Rand Whipple

Early Learning Residency at York Day Nursery

Canadian Poems for Canadian Kids

Canadian Poems for Canadian Kids Edited by Jen Hamilton Illustration by Merrill Fearon Subway Books ISBN: 0-9736675-0-9 May not still be available except at your public library, or Amazon.ca Poetry / Humour / Thoughful For Grade 2 - 3

Beyond Words

Teaching without Pressuring the Teacher to Teach or the Child to Learn Stories and songs are natural teachers and create natural paths to literacy. Stir a child’s imagination with stories, songs, and poems, and you feed the roots of their learning. Once memorized, a single sentence from a piece of prose, a song, or a poem, creates a model for many hundreds of sentences to come.

Failure a Means to Success

Michael Jordan “I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” - Michael Jordan.

Recently on CBC Radio, I heard a discussion between the renowned Michael Enright, host of CBC’s Sunday Edition, and three prominent and concerned educators. The subject for discussion was whether or not the current policy of ‘not failing students’ is ruining their possibilities in later life.

Where would we be today without failure and the subsequent success that failure can lead to? Would we have the telephone, space travel, or modern medicine? Most great scientific and technical advancements have been made because of years and years of trial and error.

Teaching Children to Be Charming

Last night I dreamt that a teacher asked me how to teach her class how to be charming.

In answer to my dream, I came up the idea of teaching a block focused on the ideals of Victorian society. Though the Victorians certainly were not perfect, I imagined the following premise; children of the time would have believed that their parents were perfect and most would do their best to follow in their parent's footsteps, especially when playing. 

Here is a list of possible goals and parameters:

Dummies CAN Read

Introduction

Is there such a thing as a dummy? No! Absolutely not! Although children have different natural abilities, every one is born to learn and learn well, if allowed to proceed at their own pace. Unfortunately, many children with reading difficulties are often blamed for their poor reading skills. As a result, they struggle with reading or shun it all their lives.

But wait a minute, lets get UN-serious about this and smile. A child with reading problems is not alone. He or she can be helped.