Protecting Children with Allergies at School

Food allergies, especially nut allergies, have made headlines in recent years. Many people are unaware that food allergies can be extremely serious, even life threatening, as was the case withNatalie Giorgi, a vivacious 13-year-old girl who died last June as a result of eating a dessert that contained peanut butter. Giorgi had been staying at a summer camp with her family and had always been cautious about what she consumed. Her untimely death certainly provided an example of how deadly food allergies can be, causing schools and other institutions to seriously evaluate their …

The Benefits of Puzzles in Early Childhood Development

People have long known that puzzles present many benefits for children as they develop. Children usually start out with simple knobbed puzzles that are outlines of simple shapes that fit into corresponding board cutouts. From there they go to more complex silhouettes of real world objects that take more consideration.

The last step that people take with puzzles is usually to jigsaw puzzles of varying complexity. The user is guided by an image they assemble and every time you end up with the same result.

I am here today to write about the benefits of puzzles for your child as they grow, and offer a step beyond jigsaw puzzles that are found at Puzumi.com.

 

The Best Educational Toys for Your Child This Holiday Season

The opportunity to learn is around the clock, it doesn’t have to happen at school alone! This coming Holiday season you will no doubt purchase many toys for your child, why not find some that can help your child learn and develop while they play?

We’ll look at 5 different styles of toys, primarily for children over the age of 5. Hopefully one will apply to your specific child in a way that makes them see a toy they want to play with - not an educational toy meant to trick them! Do this by considering your child’s interests and what they enjoy and then look for a toy that will interest them, not the other way around!

Sparking Their Interest–Engaging Students with “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”!

Today is the day! The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is now playing in theaters everywhere. Whether you're seeing the movie this weekend or later on, the excitement surrounding the release is sure to last a while. Why not take advantage of the buzz to get your students excited about learning?

Students' fascination with The Hunger Games can be more than an obsession with popular culture. Great teachers like yourselves recognize the potential to transform entertainment into education, harnessing students' interests to engage them in productive learning. Tracee Orman, Teach 100 blogger and the mind behind the wildly popular website Hunger Games Lessons has been using Suzanne Collins' popular franchise to add depth and excitement to her lessons since she first di…

The Secret, Part 2 – Permission for an Inner Life

This post was originally published on Wonder of Children, by Lisa Dewey Wells, on October 22, 2013.

Lisa Wells has taught for 20 years in independent schools in MA, NY and MD. She currently writes a blog on child development, teaches yoga and tries to spend as much time with her two high schoolers as they will allow. Lisa’s committed to knowing each learner as an individual, creating a classroom community where the social curriculum is interwoven with the academic fabric and sharing her work with yoga and meditation with teachers and students. As a consulting teacher for the Northeast Foundation for Children’s …

 

Celebrating Banned Books

While it is a popular book used as a teaching tool in schools, The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, was one of the most challenged books of 2010 due to being “sexually explicit, unsuited to [a number of] age [groups], and [violent].” It is often surprising when books are banned from schools, so talking to students about book banning can help spark rich classroom discussions and boost critical thinking skills.

HISTORY OF BOOK BANNING

Books are banned by different organizations for a multitude of reasons. The history of book banning is…