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

Once upon a time a king asked several blind educators in his village to examine a new beast that had come into his possession and to tell him all about it.  The first educator went up to touch the Literacy Lion, and then ran back to the king shouting ”This beast is made up of...Read More

When children are diagnosed with special needs (e.g. dyslexia, ADHD, autism etc.), the initial efforts to support them almost always revolve around helping them to fit in with the environment around them.  This of course is very important, but it leaves out a much-needed corollary to these efforts and that is:  changing the environment to...Read More