. If your child has the option of sleeping for an extra half hour or studying for that same time, remember that sleeping is going to be better for them.

At CodeREV Kids, we know how important studying is to a child’s future. We also know that our coding programs help children improve their critical thinking and problem solving skills – both of which can help them do better on tests. Reach out to us today to learn more about our numerous programs.

Education

How to Take Your Good Student and Turn Them Into a Great One

Your child is a good student and that’s something to be proud of. But if you’re likely many parents of good students, you’d likely prefer that they were a great student. There are actually several steps you can take to encourage your child to excel even further. At CodeREV Kids, we’ve here to offer some simple tips.

Make sure your expectations are clear

In many cases, parents work so hard to praise their children for what they’re doing – as they should! – that their child doesn’t even realize that there are other things they could do to excel even further. Take this example: A student gets rewarded for getting a B. Are they going to push even harder to get As if they already know you’re proud of their Bs?

This certainly doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be supportive, but it does mean that you can push them by letting them know that you believe in their ability to do even better. Stick to talking about their potential – not just their grades.

Find the right motivations for your child

Just making a small change in your child’s study habits can make a big difference. Take this as an example: Let’s say that you’ve always required your kid to finish their homework as soon as they get home from school. Instead, try letting them watch a TV show first. This may encourage them to focus more on their books because they won’t be rushing through to get to that TV show. Try different things to see what works best for your child.

Don’t get stuck in a rut

Your child’s life shouldn’t be all about school and homework. Yes, you want them to excel, but you should work to allow them to have passions outside of school. Certain extracurricular activities can benefit your child overall, like sports and music, while other extracurriculars, like learning to code, can actually prepare your child for the future.

At CodeREV Kids, we do think that every child has potential and that a child’s parents and instructors should encourage each child to reach their full potential. That said, remember that the journey should be fun. Make sure that you’re not focusing so much on grades or scholastic performance that you forget to give your child time to just be a kid. Once again, CodeREV Kids has options that are both educational and a lot of fun for your kid.

Coding Curriculum

Why Should You Choose CodeREV Kids Camps Over Other Coding Camps?

It wasn’t long ago that there were no coding options for kids at all, let alone camps. Today, more and more school districts are beginning to understand how important coding is, kids are becoming interested in it an earlier age, and there are more and more coding camp options like the ones offered by CodeREV Kids. We welcome the competition because we want kids to have as much access to these technology classes as possible – and because we know we’re the right choice.

Our staff is second to none

One of the things we really pride ourselves on at CodeREV Kids is the fact that we hire only the best. Our hiring process is extremely rigorous and our training process is too. Every mentor we employ has at least two years of experience teaching kids technology, and some of our staff have more than 13 years of experience.

Each mentor must also have at least one year of experience in the real world – specifically in the tech sector. Our mentors come from many different companies, including Riot Games, Microsoft, Google, EA, Sony, Sega, and many others. We stress to our instructors that working as a mentor for us is not just a job they take on for the summer – it’s a great way for them to share what they’ve learned with kids who are eager to learn. Our mentors take this seriously and you’ll see the effect in every classroom.

We have the best curriculum

Not only do we work to find the best instructors in the business, but we have created what we believe is the hands-down best curriculum out there. It can be challenging to make classes like these both fun and education, but we’ve done just that. Our goal is to strengthen STEM skills and our curriculum has been supported by the big wigs, including specialists at MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

While it’s true that we take our jobs seriously and we want to create the best camps out there with the best educational content, don’t worry – that doesn’t mean we forgot to bring the fun! Our camps are project based, which means that kids get hands-on experience and get to create their own projects, ranging from simple coding to robots to digital art.

Are you ready to see the difference that our passion can make? Then reach out to CodeREV Kids

Coding Education

The Future is Digital and Other Reasons Your Kids Need to Learn to Code

If you look at the jobs that have been booming in the last decade, it’s not hard to see that there’s one sector that’s here to stay: Technology. It’s difficult to imagine a career today that doesn’t involve digital technology in some way, from cell phones to email to in-depth html. At CodeREV Kids, we think it’s important for kids to get involved in the digital world as early as possible.

Why wait until college for your child to learn to code?

It wasn’t long ago that students could only hope to learn how to code when they got to college. Today, kids often teach themselves in high school or even as early as middle school. But why should they have to teach themselves? The good news is that now that we’re around, they don’t have to.

Learning early means a deeper understanding of a wide range of topics

If students learn how to code at an early age, they’ll also get the benefits of learning to code at an early age. For example, coding helps teach children logic, advanced thinking, and problem solving. You’ve likely heard that the earlier a child learns a language, the easier it is. The same is true of coding because it is indeed a new language.

Your kids deserve the best education

When you think of the best education for your kids, what do you think of? Do you think only of getting good grades? Do you think of them embracing critical thinking skills? Do you think of them learning skills that will actually be useful after they’ve graduated from high school and college? No matter which of those definitions you’d chose – or what combination of them – there’s no question that we can offer a truly excellent education when it comes to coding.

Teach valuable skills today in an environment kids enjoy

We know that if you tried to sit your kids down and teach them how to be a CEO at seven years old, they’d soon get bored. That’s why teaching kids coding is much more appealing than helping them prepare for any other type of career: It’s fun to learn. From our Minecraft servers to our flexible, at their own pace classes, we have options that your kids can get excited about. CodeREV Kids is here to make it a reality – just reach out to us for more information.

Education

Does Memorization Help Kids in the Long Run?

At CodeREV Kids, we believe that the best way for kids to really learn STEM skills is to get involved. We offer a wide range of hands-on coding classes that can help your kid to learn to code from a young age. That said, there are some fields where memorization still has a place.

Memorization can help improve a child’s language skills

When you think about memorization, do you think about kids simply memorizing important facts and then forgetting them as soon as they’re done remembering those facts for a test? That may not be useful memorization, but remember that there are other types. For example, you likely know the lyrics to more than one song by heart. That’s memorization!

Whether kids memorize poems, lyrics, passages from books, or something else entirely, they’ll become more familiar with the rhythm, vocabulary, and cadences in the English language. This is why kids are so fascinated by Dr. Seuss’s books – they are written with lovely tempos and upbeat sounds.

Do your kids need to build organization skills? Memorization may help

When a child memorizes something, they are doing several things they’re not even aware of – including breaking down a big task into smaller tasks that are much easier to complete. For example, consider when you memorize a song without meaning to. You don’t memorize it in its entirety the first time you hear it.

What’s more likely is that you hear it a few times, memorize the chorus, and as you hear it more and more, you start to fill in the rest of the song. This is all done without you even knowing it! Your brain is organizing the song into parts and automatically knows that the best bet is to memorize the part that’s heard over and over again – the chorus.

Memorization works with other skills

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years at CodeREV Kids, it’s that when kids learn one skill, it helps them with others. As they learn how to memorize, they’re also learning visualization skills, they’re learning how to rhyme, they’re building association skills, they’re learning about repetition, and they’re using reviewing skills.

Each of these skills will help them in the future as they learn other subjects, whether language or math related. Kids don’t have to start off memorizing an entire book. Just start with a fun quote and move on from there.

Coding Education

CodeREV Kids Spring Camps Are Just Around the Corner

We’re excited about our upcoming spring camps and look forward to seeing kids returning and our newest additions too. If you have questions about the possibilities, be sure to reach out to us. We offer a wide range of coding classes, from camps to at-their-own-pace classes. We believe strongly that every kid can learn to code and we’re here to help!

Spring camp dates

We have several locations with spring camps and they all run from March 27th through April 14th. Note that these are three separate class groups. The first meets on March 27th through March 31st, the second meets April 3rd through April 8th, and the final session is April 10th through April 14th.

Choose a half day or full day

When you sign up, you can decide if you want your kids to come to us for a full day or a half day. The full day begins at 9 AM and is over at 4 PM and the half day begins at 9 AM and ends at 12:30 PM. Note that kids get to bring their own lunches and snacks to ensure everyone gets what they want and can easily accommodate their own food sensitivities or allergies.

Pricing and locations for spring coding camps

The price of the camp you choose will vary based on whether or not you want a half day or full day, and whether or not you want to bring your kid the entire day. On a per-day basis it’s $60 for a half day and $110 for a full day, while a full week is $540. We’re going to have four locations available in several cities: Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Irvine, and San Diego.

There are numerous classes in both the micro and macro options

Our grouping is as follows. We have micro classes with 6 and 7 year olds and with 8 and 9 year olds. Our macro classes are broken into 10 to 12 year olds and 12 to 14 year olds. The micro classes are offered in three options, including Minecraft level design, Adventures in Programming, and MathCraft. Macro course options include Modding in Minecraft and Game Development.

Do you have questions about these or other coding classes offered by CodeREV Kids? Feel free to reach out to us and we can work to find you the right classes for your kids.

Skills

Have You Made New Years’ Resolutions with Your Kids?

You may think that since we’re already a few weeks into January, it’s too late to make a New Year’s resolution with your kids. Or you may think that resolutions aren’t really that helpful. At CodeREV Kids, we think it’s never too late and we think there’s nothing wrong with setting a few goals. Here are some tips we have to help you create resolutions that work.

Set resolutions for both school and home

It’s understandable that parents want to pair up home and school but the truth is that the work done at either one is different and should be rewarded differently. Children should have a resolution to get their daily chores completed but also to do well over an entire semester. The goals necessary to reach these very different objectives aren’t identical, so don’t choose a single resolution to cover both of them.

Create resolutions for extracurricular activities

Extracurricular activities are fun and kids don’t need to set goals with them, right? Well, you’re partially right. What we’ve found is that any kid who wants to sign up for our coding classes can increase their self-esteem, their problem-solving skills, and their overall STEM skills. However, if you set goals these results can be even more significant. For example, consider setting goals to get your kid from our simple Minecraft server to our modded server.

A great goal for every child: Learn how to ask for help when you need it

Resolutions and goals can help kids learn how to problem solve. They can teach them how to take a big goal and break it down into smaller, more easily completed goals. However, if you’re not careful, you may end up trying so hard to show your kid they can do it all on their own that you discourage them from asking for help.

You do want your children to be self-sufficient and to work to solve problems on their own. However, once they hit a wall, you want them to feel comfortable asking for help. One great resolution is to have your kids identify situations in which they may need to ask for help. Whether they need a math tutor, assistance with chores around the house, or have a problem with friends that they need support with, teaching your kids how to ask for help is a great lesson.