Recently in Primary Category

This interesting Associated Press "Fact Check" article looks at some of the claims that people make frequently about international comparisons, saying that U.S. kids test worse than other countries, spend less time in school and have a lower graduation rate. According to the AP, statistics tell a more complicated story, with U.S. performance - although not absolutely stellar - comparing more favorably than some education critics assume. An excerpt:

"The U.S. does trail the most high-achieving countries, mostly developed nations in Asia such as Singapore, Taiwan and Japan. But the U.S. holds its own in the group that comes next, a group of developed countries that, depending on the test, includes England, Germany and Russia. In fact, the U.S. has gained on some of its toughest competitors since 1995, making bigger strides in math than Singapore and Japan, and in science than Japan."

Corporal punishment in school is illegal in California, but a spanking controversy has hit a publicly funded charter middle school in Memphis, prompting opposition from the California-based activist group "Hitting Stops Here!", according to this story from the Commercial Appeal newspaper.  Males get a wooden paddle, while girls are given "lashes to the fingers with a leather strap," according to the article. In an unusual twist, much of the discipline is meted out at student assemblies. An excerpt:

Spanking has been part of MAHS's strategy since the school opened in 2003, said principal Curtis Weathers. Parents must sign a contract before their children are admitted."This is nothing that we are ashamed of," Weathers said. "It's very effective for us as a strategy for avoiding certain conducts."

[The director of  "Hitting Stops Here!" said that she] wants parents to know "there are other ways to treat children without beating the tar out of them."

An interesting debate is going on in the United Kingdom about whether Twitter should be a part of the reading/writing curriculum in primary (elementary school) grades.  This article lays out the debate:

Comment of a pro-Twitter expert: According to Angela McFarlane, the professor of education who conducted the study, pupils who master 21st-century communication technology and social networking are better at organising their studies, use information from different sources more effectively and often write more extensively through the use of word processing. But some children are missing out because of the myth that anyone under 25 can miraculously and spontaneously pick up the latest technology, she cautions.

Comment from anti-Twitter expert, who notes that each Twitter message is limited to just 140 characters: Learning how to use Twitter and Wikipedia will take five, maybe 10 minutes; there should be more thought and research into whether we really want to be promoting in schools a means of social networking that limits the amount of characters one can use. Using Twitter to teach children all that communication must, by definition, lack depth of any sort, and is plainly mad. Besides, it is likely that Twitter, in the faddish world of social networking, will no longer be of any interest to anyone by the time the plan to teach it is implemented.

So what you do think about using Twitter in elementary classrooms? Is it a useless gimmick or great educational tool?

An interesting article appeared recently in Newsweek magazine in which the author argued that schools should stop teaching cursive in light of society's shift to keyboards, Blackberrys, cell phone texting, Twitter, etc. Here's a quick excerpt"

In all my years of school, there was only one time I cried in class. It was the first week of first grade--Mrs. Scougie's room--and we were learning cursive. Q. I hated the letter. But it wasn't that I couldn't get the strokes right. It was the way I held my pencil: with four fingers around the base, not three--an apparent crime against writing protocol. And though I still write that way, thank you very much, I haven't used script since elementary school. I type, I Twitter, I Facebook and IM. I e-mail co-workers who sit feet from my desk, and text rather than call. The only time I pen a handwritten letter is when I write to my grandmother. So when I hear people say that penmanship is dead, my response: it's about time.I

I must admit that I don't know too many people who actually use cursive (apart from their signatures). Certainly no one in my family does. So if few people use cursive  - or even use handwriting in general in their professional lives - should we still teach it in school? What do you think?

On the education front, there are several sites that offer free learning games online for students of all ages. Here are some sites that offer free online games for math, English and other skills, mostly for primary grades or pre-school years.
Primary Games,  Fun Brain, KidsGames, Gamequarium, Funschool,
I'm curious to know if your pre-school or early-elementary-school child is into video games.

A new report by the Alliance for Childhood states that kindergartners don't get enough "play time" even though research shows that it can boost language learning and social skills. Education leaders are too dismissive of the value of properly structured play time, researchers said. Here's an except from the report. I'm not quite sure about the real-world relevance of this "animal research," but the document does raise some interesting points.

"Research shows that children who engage in complex forms of socio-dramatic play have greater language skills than nonplayers, better social skills, more empathy, more imagination, and more of the subtle capacity to know what others mean. They are less aggressive and show more self-control and higher levels of thinking. Animal research suggests that they have larger brains with more complex neurological structures than nonplayers."