Fall will be here before we know it, and there are lots of new children’s books to be excited about! Here are some of the most highly anticipated children’s books releasing in fall 2024. 1. Good Night Thoughts by Max Greenfield. From actor Max Greenfield, the author of I Don’t Want to Read This Book and its two companion titles, comes a sweetly funny bedtime book about anxiety and being present. What do we do…
Fall will be here before we know it, and there are lots of new young adult books to be excited about! Here are some of the most highly anticipated young adult books releasing in fall 2024. 1. Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay. This exploration of four generations of Filipino American boys spans the 1930s to the 2020s. Told in multiple perspectives, Everything We Never Had unfolds like a beautifully crafted nesting doll, where…
When Celeste Gravatt first heard about a data breach in her kids’ school system in February 2023, it sounded innocuous. “I didn’t really think anything of it at first,” Gravatt says. Officials at Minneapolis Public Schools called it a “system incident,” then “technical difficulties,” and finally, “an encryption event.” She says it was only when she checked social media that she realized the true extent of the attack, and what it could mean for her…
For a few weeks in the spring of 2016, nearly all the eighth grade students at a small public school affiliated with Columbia University agreed to stay late after school to study math. They were preparing for a critical test, the New York State’s Regents examination in algebra. Half of the kids came from families that lived below the poverty line in Harlem and upper Manhattan. They attended a selective middle school and were advanced…
When your child is younger, you as a parent have a lot of control over his social life, selecting whom he should interact with, the length of the interaction and where the interaction takes place. That changes when your child reaches school age. Suddenly, these decisions about friendships— with whom to be friends, how much time to spend with a friend and how to spend that time together — are made largely on his own…
Kids around the country are still suffering academically from the pandemic, but more than three years after schools shut down, it’s hard to understand exactly how much ground students have lost and which children now need the most attention. Some new reports offer some insights. All three were produced by for-profit companies that sell assessments to schools. Unlike annual state tests, these interim assessments are administered at least twice a year and help track student…
Is a dump truck a vehicle? What about a skateboard? An elevator? A hamster wheel? These are some of the questions math educator Christopher Danielson has asked — or been asked — while playing a reasoning game he calls “Is It or Not?” The game began with a debate between another math educator, Kassia Wedekind, and her six-year-old daughter, but Danielson has played it with children of all ages, including his own. “It was a…
Think about how crushed young teens can feel when a formerly close friend becomes distant or the shame that can follow disclosure of sensitive information to a mere acquaintance. Knowing what studies show—for example, that humans tend to have frenemies and we often confide intimacies in people we aren’t that close to—can assuage adolescents’ fear of being abnormal. Frank discussions about middle school friendships like these are important to have at school, since parents of…
When teachers familiarize themselves with students’ reading lives and histories, they may uncover reading trauma — moments when students had a negative experience with a peer, teacher or librarian that turned them off of reading. Students with reading trauma associate reading with painful feelings of shame or stress and doubt their reading abilities, said Boston-based educator Kimberly Parker in a recent webinar organized by the Texas A&M Collaborative for Teacher Education. Take reading logs, for…
In Fairfax County, Virginia, thousands of middle school students experience what most of their peers leave behind in elementary school — recess. The break is only 15 minutes long, but at Rocky Run Middle School (about 25 miles west of the nation’s capital), the seventh and eighth graders make the most of one of the few stretches of time in school that they can truly call their own. Fairfax County schools, a district of around…
