* Here’s a terrific way for schools to boost reading: the five-million page challenge.
Heritage Elementary School, the largest elementary school in the district, read 635,103 pages. Although the school didn’t set a particular goal, there was some friendly competition between the girls and the boys.
“The girls barely won over the boys,” said library media specialist Michelle Barnes.
“We had an assembly last Friday (March 4) where several girls got to spray shaving cream all over a fourth-grade teacher and other girls got to spray silly string all over the principal.
Photo: Lindsay Keefer.
* An amazing story about a British father with a motor neurone disease who is set to record 1,600 words before losing his voice forever.
Laurence Brewer will record 1,600 sentences for a computer program that will break them up into individual sounds and then piece them back together again to form words under Brewer’s control. Brewer said his inspiration for the project was his 13-month-old son.
He said, “He is the key motivation for me to record my voice so that if my voice is lost, he can still hear what his dad sounds like. I might be able to read him bedtime stories; your voice is part of your identity. He can maybe also hear what I sound like when I am no longer here.”
* A University of Washington study shows that second-grade students associate math with boys and reading with girls.
Our results show that cultural stereotypes about math are absorbed strikingly early in development, prior to ages at which there are gender differences in math achievement,” said Andrew Meltzoff, co-author of the study.
* Speaking of stereotypes that limit boys, Eva Pearlman asks questions about why the acceptable range of expression for girls seems to have expanded — tough and athletic is cool — there is no or little leeway for boys.
As a society we seem to be more comfortable with a tree-climbing, ball-playing, T-shirt-and-jeans-wearing girl then a pink-wearing, non-sports-playing boy who prefers quiet arts-and-crafts projects.
Why is that?
* This is just great. Hat tip to my new friend, Deb Hanson, over at Real Men Read with Kids.
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