7 TIPS FOR GETTING YOUR KIDS TO READ THIS SUMMER
By some estimates, the average child loses one month of overall learning over the course of their summer vacation—and two months of reading skills, specifically. This is a phenomena known as summer learning loss, and in practical terms it means that schools spend an average of six weeks each fall reteaching old material to get students back up to speed after summer break. Building in daily reading time for kids can help prevent summer learning loss to set them up for success next school year.
Here are some tips to make reading a priority this summer.
5 Resources for Parents Who Are Stumped by Math Homework
With a new school year underway, there are many exciting events ahead for you and your child. And then, there are some events you might not be looking forward to — like deciphering your child’s math homework! As new concepts and strategies are being taught, it may feel like you have no idea how to help your child. While I love math and teaching it, math homework can still be a tricky part of my own family’s nightly routine.
Reading Comprehension Tips For Parents – Strategies You Can Use At Home
Parents are their child’s first and most important teacher. It’s almost impossible to overestimate the tremendous impact parents have on their child’s reading success. Throughout the first years of school, teachers are helping your child develop reading skills that will enable him or her to become a proficient reader. But make no mistake, learning to read takes practice, practice and more practice–much more than a child can get during a school day.
Choosing the Right School: 10 Key Factors for Parents of Special Needs Kids
If you’re like me, you might find yourself surprisingly, woefully underprepared for your first special needs school search, especially if you are considering mainstreaming and attend tours that mainly consist of parents of typical children. The tour guide, whether it be a parent coordinator or the vice principal, is not going to offer up a special needs version of the tour most of the time, but will instead cater to the general audience and tell you how competitive their school is academically and how amazing their extracurricular activities are. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s good to know those things, but depending on your child’s disability, academic competition and after school clubs might not be at the top of your list.
So what should be on your list then? Well, obviously priorities are different for each parent depending on their child’s disability, unique needs, strengths and personality, but here is my Top 10.
Benefits of smaller class sizes
1. Each Student Gets Noticed In smaller classes, it’s harder for students to hide and get left behind. Fewer students mean more personalized attention from teachers, encouraging active participation and expression of opinions. 2. Better Results Research shows that high school students in smaller classes achieve higher grades and perform better on university entrance exams. […]
4 ways to get students excited about writing
It can be difficult to get students excited about writing.
Growing up, I liked to write. More specifically, though, I liked to write about things I liked. While I could crank out a decent enough essay like the best of them, my real passion was in creative writing. Buried in the depths of my office closet is a box holding over a dozen spiral-bound notebooks and hundreds of loose pieces of paper (all adorned with my middle-to-high-school handwriting) spinning elaborate tales of drama and adventure, mostly inspired by my favorite fantasy novels.
A few pieces, though, stand out. There’s the short story I wrote for my honors English class in tenth grade, when we were studying the works of Edgar Allan Poe. My teacher gave us the option to either write an essay comparing the themes in multiple examples of Poe’s work or to demonstrate our understanding of the class material by writing an original short story mimicking Poe’s style. I chose the latter. And I got an A.
Looking back at my high school career, I realize how extremely fortunate I was to have English teachers who understood the importance of “leaning in” and getting to know me as a person. The Poe assignment was one of many in which my teachers found ways to tailor writing tasks so that they felt more interesting and relevant. It was their ability to create buy-in on my part that resulted in my not only wanting to write for school but also in my learning to see myself as a writer both inside and outside of the classroom.
There’s a great deal of focus in writing instruction on making sure students consider their audience. Just as we want students to know their audience, however, we, as teachers, need to also know our students so that we can empower them to use their writing voices. Here are four tips on how to go about this in your classroom.
Reading Goals Teachers Recommend for Families
Want to get the whole family reading more? Creating book goals turns reading into a fun activity that your kids will look forward to in their free time. These are five tangible family reading goals teachers recommend.
How to teach leadership skills to your students
Every classroom has its leader, and it doesn’t take long to identify who that is. In fact, you can often tell who this kid is going to be before you ever step foot in the classroom and they are usually the first to be mentioned to you by other teachers.
7 tips for your students to improve their English grades quickly
Since a language course includes many different skills to acquire (grammar rules, reading comprehension, research, descriptive writing, and so on), many students find themselves in chaos and often seek help to improve their English grades.
Top Tips for Raising a Motivated Reader
Reading crosses into every area of a person’s life. We must read to fill out a job application, to file a tax report and to communicate with other people. Email has become the primary way that we communicate in business and in our personal lives. Social media chat is another way we communicate. Reading is at the heart of it. If we do not have a solid understanding of reading skills, we are not able to read or understand important communications from friends, coworkers or employers.
