Develop your child's writing

FOR GENERATIONS, parents have read bedtime stories to their children, hoping to help them develop language, vocabulary and creativity. But new educational research shows that writing is as fundamental to a child's development as reading.
Five keys to help your kids write:

1. Word Power. As children's vocabulary grow, they are drawn to new words they hear. Help them practice using new words by writing notes to each other, creating a "word jar" with your child's favourite words and talking about new words you hear in songs.
2. Reading aloud. This is a great way to teach kids grammar, syntax and other structures of writing. Try all genres: poetry, non - fiction, even picture books.
3. Identity. Just the way your child's favourite colour changes by the minute, so will her style of writing. As she tries out new ways of expressing herself on paper, expose your child to a variety of writing styles, then let her develop her own writing identity.
4. Time. make writing time sacred and consistent.
5. Environment. To create the ideal writing environment for your aspiring writer, you'll need a surface, writing tools, good lighting and a little bit of inspiration.

Source from: Your Child's Writing, Pam Allyn

Mistakes Teachers Often Make

Teachers often -

• Fail to do effective long-range and daily planning.
• Fall into rut a by using the same teaching strategy or combination of strategies day after day.
• Spend too much time with one student or one group and not monitoring the entire class.
• Begin a new activity before gaining the students' attention.
• Talk too fast, and are sometimes shrill.
• Use a voice level that is always either too loud or too soft.
• Stand too long in one place (the feet of clay syndrome).
• Sit too long while teaching (the posterior of clay syndrome).
• Overemphasize the negative.
• Are way too serious and not much fun.
• Are way too much fun and not serious.
• Are ineffective when they use facial expressions and body language.
• Tend to talk to and interact with only half the class (usually their favorites, and usually on the right).
• Interrupt students while they are on task.
• Do not intervene quickly enough during inappropriate student behavior.
• Do not learn and use student names in an effective way (kids pick up quickly on this and respond in kind).
• Fail to do appropriate comprehension checks to see if students understand the content as it is taught.
• Use poorly worded, ambiguous questions.
• Introduce too many topics simultaneously (usually the result of poor planning).
• Overuse punishment for classroom misbehavior - going to an extreme when other consequences work better.

Grow Your Own Pizza garden

"Hello! My name is Tomato. Do you like Pizza?Did you know that the sauce on pizza is made from tomatoes and herbs? And now you can grow these same delicious things in your garden to make your own!My friends Bell Pepper, Oregano, and Baby Basil work with me to help you grow the best pizza ingredients. It's a fantastic garden for the whole family!"
What you need:

• A sunny spot
• Compost or bagged garden soil
• A wooden stake
• Three and a half feet of string
• Plastic or metal edging to create a pizza outline
• wood edging to define slices
• Seeds of your favourite toppings 9our garden includes tomatoes, peppers, basil and oregano)

Getting started:

• Choose a site that offersa good amount of sun
• Decide how much of each type of plant you want to grow, and outline a circular bed that will give you enough room to plant your seeds
• Plant your seeds. As a rule of thumb, tomatoes need at least two feet of space to grow, bell peppers need one foot, basil needs 15 inches and oregano needs 10 inches
• When you are finished, give your plants a big drink of water
• Provide support for your tomato plants once they sprout. Use a cage or a wooden stake to do this.

Source by: kauaifamilymagazine.com

Writers at Risk By: Carol Adler, Missoula, Montana

Several groups of children are at high risk of inadequate progress in written language. Some children of average intelligence fall further behind their peers as they get older. They need special help. How can they be identified? How can we give assistance?

• early success in writing for all children
• early identification of writing difficulties
• intervention, to provide the maximum direct assistance to those children at risk of failure.

As teachers, we must take special care to avoid labeling children as disabled. However, it is through continued diagnostic teaching that we will recognize specific areas in which each child needs additional support.

When a child is recognized in class as delayed in language abilities, is the delay recognized as

• general?
• specific?

Do these group of children have different educational needs? What assistance is provided to these children? Are these children given assistance early in their schooling when it may be most critical? What assistance is provided to classroom teachers who recognize these needs?

How do children learn new words? by: Warwick B. Elley/University of Canterbury

MOST CHILDREN IN SCHOOL learn the meanings of more than a thousand new words each year. Yet few teachers deliberately set out to drill their pupils systematically on selected word lists. Nor do children consult their dictionaries a thousand times a year. Even if they did, it is unlikely that they would remember what they read so that it became permanent part of their lexicon.
The prevailing assumption underlying practice in the classroom is that children acquire most of their new words from context during silent reading.
The trouble with learning from silent reading is that many pupils do not read widely or quickly enough. The avid reader goes on growing, the slow reader gets left behind, and we have yet another case of "the rich get richer"syndrome.
A recent study was undertaken by the Research Committee of the Canterbury Council of the New Zealand Reading Association, to explore how much new vocabulary children do learn from context while listening to stories, how much difference it made if the teacher discussed new words in passing, how permanent the learning was, and how much the weaker readers learned relative to the good ones.
The findings reported confirmed the fact that much vocabulary acquisition does occur during the enjoyable experience of listening to suitable stories read aloud to the class. It was clear too, that the teacher explanations add substantially to the level of acquisition, that the lower ability children learn as many new words, or more, than the bright, and that learning is long-term.
The essential point here is that story time is frequently productive, and not a frivolous waste of time." Now for a story" is a popular one in most classrooms. It is encouraging to realise that it is also a productive learning exercise.

Impress your students with mental math tricks!

Squaring 2-digit numbers (other than the numbers that end in 5)

Let's say you want to square 58. Square each digit and write a partial answer. 5x5 = 25. 8x8 = 64. Write down 2564 to start. Then, multiply the two digits of the number you're squaring together, 5x8=40.

Double this product: 40x2=80, then add a 0 to it, getting 800.

Add 800 to 2564 to get 3364.

This is pretty complicated so let's do more examples.

32x32. The first part of the answer comes from squaring 3 and 2.

3x3=9. 2x2 = 4. Write down 0904. Notice the extra zeros. It's important that every square in the partial product have two digits.

Multiply the digits, 2 and 3, together and double the whole thing. 2x3x2 = 12.

Add a zero to get 120. Add 120 to the partial product, 0904, and we get 1024.

56x56. The partial product comes from 5x5 and 6x6. Write down 2536.

5x6x2 = 60. Add a zero to get 600.

56x56 = 2536+600 = 3136.

One more example: 67x67. Write down 3649 as the partial product.

6x7x2 = 42x2 = 84. Add a zero to get 840.

67x67=3649+840 = 4489.

Island Aviation Award for support staff of the year

Name of the Awardee: Shujau Saleem

Address: H. Rumania

School: Jamaluddin School

Duration of service: 20yrs

“Today I have a successful career in the National arena of sports in Maldives. I believe that you are the foundation for all the pillars of my success in sports.” – Aishath Shaffa, student of Jamaluddin School-

Alia Investments Award for leading teacher of the year in a secondary school

Name of the Awardee: Ashraf Ali

Address: Lilymaage, Ga. Nilandhoo

School: Dharumavantha School

Duration of service: 13yrs

“I have found him to be very enthusiastic and committed in discharging his duties both as a teacher and leading teacher.” – Abdhulla Didi, Principal of Dharumavantha School-