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Where does the Money go in Schools?

To the education of the kids, right? Text books, teacher supplies, teacher salaries. Paper for students to write on, pencils and crayons, tissues for runny noses and bandaids. Stickers and educational videos. Books. Educational games.Research based programs that help kids learn to read, write and do math.

Right?

Wrong.

Just ask a teacher. Ask a teacher who ran out of pencils at Christmas – ran out of her own stash bought at the beginning of school. Ask a teacher who got a tax refund for $200 of supplies that didn’t cover everything they bought. Ask a teacher who no longer has a job because of layoff or who is anticipating a layoff at the end of the year.

It’s a good question, isn’t it? Where does the money go?

Teacher Layoffs Loom

Tags: Public School System

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Reading with children is a simple task, right? Sit down together, open book, read words. Here are a few secrets that can help anyone sit down with a child turn a reading time into a rich learning time.

1. Talk about the pictures. Ask the child questions about what is going on in the pictures. Young children (preschool age) can be asked to point to various objects in the picture to increase vocabulary. Ask questions about non-verbal communication happening in pictures.
2. Ask Questions. Ask simple to complex comprehension questions about the story based on the ability level of the child. Questions can include who, what, where, when why and how. Try to ask one question per page.
3. Emphasize Inflection. When reading to young children, parents are often overheard making silly voices and being overly dramatic to keep the child’s attention. When the child gets older, parents should not lose this inflection. While the silly voices may disappear , the emotion in the book needs to remain in order to teach children how to read with inflection.

While these tips will help enrich reading time, the simple act of reading to your children is important and can make a huge difference in your child’s education.

Tags: Parents, reading resources, Teach reading

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Tags: Teacher Appreciation Week

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Guest Post from David García:

What if we were to tell you that there’s an easy and even funny way for learning and improving your knowledge of English Grammar? Would you believe us? Probably not, but if you keep reading and try the resources that we mention in this post you might discover that you’re actually wrong.

The free websites that we present you here are very user friendly and contain top quality material to improve your English grammar:

The BBC offers Grammar Challenge, a collection of programs about different grammar topics. Each programme includes a grammar explanation (you can download it in .pdf format), an audio file (in .mp3 format) and complementary material.

There are also exercises to practice each grammar topic. There usually are three really entertaining interactive quizzes and a written exercise per topic.

Link | BBC Grammar Challenge

The British Council (Learn English Central) also offers explanations to the common areas of grammar along with fantastic grammar games to challenge your knowledge.

Both: explanations and games are stored in two archives sorted alphabetically where you’ll find any topic that you need.

Link | Learn English Central

Grammar Girl is the resource that the advanced English grammar learners are looking for: deep, clear and attention to the detailed explanations to learn all the secrets of the English grammar.

You can listen to the explanation (also download the mp3 audio file) and see the whole transcription on the website.

Link | Grammar Girl

Last but not least we’d like to include Free Rice on this list. In there you’ll be able to test your grammar knowledge and for each answer you get right, they’ll donate 10 grains of rice through the World Food Programme to help end hunger.

Pretty cool, eh? What are you waiting for?!

Link | Free Rice

This is a guest post from blogger and education lover David García. David collaborates in different education blogs like Learn English Online and englishdragon.cn (网上学英语).

Tags: writing resources

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Basic math is often overlooked by how simple it seems. The problem occurs when a child doesn’t “get it”. In fact, many children do not understand what they are doing and are only memorizing. Memorizing is not a bad thing, in fact, memorizing multiplication facts is something that every teacher emphasizes at some point, but a child needs to understand the math before memorization happens.

Teaching basic math in a way that a child can comprehend it is not so difficult, it just takes time and creativity. (These are two things you will begin to see a pattern in over the coming days and weeks.)

One-To-One Correspondence

A teacher term for learning to count and add is one-to-one correspondence. This is the ability of the child to connect one number with one object. So line up five ducks and count – one – two – three – four – five. Each duck represents one, yet as you move down the row the number or count goes up. Teaching this concept is the foundation for all math.

Once children know how to count with one-to-one correspondence, they can move on to addition and subtraction. If I have 3 ducks and add two more, now I have five ducks. Show this with something that the child can touch and manipulate in order for the concept to stick.

Teach Math with Manipulatives

When teaching any basic math concept, it needs to be paired with a manipulative. This means any object a child can touch and move with his or her hands. The physical moving of objects while learning math will make abstract concepts concrete and enable a child to learn faster and with greater comprehension.

Finally, if a concept is not making sense to a child, do not continue to repeat he same lesson or teaching tactic. If a child does not get the point, try from a different angle. It would be like using the same vocabulary word in the definition. In order to teach the child the concept, use different words and different ideas until something clicks and makes sense. You will see the light bulb come on when you figure out how to teach it so it makes sense.

Tags: teach math

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