Education

Monday's ceremony marked the installation of the Born Learning Trail, a series of signs along a pathway through a playground at Springside Park in Pittsfield, aimed young children and their families to encourage outdoor activity and reading. The Born Learning Trail comes from efforts by Pittsfield Promise, a city-wide coalition that is working through a variety of projects with a goal of boosting reading proficiency levels among Pittsfield third-graders to 90 percent by 2020.

Books for the very youngest readers can be deceptively simple. Often, although not always, printed on thick cardboard pages (board books) and with an elementary text and straightforward illustrations, these books can strike many adults as rather boring to read and easy to create. Yet the truth is that books for babies and toddlers take a devilish amount of talent and an uncanny ability to synthesize information and illustrations while still making them entertaining and educational.

In a few more days Clarksville students will be dismissed for the summer. Weeks of relaxation, fun activities and vacation trips will kick into high gear after Memorial Day. For the director and teachers at Clarksville Youth Enrichment Programs (CYEP), the real fun starts on June 3 when their summer programs begin. Brooke Knight founded CYEP in January 2012, and wanted to create a learning center where students had the opportunity to learn academics within a fun environment.

Most parents will have access to free, all-day kindergarten beginning in the Fall of 2014 under a $15.7 billion education funding bill given final approval by the Legislature on Sunday. The Senate approved the bill on a 41-26 vote and sent it to Gov. Mark Dayton. The bill is both the biggest single part of the state's general fund budget and a top priority of the DFL Legislature. Their reason for taking the unpopular step of raising taxes is to provide the popular benefit of all-day kindergarten, as well as other education improvements.

Casey Wardynski knew his district had to make a change when he glanced at its crop of history textbooks and spotted one glaring omission. "They didn't even have 9/11 in them," said Mr. Wardynski, the superintendent of the Huntsville city schools, an Alabama district of about 24,000 students. Last summer, the district replaced its paper-based curriculum with digital content in a rapid-fire overhaul--with 3rd graders and above receiving Hewlett-Packard laptops, while pre-K pupils to 2nd graders received iPads.

--> Having grow up on afterschool specials and whatnot I’m of the generation that knows the TVz can teach u stufz. To wit, the recent spate of PSAs informing me that my kids should get 60 minutes of exercise a day (which reminds me of the one telling me to read to my kid for 30 minutes a day, which I ignored I hate reading to children).Now that recess is relegated to the era of after school specials (kids informed me its 10 minutes when it occurs) and PE is only once a week, I find myself, in the absence of team sports (that’s a whole other post coming up soon) pushing the kids to “exercise.”I’d like to say that this push has us all exercising en famille, with pickup games of soccer in the yard et al. Sadly not.Thankfully our academic ‘hood handed down a new bike to fMhson and he happily tools around, free-ranging. fMhgirl is a devoted skater/scooter (and wannabe skateboarder, but I’m holding off on that “you could break your wrist” However my most ingenuous method of sneaking exercise in has been to require kids to perform brief calisthenics to “earn back” stuff of theirs I’ve picked up or to earn extra “screen time.”How about you interwebz? Do you get 60 minutes of exercise a day? Do your kids?

Moving at the Speed of Creativity | Redeeming the Family: Blessing Children of Incarcerated Parents Wesley Fryer is not only a great educator but a great man. Here he shares how he and other men went into the Cushing Oklahooma correction facility and helped dads record messages to their children for Father's day. What a great thing to do. Part of my own faith is the forgiveness that we can receive and as people we must forgive and encourage those who have made mistakes. If you don't make a mistake ignore this post, if you do, then consider bringing something like this to your area. Great work, Wes. I hope our PLN's share this message far and wide. "This is a 14 minute video reflection by Wesley Fryer, who volunteered with Redeeming the Family on May 15, 2013, at the Cimarron Correctional Facility (prison) in Cushing, Oklahoma. Oklahoma currently has 17 prisons, and Cimarron is one of three which is privately operated. Corrections Corporation of America has owned and operated this prison commercially since 1997. Last week Redeeming the Family volunteers assisted 50 incarcerated dads to record video messages of love for their children, which will be mailed to their children before Father’s Day on Sunday, June 16th." tags: education news prison families edu_news Teaching Students to Dig Deeper | Edutopia You can help them think deeper but it takes time and sharpening the saw. Great article. "A common occurrence in classrooms is that the teacher, when he or she sees the students struggle mightily to "think out of the box" will precipitously step in and give the students the answers, or throw the deeper learning activity out all together, thinking that the students aren't ready for it. What these students and the teachers need is to be patient, practice and build those mental muscles over time. One thing that helps teachers and students is a better understanding the nature of the advanced thinking tools." tags: education news common core all_teachers bestpractices Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Increasingly we are hearing concerns from educators that new education reforms are being rushed, including the Common Core State Standards. At the same time, new teacher evaluation systems are being put into place as well. Here to evaluate the risks … Continue reading →

Big money doesn’t always win the day. At least it didn’t in a school board race in Los Angeles in which a few million dollars showered on a favored candidate failed to overcome the poorly funded campaign of a fifth-grade … Continue reading →

The University of Minnesota at Duluth has fired Rod Raymond as wellness director over numerous charges that he denies, The Duluth News Tribune reported. During the last four years, two students filed sexual harassment complaints against Raymond and he was facing other, unspecified charges. A university statement said that he was dismissed for, among other things, “violation of the Regent’s Policy on Nepotism and Personal Relationships;" “inappropriate sexual conduct with a UMD student on university premises and during work hours,” and "untruthfulness during an Office of Equal Opportunity investigation." Raymond has denied all charges, and vowed to challenge his dismissal. Ad keywords: Diversity