Category Archive:
Teaching and learning principles

A New Grading System

a new grading system

In our education for a new world, we learn to respect and honor the uniqueness of our children, while giving students, teachers and parents the time to learn and forge partnerships. In this new system, children possess a set of age-appropriate tools to organize thoughts and actions, to problem solve, to foster self-expression and to […]


Students Need Learning Tools

students need learning tools

As human beings, the problem solvers, we need learning tools that will help us organize our thinking and actions, tools that help us with self-expression, tools that help us learn to problem solve while digging out facts and tools that help us prepare for performance of our goals and objectives. In our current educational system, […]


Learning Requires Deep Time

getting ready for preschool

Research shows that to master a subject requires 10,000 hours of concentrated practice. At 40 hours per week, 50 weeks a year, we’d need 5 years to become a master. Ratchet that time down to 20 hours per week and we are looking at 10 years. Ten hours a week of practice, we’ll need 20 […]


Every Brain Is Unique

Every Brain Is Unique

We say that every snowflake is unique. We also say that every person is unique. We need to start walking our talk. Every person is born to a unique set of circumstances, time, place, family, natural affinities, intrinsic motivations, attraction to objects, activities and people in our environments. Fifty factors in different combinations would give […]


Towards the New Education

towards the new education

Exponential Education: Releasing Human Potential Remember that moment playing tic-tac-toe when you discovered if you were the first one to mark a square, you could beat your opponent? If you always won, what was the fun of that? It was on to bigger and better games. In the movie, War Games, a computer designed to […]


The Happy Song

happy song

”I don’t feeeel good,” was the daily lament from one of my four-year-old students. Whatever ways we tried to distract Zoe and get her mind off her problems and into some fun learning, Zoe chose to sit and complain about vague physical ailments. Verifying with her parents that Zoe didn’t have any pathological reasons for […]


Kids Love Monkey Bread

kids love monkey bread

As the Christmas holidays and our winter season begin, a nice warm yummy treat to share creates fun and memories. One of my favorite activities for those cold dark afternoons of winter is to whip up a batch of Monkey Bread with my favorite group of monkeys, who affectionately call me Momma Monkey or Ms. […]


The Power of Open-Ended Questions

In my column, What’s Scary About School, I wrote about various situations to be aware of when dealing with your child’s first days of school. A perceptive reader, Aleta Ledendecker, wrote: ”I so enjoy your weekly newsletters, but there was one line in this week’s that concerned me. At the end, you mentioned asking if […]


Experiencing the Moment

My friend, Anita, recently wrote me about her adventures of accompanying her five-year-old granddaughter and daughter-in-law to private school enrollment interviews and classroom visits. Eliana came out of one school interview jumping and twirling around and exclaimed, ”That was so much fun!” A week later at another interview session Eliana was the last to leave […]


Is My Child Working at Grade Level?

is my child working at grade level

Recent news articles report on the discrepancies in test scores that are appearing in the comparison of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests and state test scores. An example of the most extreme difference is Mississippi’s scores. The state test shows that 87% of students are working at a proficient level compared to […]