SUMMER FUN!
Backyard gardens, puppet theaters, scrapbooks and crafts are some of the ways to keep your children active and their minds working all summer long. Summer vacation can be either a learning wasteland or a learning paradise. The temptations are great for children to spend hours watching television or playing video games, but with a little ingenuity and planning, the summer can be transformed into a time to stretch the mind, explore new hobbies, learn about responsibility and build on skills learned during the school year.
That doesn't mean that children should be doing math worksheets and studying vocabulary lists to preserve the skills that have learned during the school year. Summer is the perfect time for children to discover that learning is fun and can happen anywhere. "You don't want your kids to think that learning is fun and can happen anywhere. "You don't want your kids to think that learning is only something that happens in places called schools," says Susan K. Perry, author of Playing Smart: The Family Guide to Enriching Offbeat Learning Activities for Ages 4-14. "Rather, you want them to grasp that learning is fun and can go on all the time, anytime, anywhere, with handy materials, not only based on the instruction of an actual schoolteacher. The summer is a great unstructured mass of time to try out new things and explore interest that don't necessarily fit into the school curriculum."
Learning can take place whether you are taking a trip to a far-off place or spending the summer in your own neighborhood. But be careful not to over-plan. "To avoid boredom, a child has to learn to be motivated on his or her own, to a certain extent, and that is an acquired skill," says Perry. "If every time your child says, 'I'm bored,' you step in with a quick solution, they'll never learn to develop their own resources. But do provide some options. Just don't try to instill learning. That's not how it works."
COMMISSIONER MCQUEEN MAKES RECOMMENDATIONS TO REDUCE STUDENT TESTING
Education Commissioner Candice McQueen announced today the approval of recommendations that will reduce student testing in 2018-19. The recommendations are the first to be released by the state’s third Task Force on Student Testing and Assessment – which includes educators, parents, and education leaders from across the state – and they resulted from months of analysis and discussion, as well as additional surveys of high school teachers and parents.
In addition to today’s recommendations, Commissioner McQueen also announced additional ways the state will further reduce testing in Tennessee next year. Altogether, these steps will reduce the number and length of student tests and streamline the assessment administration.
The task force’s recommendations for 2018-19, which Commissioner McQueen affirms, are to:
1. Eliminate the TNReady chemistry end-of-course exam; instead, the department will provide a chemistry test form as an option for local
administration and scoring
2. Eliminate the TNReady English III end-of-course exam; additionally, the department will prioritize adding a statewide dual credit English composition option that will be available beginning in 2019-20
3. Collaborate with the Tennessee Board of Regents to use the TNReady U.S. History end-of-course exam as a dual credit exam and help students earn college credit from their TNReady score
The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.
Jean Piaget