Someone asked me, "How do you do all of this and have a young family?" I am used to hearing people say, "Do you ever sleep?" Yes, I sleep. In fact, I need at least 8 hours of sleep each night. Rest is important for me to function at full speed as well as for my recovering brain. It's a fair question. When I was a beginning teacher, I would arrive at school early in the morning and stay there until past dinner. Then, most nights I was doing work at home before bed. It would've been really difficult for me to be an excellent teacher if I were just now starting with littles at home (not to say that others who are just starting and have littles at home can't be excellent teachers, just that it would've been hard for ME). But due to that hard (and likely unhealthy) work back then, I have a lot of strategies in my teacher tool kit and many resources to pull from. I also spend an hour each day in the summer working on resources that will help me durin
The school year is winding down and parents start thinking about summer learning. This is a question I see a lot at the end of the school year and I'm happy that summer learning is on their radar because the 'summer slide' is real. While a workbook isn't a terrible idea, and it's certainly better than doing nothing, there are better ways to spend your 30 minutes of daily learning over the break. Here is the email I send to parents this time of year with my thoughts on summer learning. Dear Parents, It's getting closer to the end of the school year. There is such a thing as the "Summer Slide" where students slide backwards academically. A 1996 study by Harris Cooper found "that all students lost at least a month of math skills every summer, with an average loss of 2.6 months." Three researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that "two-thirds of the ninth-grade reading achievement gap could be attributed to how students spent thei