School is out for many area public school students and the concept known as Summer Learning Loss says some of those students will lose week's worth of skills over the next few months. Plus, studies show the losses are even greater for at-risk students, who may lose as much as two to three months of reading skills during the summer. Most students lose two to three months in math skills, studies show.
When their daughters graduated from high school and stepped onto the next stage of their lives, Richmond friends and authors Gigi Amateau and Meg Medina felt that normal twinge of sadness that moms know so well. When they talked, they began reflecting on how they had used books, not just as writers but as parents, through their children's lives.
Since February 2012, we've been tracking (and live-tweeting) the PreK-3rd Grade National Work Group's series of webinars on reducing the achievement gap by fourth grade. Today the work group, of which New America is a part, released a four-page brief with webinar highlights. The group's site also includes PDFs of press coverage from Ed Daily, which reported on each session.
Here are highlights from the links that I shared on Twitter this week @JensBookPage.
BEA (Bookseller's Expo America)
So many books to covet! BEA 2013: Strong Season Ahead for Children's Publishers http://ow.ly/lMZwE via @PWKidsBookshelf
BEA 2013: The Boy Readers Are All Right, panel with Gantos, Scieszka + Emerson http://ow.ly/lMZH7 via @PWKidsBookshelf
BEA 2013: Why Kids Should Read About War from Suzanne Collins and Walter Dean Myers...
Common Core Standards--adopted by 45 states--is supposed to bring back writing in schools. Ironically, a writing revolution in schools happened 37 years ago when an eloquent professor named Donald Graves cracked the psychology of writing. Today some teachers fear Common Core is wrecking writing instruction in their classrooms. The father of the writing revolution in schools, the late Donald Graves, founded the Writing Process Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire in 1976 that would have profound impact on the teaching of writing in the English-speaking world.
For the last two years, I've published a series of profiles of young education leaders who are helping to transform education today and are likely to have an even greater impact in the coming years. This year's list features ten amazing leaders working in education in a variety of ways. These leaders are a diverse bunch. Among them are individuals with professional experience as computer scientists and app developers, classroom teachers, community organizers, reporters, and politicians, among other things.
While the contention that video games are bad for kids is slowly, stubbornly slipping from the public conscious, it seems that study at the other end of the spectrum - how video games might be good for children - is still very much in its infancy, and often met with scepticism and disdain. A recent example of this is a paper published in Current Biology earlier this year from The University of Padua, bearing the eye-catching title "Action Video Games Make Dyslexic Children Read Better."
Not every parent wants to be a Tiger Mom, but many parents harbor the desire to raise a virtuoso cellist, or at the very least, children who can distinguish between their Vivaldi and their Verdi. Two new illustrated books, one complete with CD, aim to instruct children on how to listen to and appreciate classical music. Even if they don't have a piano to practice on.
As the third graders who were the first Speak Up participants in 2003 graduate from high school this spring, a decade of digital learning research provides a birds' eye view of the changing environment for digital learning both in and out of school. Today's students are more concerned about using a variety of digital learning tools such as mobile devices and less concerned about access to the internet, according to the Speak Up 2012 National Report on K-12 Students released June 4.
Book: The Last Academy
Author: Anne Applegate (@AnneApplegate)
Pages: 320
Age Range: 12 and up
Those who enjoy a creepy, Gothic read will not want to miss Anne Applegate's The Last Academy. The book begins with a confrontation between Camden and her best friend Lia at a summer party, but quickly shifts gears as Camden heads off to boarding school. On the plane, Camden encounters a strange man who seems to threaten her. At her new school, Lethe, she learns that this man owns the land on which the school is located. She also learns that anoth...
