If you want your child to have a rich and fulfilling life, one of the best things you can do is help build your child’s vocabulary. Research shows strong language ability is associated with a number of positive things, including happiness, friendships, connections with family, academic success and a satisfying career.
Building your child’s language ability is not something you should wait to do until they’re old enough to go to school. Continue reading
Gillian Lynne. Maybe you’ve heard of her? She’s the choreographer who did Cats and Phantom of the Opera, and she most likely would be diagnosed with ADHD if she was of school age today.
Gillian was fidgety. She couldn’t concentrate. And she was disturbing people. Gillian was considered hopeless by the school system. This was in the 1930s and Gillian was eight. As the story goes, she was sent to a specialist with her mother. After about 20 minutes of dialogue, the specialist told Gillian that he needed to speak with her mother privately. Before leaving, he turned on the radio. Once the pair were in the next room, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.” Continue reading
When I was in high school we had Home Ec and Shop to teach us those daily things. Home Ec also taught us how to care for an ill family member – how to change sheets and make a bed; how to sew things as well as how to keep a house clean and orderly. The shop classes taught woodworking, auto mechanics, etc.
The ADULTING DAY idea is great but it needs to be more of an ADULTING MONTH – including how to change a light bulb, how to fix a leaky faucet, how to clean a plugged drain, etc. All those things that are part of every day life. But then, nowadays, the schools would have to bring in professionals to show them how to do it as most teachers wouldn’t have a clue. I can just see todays youngsters (and adults) asking Google, Alexis, or those other talking tech things to tell them how to do something —other than to spy on all that goes on in your house.
How about teaching our kids how to do something PRODUCTIVE for a change???? ~ Jackie Juntti (Granny) Continue reading
Soon the first grader would wave good bye to her four year old brother at my classroom door. But now they both sat in a wooded glade on a hot August day listening intently to my story during a home visit, a tradition in our school. Continue reading
There’s nothing quite like an old book to gain a snapshot of the linguistics of the day; many words and phrases long ago common and once well understood today are, in some cases, simply baffling, if not comical.
But it’s not subject matter and linguistics alone that make old books the rare treat they are. Oftentimes, it’s what people have tucked into them. Continue reading
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
On March 30, 1973, the ‘Charlotte’s Web‘ author wrote a beautiful note to a dispirited man who had last all faith in humanity.
I’m a longtime fan of E.B. White. Intellectual Takeout readers likely know he wrote a lot more than just Charlotte’s Web. His short story The Door is one of my favorite short stories. (We’ll deconstruct that one another other day; as you can see, it’s quite mad.) Continue reading
SOUTH BEND, Ind. (WSBT) – An Indiana school district is taking steps to make sure kids have enough to eat.
Elkhart Community Schools students usually get breakfast and lunch at school, but on the weekends at home, they may be without food.
That’s where the South Bend-based non-profit Cultivate Culinary comes in: it provides weekend meals to a small group of students in the elementary school pilot program. Continue reading
Growing up in a small but well-to-do Kansas town, I had access to several local bookshops – used and new – in grade school. Every bookstore offered joys, mysteries, and delights. Rarely have I walked into one and not found some kind of treasure.
A few weeks ago, while lecturing for a Hillsdale College event in Boise, Idaho, I visited the local Barnes and Noble on Milwaukee Street. It had been at least fifteen to twenty years since I’d last visited that particular store. Wave after wave of nostalgia flowed over me as I opened the front door and walked in. I knew the layout immediately, and, even more powerfully, I knew the smells. The scents of slick magazines, pulpy books, and thick coffee. This was, you see, the very first Barnes and Noble bookstore I had ever visited. Continue reading
Whatever I teach, I teach storytelling because it is an expression of human creativity that provides perspective. Stories help us understand our world by showing us that random events surrounding our lives only seem random, but are in fact connected. Stories enable us to perceive a higher level of meaning. Fiction such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Alex Haley’s Roots explore the role of cultural storytelling in personal formation. Aesop uses “The Tortoise and the Hare” to explain the virtue of diligence, and Ernest Hemingway critiques modernist conventions of storytelling in “Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Continue reading
Turn yourself into a bookworm. These techniques will help you read more.
Reading books can exercise your brain and even boost your emotional intelligence. Despite this, about a quarter of all Americans haven’t read a book in the last year and our overall book-reading time is on the decline.
In the new year, it’s time to buck this trend. But how do you find the time to read full-length books—and why should you bother in the first place? Continue reading
A California family group says mothers in the state have had enough of public schools exposing their children to radical sex-ed curriculum, and they’re doing something about it.
Leaders of Informed Parents of California recently gathered on the Capitol building steps to make legislators and the State Department of Education aware of their outrage. Continue reading
The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that a Kansas state freshman Republican representative hopes to help struggling college students burdened by the already high cost of textbooks via tax relief. Rep. Rick Hoheisel suggests that Kansas exempt all textbooks from the statewide 6.5% sales tax, thus saving students money each year they buy new books for their curriculum.
Rep. Hoheisel is a recent college graduate and remembers quite well that he would have to shell out big bucks each year simply to afford required reading. While Kansas cannot control the price of textbooks directly, the state government can control the taxes imposed on said products. Continue reading