Making reading logs fun! | Reading-Rewards.com Blog Making reading logs fun! Share it now! Many teachers use reading logs in the classroom and as homework assignments to encourage reading and comprehension among their students. But reading logs are often done individually, and cannot easily be shared by fellow students. Kids often complain about them, and they can actually become counter-productive. Here a few tips on how to make reading logs fun: Use an online reading log program like Reading Rewards. Share your students’ book lists and reviews with the class. Suggest or choose books for your students that are appropriate for their age-level and interest. What about you? Happy Reading, Michelle Michelle Skamene is the Founder of Reading Rewards, and one of its Managing Partners.
edu365.cat Developing Fluency in Math-Delayed Children The acquisition of math facts generally progresses from a deliberate, procedural, and error-prone calculation to one that is fast, efficient, and accurate (Ashcraft, 1992; Fuson, 1982, 1988; Siegler, 1988). For many children, at any point in time from preschool through at least the fourth grade, they will have some facts that can be retrieved from memory with little effort and some that need to be calculated using some counting strategy. From the fourth grade through adulthood, answers to basic math facts are recalled from memory with a continued strengthening of relationships between problems and answers that results in further increases in fluency (Ashcraft, 1985). In a typical developmental path in addition, for instance, students begin adding using a strategy called “counting all” that gives way to a “counting on” strategy, which in turn gives way to linking new facts to known facts (Garnett, 1992). Following this initial placement quiz, FASTT Math constructs a fact grid.
More evidence corroborating Professor Krashen and exposing the contrived skills and STEM crises "...the impending shortage of scientists and engineers is one of the longest running hoaxes in the country" — Gerald W. Bracey Schools Matter's Professor Stephen Krashen has been a long time critic of the media promulgated mythology that there's a shortage of qualified workers, particularly those in the Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM) fields. A quick survey of his posts here reveal his ongoing work to counter the skills/STEM propaganda that is most often used to justify some of the most pernicious corporate education reforms. Whenever I see more evidence proving these skills/STEM myths wrong, I'm quick to forward them to Dr. Krashen for him to add to his burgeoning catalog of documentation. "numbers released by the National Science Foundation show that people with doctoral degrees in those technical fields are struggling to find work in their industries." and Krashen posted the above piece on his facebook page, and several of us commented. The manufactured STEM crisis.
The myth of learning styles | thInk Three children doing group work together. Credit: Anthea Sieveking/ Wellcome Images Before becoming a writer, I spent a year-and-a-half training as a science teacher and then working at a secondary school in Croydon. During my short stint in education, the biggest buzzword was “differentiation.” We were told that any given class contains pupils with a range of abilities, and that different children have different learning styles. This second idea was drilled into us over and over again. The idea of learning styles is based on the theory of multiple of intelligences, developed in the early 1980s by psychologist Howard Gardner of Harvard University. Gardner has been expounding his theory, and pushing for educational reforms, ever since. It is, however, a myth. There is no scientific evidence that children do indeed acquire information more effectively if it is presented to them in their preferred learning style. Like this: Like Loading...
California holds out against Obama's education vision Education Secretary Arne Duncan visits a Louisville, Ky., school last… (Angela Shoemaker / Courier-Journal ) WASHINGTON — California is almost always there to boost President Obama's policy agenda as he fights fierce headwinds in Congress, working with the executive branch to carry out the administration's vision on healthcare, renewable energy and clean air. But when the topic shifts to overhauling education, the state has become one of the administration's biggest headaches. California has defiantly refused to follow the administration's lead in grading the performance of teachers and using those measurements to reward the best teachers and punish the worst. The state is one of very few that have told Washington that under no conditions will it put in place the type of teacher evaluation system Obama has championed. California is one of the last holdouts in the country; the administration has succeeded in persuading reluctant officials in Illinois and Texas to come aboard.
Conquest of Mexico “RESOLVED, That to conquer Mexico and to hold it, either as a province or to incorporate it into the Union, would be inconsistent with the avowed object for which the war has been prosecuted; a departure from the settled policy of the Government; in conflict with its character and genius; and in the end subversive of our free and popular institutions.” “RESOLVED, That no line of policy in the further prosecution of the war should be adopted which may lead to consequences so disastrous.” In offering, Senators, these resolutions for your consideration, I have been governed by the reasons which induced me to oppose the war, and by the same considerations I have been ever since guided. In alluding to my opposition to the war, I do not intend to notice the reasons which governed me on that occasion, further than is necessary to explain my motives upon the present. So much for the past; we now come to the commencement of another campaign; and the question is, What shall be done? Mr. Mr. Mr.
Common Core: Solve Math Problems Additional Resources • Curriculum Associates. The Ready Common Core package provides materials built to the new math standards from the ground up, along with a teacher resource book and an online tool kit. • Peoples Education. • Math Solutions. • Math Common Core Coalition. Download Sample CRAs... The new Common Core standards for mathematics demand that students (and teachers!) We talked with Tapper about concrete-representational-abstract assessments, or CRA, a tool that does just that. What is a CRA assessment and what does it do? At the first station, students use physical materials—place-value blocks, Unifix cubes—to solve a problem. In America, particularly, we have an overemphasis on procedural understanding. Isn’t deeper conceptual understanding exactly what the Common Core calls for? Getting a right answer on a test represents the potential for understanding, but it could be at the level of “I did the right steps—I followed the procedure.” What do CRAs look like in action?
Social Skills Grade by Grade | Parents Step into any classroom, and along with the usual math tables and word lists, you’ll probably see other signs hanging front and center. You know, the ones that say, Be kind! or Be brave! These rules aren’t just there to keep the peace. Being able to delay gratification, for instance, is one of the biggest predictors of success. Pre-K Skills: Sharing “Give-and-take is the first moral skill kids learn, and it’s hard to go forward without it,” says Borba. How to teach it Take turns talking about what you did that day over dinner and play lots of board games together; these are two of the easiest ways for him to practice waiting. Being Polite “A kid with manners is a likeable kid — and you can’t underestimate likeability,” says Borba. How to teach it Remember your manners. Self-Control Your kid may be used to relying on you to help calm him down. Kindergarten & 1st Grade Skills: Patience Give your child lots of opportunities to entertain herself without your help. Assertiveness Resilience
Charters schools and vouchers: Decimating the case for privatizing public education. Photo courtesy Diane Ravitch The case for market-driven reforms in education rests on two key premises: The public school system is in crisis, and the solution is to let the market pick winners and losers. Market strategies—high-stakes teacher accountability, merit pay, shuttering “failing” schools—are believed to be essential if public schools are ever going to get better. And these maxims underlie the commitment to charter schools and vouchers. If you follow education debates, you’ve heard that again and again. Since The Death and Life of the Great American School System, her 2010 best-seller, Diane Ravitch has been the most prominent critic of the market-minded reformers. In her new book, Reign of Error, Ravitch documents how public education’s antagonists have manufactured a crisis in order to advance their agenda. Exhibit A in the sky-is-falling argument is the claim that test scores are plummeting. Courtesy of Knopf Ravitch is both a respected scholar and a gifted polemicist.
Why we don't learn from our mistakes Whoever said that we learn from our mistakes made a mistake. Albert Einstein said it, Winston Churchill said it, and they got it wrong. It turns out that we are better at learning after doing something right rather than after doing something wrong. Researchers from MIT have shown for the first time that the brain learns more after a success than a failure. “The findings suggest that learning may not require the changing of connections of neurons on each trial, as several other studies have suggested, and instead suggest that information about outcomes on each trial are held in a sort of buffer for guidance in the next attempt,” says Professor Howard Eichenbaum from the Centre for Memory and Brain at Boston University. So, it turns out our history, piano and tennis teachers had it right all along, practice does indeed makes perfect. In their study, monkeys were rewarded after shifting their gaze to the right or left after being shown specific pictures on a computer screen.
Blended Learning Sports Variety of Approaches Published Online: March 12, 2012 Published in Print: March 15, 2012, as Blended Learning Mixes it Up Teacher Katie Glass, middle, talks to student Christian Guillen about history at Bronx Arena High School in New York City while student Maribel Peralta works on an assignment. —Emile Wamsteker for Education Week As schools mix online instruction and face-to-face learning, educators are identifying promising hybrid approaches As blended learning models, which mix face-to-face and online instruction, become more common in schools, classroom educators and administrators alike are navigating the changing role of teachers—and how schools can best support them in that new role. "This is a whole new world for education," says Royce Conner, the acting head of school for the 178-student San Francisco Flex Academy, a public charter school. Meghan Jacquot is the school's English teacher. "It would be impossible to do this job without that framework [of online-delivered curriculum]," says Jacquot.
The Book Bench: White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in Hunger Games On Tuesday, February 28th, a twenty-nine-year-old Canadian male fan of Suzanne Collins’s dystopian young adult trilogy, “The Hunger Games,” logged onto the popular blogging platform Tumblr for the first time and created a site he called Hunger Games Tweets. The young man, whom I’ll call Adam, had been tracking a disturbing trend among Hunger Games enthusiasts: readers who could not believe—or accept—that Rue and Thresh, two of the most prominent and beloved characters in the book, were black, had been posting vulgar racial remarks. Adam, who read and fell in love with the trilogy last year, initially encountered these sorts of sentiments in the summer of 2011, when he began visiting Web sites, forums, and message boards frequented by the series’s fans, who were abuzz with news about the film version of the book. “Naturally Thresh would be a black man,” tweeted someone who called herself @lovelyplease. “I was pumped about the Hunger Games. “Why is Rue a little black girl?”
Next Generation Learning A physics lab at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina, which offers nearly 300 degree and certificate programs. our goal: to ensure that all low-income young adults have affordable access to a quality postsecondary education that is tailored to their individual needs and educational goals and leads to timely completion of a degree or certificate with labor-market value. The Challenge At A Glance A college education is the gateway to the American middle class, with college graduates earning substantially more than those without a degree. Poor college completion rates in the U.S. hurt the national economy. The U.S. economy will need an estimated 22 million new college graduates by 2018 but will face a shortfall of at least 3 million. The foundation works with educators, researchers, technologists, foundations, policymakers, and other partners to help public colleges and universities affordably and efficiently guide more low-income students to degree completion.