Sunday, July 26, 2009

Race to the Top Guidelines Announced

Friday saw the long awaited guidelines for states to apply for approximately $4 billion in aid to improve student achievement. Find them here. Caution: Opens in pdf, you can also follow the link from the US Dept of Education web site.

A few highlights of the requirements to receive funding:

Teacher and principal evaluations must be tied to student achievement.

States must adopt internationally benchmarked standards. Currently the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) is used to compare the 50 states, which all have different standards, to each other and other countries. Minnesota's "proficient" standard in reading on the 8th grade MCA II is roughly equivalent to the "basic" level on the NAEP.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Friday Fun

It's Friday and Friday's are for fun.

Explore the RIF Kids Reading Planet site with your child for lots of reading fun and games.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Minnesota Has Third Highest Child-Care Costs in Country

From the St. Paul Ledger, Capitol Report

"Child-care costs in Minnesota are the third highest in the nation based on the price of child care as a percentage of the state median income for a two-parent family, according to a new report from the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies (NACCRRA).

And single parents here spend almost half their monthly income on day care, the report said.

In every region of the country, according to the report, the average monthly child-care fees for an infant in 2008 were higher than the average amount families spent on food each month. Also, in every state, monthly child-care fees for two children at any age exceeded the median cost of rent and were nearly as high – or higher than – the average monthly mortgage payment."

Read the rest here.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

School Report Cards

The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) web site has the latest MCA (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment) results posted for every public school and school district in the state. Visit the
school report card page of the MDE web site to see your community's school's results.

Tip:You can compare multiple schools and school districts by selecting "Analyze Your Results" from the menu on the right of the first page that comes up after selecting your school district from the alphabetical list.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Did you know?

High school graduation is not a guarantee of adequate reading skill for today's workforce.

It's not hard to find conflicting conclusions in literacy studies, particularly when trying to determine the precise economic impact of reading programs. However, in To Read or Not To Read the National Endowment for the Arts reviewed government, academic and private reading research findings and discovered startling agreement on the impact of reading skill on the success of adults.

According to the report:
Fewer than one third of high school seniors read at the proficient level.
Employers now rank reading and writing as top deficiencies in new hires.
Good readers generally have more financially rewarding jobs.
Less advanced readers report fewer opportunities for career growth.

The entire report- To Read or Not To Read

Friday, July 10, 2009

Friday Fun

It's Friday, and Friday's are for fun.

Summer often brings lots of time in the car and there are more educational ways to spend some of that time than popping another video into a portable DVD player. Teach your children some old family favorite games. Here are two-

Alphabet Signs- Find letters of the alphabet, in order, on road signs. You can play this as one team-everyone looking for the letter-or as competitors with one team finding A, then the next team finding B, and so on. Ask prediction questions, like "Which letters do you think will be the hardest to find?"

I Went on A Trip, and in My Suitcase I Packed- This is a great memory building, and often silly, game. Start with the phrase "I went on a trip, and in my suitcase I packed a ______" filling in the blank with the item of your choice. The next person then repeats the phrase,and your item, then adds an item of his or her own. You keep going round and round with the list of items in the suitcase getting longer and longer until someone breaks the chain. The giggling usually starts before that.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Copy and Paste Parent Tips

Paste the checklist into your organization's publications.

Checklist for Parents of First Graders
These skills usually develop during first grade. Talk with your child's teacher if you have questions.

____ My child knows all the letters of the alphabet.

_____ My child knows the difference between letters and words, and knows there are spaces between words in print.

_____ My child knows that written words represent speech and can show how words are represented by letters arranged in a specific order.

_____ My child knos some punctuation marks and where sentences and paragraphs begin and end.

_____ My child is beginning to understand and explain why people read.

_____ My child can put together (blend) and break apart the sounds of most one-syllable words and can count the number of syllables in a word.

_____ My child can sound out words he doesn't know, and recognize some irregularly spelled words, such as said, you, and are.

_____ My child reads and understands simple written instructions.

_____ My child reads first grade books alund, and can tell when she cannot understand what she is reading.

_____ My child uses what he already knows to enrich what he is reading.

_____ My child predicts what will happen next in a story.

_____ My child asks questions (how, why, what if?) about books she is reading and can describe what she has learned from a book.

_____ My child uses simple punctuation marks and capital letters.

_____ My child is curious about words and uses new words when he speaks and writes.

Friday, July 3, 2009

Friday Fun


It's Friday and Friday's are for fun.

Check out this fun fireworks web site Just move your mouse around the screen and click.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Did you know?

85 percent of all youth charged in juvenile courts nationwide have reading difficulties, and at least 40 percent of those who should be in high school read below a fourth-grade level.

Most recently available data from 2004, Report on Literacy Programs