A lot of recent research supports the systematic teaching of phonemic awareness in beginning reading programs.  The problem is that phonics lessons can get awfully dull, with teachers pointing to the letter and having kids say the sound, or students poring over phonics worksheets that ask them to match the right letter to the word,...Read More

Homework is considered to be part of the natural order of things in school.  But in the past twenty years or so there’s been an increasing amount of criticism about its function and use (see for example, Alfie Kohn’s The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing).  I too believe...Read More

One of the reasons that I’ve been enthusiastically teaching and writing about Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences for the past thirty-four years, is that it is so easy to understand and apply to one’s own personal life.  In this post, I’d like to demonstrate this to you by outlining how you can learn just...Read More

More kids are suffering from trauma-related sensitivities than you might realize  The gold standard research on this matter is the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  They looked at almost 10,000 adults at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego,, California, who were asked questions covering seven aspects of...Read More

I’ve been hearing a lot about ”the science of reading” recently. This seems to be the new ne plus ultra ingredient in the ”best” reading programs.  It’s part of this ”evidence-based” nonsense that I’ve written about elsewhere in my blog.  As if some of us are going to sit back and let researchers in white coats...Read More