Albert Einstein said, “Play is the highest form of research.” Â This is most true when our children play with toys that allow them to create, experiment, and solve problems. Our three-year-old is enchanted with his wooden train set these days.
I grew up in a small town, but fate has seen fit to have me raise my boys in a big city. I hate the traffic. My best friend is Charlotte Masoning her children in rural Indiana with chickens and barn
Need to teach your big kid slope-intercept form but don’t really feel like explaining it? Â Break out the ol’ TI 86 — or use the amazing free Desmos graphing calculator — and let her figure it out herself. Given the
Today the “extra duties as assigned” part of my contract obliged me to visit our 1st grade classroom to deal with some technology drama. I love going out there to see what the littles are up to. Today they were
Looking for a new game for your middle kids? Â Make a dice tower. Â They are allowed to walk around it but not to touch it. Â The goal: Find the sum of all the faces that cannot be seen. This begins
Working with dice enhances number sense in young children by training them to look at a group of objects (the dots on the dice) and recognize how many are there without counting. As children grow familiar with these common arrangements, they
Currently, my boys and I drive forty minutes to and from school each day. Most of that is highway driving, so accidents and bad weather can add up to an hour. To get the most out of that time, we
“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.” I try to keep this in mind when disciplining my sons. Am I exercising authority for my sake or for theirs? Am
When kids are taught in rooms of twenty or thirty, a lot gets glossed over. Teacher doesn’t often notice whether Bobby makes his O’s clockwise or Susie adds the tens place before the ones. These seemingly harmless oversights not only
Our family piano, a recent acquisition, has become a symbol of the culture we are building in our home. Neither my husband nor I really know how to play it. He took lessons for a few years as a kid,