I recently read the book Thought and Language by Lev S. Vygotsky and Alex Kozulin. The section about writing illuminates the need for using mental models when teaching writing to young children. Some of the points that lead to this reality include:
Writing is different from speech in a number of ways:
“Writing is speech without an [...]
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As most students have headed back to the classroom or soon will be arriving, I am wondering how much has changed over the summer for many of these students. Do their parents still have jobs? Were there significant changes in the family structure that have impacted their lives? How many of them spent most of [...]
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The Boulder County Bridges Initiative in Colorado has a lot going for it: solid leadership and funding, an engaged community, and a professional support staff. They know how to manage a project and build a movement. Click here to view the tool they created to assess the progress of their Bridges work.
The Progress Assessment is [...]
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Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 17th, 2009 2 Comments »
Each year before school started I often spent two or three weeks making sure my classroom was “perfect” before my students arrived. I would arrange my room one way; then rearrange it. On the first day of school as the teacher, I found myself as excited as I was on my first day of school [...]
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The first community to develop a Bridges Steering Committee was Springfield, Ohio. The actions that group took to address predatory practices in Clark County, Ohio, sparked the imagination of other groups that wanted to organize themselves to use Bridges concepts to address poverty in new ways.
Bridges Steering Committees began cropping up across the nation. Now [...]
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