By Sarah Vander Schaaff This week, I’m sharing a blog I wrote a few years ago with a math teacher who has “seen it all.” And by that I mean, she’s seen what happens when the students she taught all year show up the following fall. Some have kept their skills sharp or even advanced them, and others,…
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…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff Tradition. My family does not have a lot of it, to be honest, so the events at school that fall under that category, are interesting to me. And if there was ever a season for traditions it seems spring is it. The only one I remember from my own elementary school…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff Sitting in the examining room during my eight-year-old daughter’s recent visit to the optometrist, I had a rare insight into how she sees the world. For the most part, it seemed, as I looked at the chart she viewed, “D’s” looked liked “O’s”. In fact, anytime a letter was difficult for…
By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff It was only four months ago that we, as a country, and as parents, were stopped cold, left to wonder how to make some sort of sense out of the events unfolding. While it is too early to know much about the bombings in Boston, we thought the best use…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff The most troubling thing about the story in last week’s New York Times, “New Disney Characters Make it Big in TV’s Preschool Playground“, was not that Disney Jr.’s “Sofia the First” is leaving Nick Jr.’s “Dora the Explorer” in the ratings dust. That contest, between the down-to-earth explorer in a pair…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff As I prepare for a two-day road trip with my family, I am tempted to say that the journey can be educational. Not in a planned, “let’s stop at historical landmarks” kind of education, but in the unstructured, “tidbits of unique information” manner. I know I learned a great deal as…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff As parents, we often talk about peer pressure, but how often to we talk about the effects of pluralistic ignorance? It doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it? But, it’s worth knowing about and perhaps even adding to our conversations. I didn’t know anything about pluralistic ignorance until I heard an…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff Eight years ago, when I first started teaching drama at a small private high school, I introduced a routine I learned from my own high school drama teacher back in Austin, Texas decades before. Before class, or a rehearsal, you ask your group to lie down. If the class is being…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff I fell asleep twenty years ago and awoke to find that numbers are added together in a whole new way. It’s called partial sum addition and if you’re the parent of a seven-year-old you might know what I’m talking about. Some schools send home a study guide or handbook to help…