By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff Sometimes you send Grandma up with the kids to read books at bedtime and they spend all their time watching the Beatles on YouTube. My six-year-old now knows the words to “Twist and Shout” and, like her grandmother, thinks Paul is a heartthrob. Perhaps this is going on in your…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff Continuing our series on What to Expect When You Have No Idea What to Expect (raising tweens to teens), we hear from a mother of two girls and a boy, whose ages range from 15 to 17. If the theme last week was to listen to your growing children, this week’s…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff I am not a trailblazer. That may be my mantra as I head into the process of raising a preteen. Someone has done this before—and I want to learn from them. Times change quickly, to be sure; the social media of last year is now passé, and young people seem to…
By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff Blurred vision, painful headaches, and the inability to attend even a half-day of school. When her eight-year-old daughter, Charlotte, took a fall into a metal pole on the playground at school, her mother didn’t expect the ensuing concussion would change the course of third grade. Charlotte, as you may remember…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff For the past month, I have been thinking about my interview with literacy expert, Peggy Kaye (LEARN WITH HOMER) who reminded me that children sometimes feel vulnerable when learning a new skill. I had forgotten that sense of fear; a worry that one will never understand. I’ve been reminded of it…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff Is there a way to talk about young people being “gifted” and not enter a territory fraught with debate? From what I’ve been reading recently, there are not only arguments about how we define “giftedness” but arguments about the arguments. For parents, the identification matters in a practical sense if they…
By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff Why are these children protesting in front of their school? Oh, wait—their parents are there, too. And their teachers. And their principal? One of them was Brooklyn mother, Jody Alperin. She has a first and fourth grader in PS10, a school that draws students from Park Slope, Windsor Terrace and…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff Editor’s Note: This was originally written in 2015 and edited by Mindprint staff in 2019. Structured phonics is proven to be the most effective instruction for all students, particularly struggling readers. If your student needs help to learn to read, our learning specialists recommend these reading strategies. Erika Bird was standing in front of a table ready…
Summer Reading: Why It Matters Thanks to a few tips from the National Summer Learning Association summer reading can be a bit less stressful and a lot more effective. If there is one tip I inferred from looking at their 2009 Research Brief, “How to Make Summer Reading Effective” it is this. If you want to increase…