Last night, the fifth graders’ parent-child book club featured a lively discussion of  A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban. The kids liked the book just fine; the parents liked it even better! And of course we served four kinds of cookies for dessert after the discussion.

Zack’s pick for the next meeting brings us back to baseball, but this one features mystery: Change Up by John Feinstein. Happy reading!

If you’re looking for ideas for selections to offer your own book club, check out our aStore. The choices are listed in reverse chronological order.

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Summer reading

June Book Club Picks

For the seventh graders’ parent-child book club, Rebecca has selected Paper Towns by John Green.

Everybody seemed to really enjoy Kalvin’s October pick, The Alchemyst by Michael Scott. Some of our seventh-graders are using Goodreads.com to keep track of their reading and offer their own reviews.

If you’re looking for ideas for selections to offer your own book club, check out our aStore. The choices are listed in reverse chronological order.

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Happy Birthday, Nicholas Flamel!

September Book Club Pick

Summer reading

June Book Club Picks

I’ve been so busy campaigning for School Committee that I haven’t posted as often as usual since June. I missed quite a few of my usual September observances like International Peace Day. But legend has it that today would be the birthday of Nicholas Flamel, one of the main characters of The Alchemyst by Michael Scott, Kalvin’s pick for October’s meeting of the seventh-graders’ parent-child book club.

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Ideas for celebrating International Peace Day

September Book Club Pick

Summer reading

June Book Club Picks

According to Lee Pulos, PhD, only about 4% of the population take time to write down their goals. But when goals are written or even drawn, they are achieved almost 100% of the time. Earlier this month, President Obama exhorted America’s school children to set goals for their education and commit to achieving them.

For parents who want to set goals for financial independence, I love Bob Proctor’s Six Minutes to Success system. Underneath each brief video is a little “workbook” type form. Your answer is saved for you and you can click back through every refinement of your goals as you go along. If you sign up for the program, a new video will be available to you every week day. Bob Proctor built his own success by relying on the class Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, but Proctor has distilled the ideas into a step by step practice.

Advising young or new social networkers to engage in the missions of this new game, Smokescreen. Experience simulations of possible problems at the nexus of your virtual and real-world lives so you can be safer online.

Yesterday I attended a Labor Day Potluck inspired by Slow Food USA. The focus of this potluck was on healthy food for kids, particularly in school lunches. Many factors in Somerville favor Slow Food values of good, clean and fair food. Groundwork Somerville sponsors community gardens, including one at most every school. Students do get to eat the vegetables and herbs they grow in the school garden. Nutrition researchers at Tufts have also worked in the Somerville schools, getting quite a bit of national attention for Somerville, including three pages in .

But it’s not all about Somerville! There’s still a chance to go to similarly themed eat-ins, for example a happy hour in Manhattan tonight. Just check on the Slow Food in Schools USA website. Here’s to our health and our children’s health!

Another Stanford study, this one cited in Wired magazine, finds that because so much socializing today is accomplished online through text, contemporary students write more than any generation before them. Beyond quantity, what makes them good writers is their awareness of writing for an audience. Most become quite adept at modifying their writing to best suit their purpose and their readers. I guess as long as you try not to multitask, or multitext…

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Social Media at School

Online learning can be better than in-class learning

Multitaskers Accomplish Less

With so many multitasking students, Stanford researchers decide to look into what edge they might have, what they might be better at. They couldn’t find it. Multitaskers actually don’t control their attention very well and tend to get distracted by irrelevancies. Focus and accomplish more. You can read the whole article here.

A meta-analysis of quantitative comparison studies from ED.gov concludes that learners in on-line courses can demonstrate greater learning gains than students in classrooms. The difference was fairly small but meaningful. Needless to say, as someone who has developed several online courses, I found this encouraging. One reason for the effectiveness of online learning may be that it better facilitates student-centered, independent and collaborative work, rather than being a teacher-centered system. It should be noted that very few of the studies included for meta-analysis were done in K-12 settings. I can’t help but think this could be a very cost-effective and engaging way to help schools offer more diverse and more accelerated courses. I would especially like to see it as part of my community’s after-school programming. I am most interested right now in helping students who are still learning English to be able to access math instruction in their home language.

This New York Times article attributes the changing status from fringe to mainstream of those pushing for fresh nutritious school lunches to attention from President and First Lady Obama. Certainly seems like a crucial part of public health!

During the Shape Up Somerville initiative, my daughter got interested in the quality of school lunches offered and now sits on the city’s school lunch advisory board. Her involvement started because she was curious as to why researchers were coming into classrooms and offering kids new foods to try but then those foods were not appearing in the lunches. She learned about piloting; maybe the researchers learned about explaining more to kids.

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Hot Tips for a Cold Lunch