By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff A twitter follower of the On Parenting blog asked: What happens when your kids are in school & have a lack of control (over) what & when they are told about tragedies? Several years ago, when I first started teaching, I had a student discuss how he learned about the attacks on…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff We’ve recently returned to the twenty-first century having spent a few days hanging out with the settlers and revolutionaries of Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg. My kids will be talking about the experience for days and years to come, and certainly testing out the new words they learned during our trip back…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff “I don’t have a chance of winning. I don’t want to do it.” Was this the attitude Google anticipated when it launched this year’s Doodle 4 Google competition? Probably not. On the surface, the competition is simple: children in grades k-12 are invited to submit a doodle version of the Google…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff When Peggy Kaye was first starting out in teaching, a parent asked if there was something she could use for the classroom. “Yes,” she said, “a tape recorder.” The parent got her one, and Kaye recorded herself reading books her students could later listen to on their own. Today, Kaye is…