Archive for June, 2009

Math skills can be hard to retain during summer vacation. Kids may spend hours reading books at the beach and doing crafts at camp, but when do they practice math? Kids who practice summer math will have an easier time transitioning...

I am a graduate student, which means that I am constantly searching and researching mathematics education.

Summer is finally here. The Fourth of July is a great opportunity to incorporate summer math games with U.S. history lessons.

Lights, cameras, math geeks! The typical A-lister is a parfait of perfection: golden hair, blinding white Veneers, and a multitude of creative talents. But there's a secret math geek lurking beneath the polished surface of each of these celebrities.

That’s what I heard an advisor/investor of ours exclaim the other day. And he’s not far off. In addition to the Distinguished Achievement Award for Educational Toys and Games, DreamBox Learning was awarded the 2009 Association of Education Publishers highest honor: the Golden Lamp  for Technology Innovation (Association of Educational Publishers). Since I’m quoting folks, I think I’ll [...]

Research shows avoiding the “summer slide” can have a profound effect on your child's learning development. You may already know that DreamBox Learning is a wonderful source for engaging math activities for kindergarten, first grade and second grade students.

I continue to marvel at the power of the Web and the way it has completely transformed how we transact business and conduct our lives. We connect and communicate, we buy and we use content (books, music, movies, information, etc.) in completely new ways. In that brief second after you click the mouse, just consider how personalized and targeted the response is to your purchase on Amazon, music selection on iTunes, flight scheduling on Expedia, restaurant reviews on Yelp, friend connections on Facebook, and searches on Google.

Michael Horn was interviewed this month by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) for their monthly Education Update. "Q&A: Disrupting Class - an interview with Michael Horn" speaks to the core need for differentiated instruction via technology in the classroom.

We've had a lively discussion in the DreamBox offices this week after someone circulated a recent Science Daily article "Self-regulation Game Predicts Kindergarten Achievement." The article describes early childhood development research (by Claire Ponitz from the University of Virginia and Megan McClelland of Oregon State University) that assessed the effectiveness of a game called the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders (HTKS) task. The researchers discovered that children who did well on this this simple, 5-minute self-regulation game in the fall achieved strong scores in reading, vocabulary, and math in the spring, compared to students who had low performance on the task. The research also showed that the children who performed well on the task scored 3.4 months better than their peers who performed at average levels on mathematics learning.

A recent newspaper article on drafting Common Education Standards had me thinking about screws, widgets, standard gauge railways and whether even those politicians with the best of intentions really get what it means to provide a child with an appropriate - and timely - education.

School's out for the summer....School's out forever! Those words filled us with glee as children, but for busy parents "summer vacation," is an oxymoron. When the last bell rings, our schedules become even more difficult to juggle! And, along with all the summer activities we're planning, we want to make sure kids have plenty of opportunities to learn, and avoid the "summer slide"!

I can remember making “trains” with upright dominoes as a child. It took a long time to set them up just right, but then it was so much fun to watch them falling into each other so quickly! It was kind of like watching a tiny roller coaster in motion.