Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Selections from reddit.com - 15 Aug 2006

I find myself checking reddit.com every day, sometimes a couple times a day. Here are a few links I find via reddit:

Times has an article on Who Needs Harvard? The main point is that there are a lot of good schools and parents shouldn't focus so much on getting into the most famous schools. We're still six years away from sending our oldest off to college. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

From down under is a report of a mother who successfully won money from a private school. The school failed to teach the boy how to read. The boy had been in the private school for five years. If parents could sue public schools in America for not teaching children how to read, the government would go bankrupt.


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2 comments:

betsy said...

I can completely relate to your last paragraph... and public schools...

I have a 3rd grader who I'm withdrawing from public school, and she- first of all -hates to read... and second- can't read past maybe a late 1st grade level...

She definitely would have slipped through the system doing "just enough" to get by, all the while retaining NOTHING.

However, I blame noone but myself for letting it get that far... Parents (I was one of them) rely to much on schools...

Janine Cate said...

It is easy to miss things when your child spends all day at school.

Good luck Betsy. Give your daughter time to relax. My middle daughter who is about to turn 10 learned to read fluently about 3 months ago. Some children's brains are simply not ready to read earlier.

Physical activities like skipping, riding a bike and crawling can help get the brain ready to read.

So maybe your child needs more play and less "school work."

We read books out loud and listened to books on tape to help our late readers learn to love books. Then when their brains were ready they learned to read and to love reading.