* Note that there are deliberate spelling errors in this post

In the previous post we looked at problems with punctuation and how punctuation can make or brake a sentence.

The same can bee said for spelling. Spelling is a major stumbling point for students if all ages. But why is that?

For starters, English is a notoriously difficult language to learn, even for native speakers. While English usage has adapted to meet the needs of a modern society, English spelling is still rooted in antiquated language forms, so the weigh a word is pronounced isn’t necessarily reflected in the way that it is spelled, which creates unique spelling challenges for students.

But is correct spelling even that important? After all, spell-check programs abound, and online dictionaries our available at the click of a mouse.

Correct spelling might not even be that big of a deal considering that a study by English researchers found that letter order in spelling is not really that important. As long as the first and last letters are in the right place, the eye can unscramble the letters sew that the sentence can be understood.

Even with the abundance of spell-checkers and the eye’s ability to unscramble letters, spelling still poses a problem.

Teachers in England say that bad spelling occurs so frequently among first year university students that they are considering adopting a system where misspelled words are labeled as variant not wrong.

Digital communication is slowly replacing other forms of communications. We email and text message more than ever before. So, it should be know surprise that since children are the biggest users of online technology and since they communicate fluently in digital language, that they are the ones who have the most challenges using standard forms of English.

If online communication is the way of the future, and our eye can fix misspelled words, and there are programs to spell for us, why do we place such an emphasis on correct spelling?

For one thing, spell-check is never 100% reliable. There are no less than five mistakes in this post that spell-check did not catch.

As of this moment, technology isn’t everywhere. Students still need to have decent spelling skills to right exams or fill out job applications. Like it or not, people will make decisions about your intelligence based on how well you can spell.

In the classroom, poor spelling can ruin a well thought-out paragraph, causing the reader to fumble, halt, backtrack, and re-read, which can diminish from the overall meaning of the sentence. This is, of course, especially troublesome for students when that reader happens to be their teacher.

Until the time that spelling variants are accepted and online acronyms are accepted in more formal situations, students need to use whatever tools they can to help them remember how to spell words correctly.

We’ll look at some tips next time.

Learning the proper uses for punctuation is challenging for people of all ages. After all, there is an almost infinite number of rules to remember and an almost equal number of exceptions to those rules.

One of the biggest punctuation culprits is the comma. And it’s little wonder when one respected grammar guide shows no less than 15 rules for using the comma correctly, and almost as many exceptions.

Commas appear where they are not needed, and are suspiciously absent where they are needed. Apostrophes pop up where they don’t belong. Semicolons are used in defiance of logic, hyphens erroneously appear in the place of dashes, and ellipses stretch out into infinity.

The discussion on the proper uses of punctuation is a hot topic not just regulated to the grammar section of the library. Non-fiction books on grammar have even been spotted on the best-seller list.

But it you are less than a grammar enthusiast, less than a word nerd, following a labyrinth of seemingly incomprehensible grammar Dos and Don’ts can actually detract from the writing process.

But isn’t punctuation supposed to make writing, and reading easier?

If punctuation causes so many difficulties for today’s students, is following a set of confusing rules necessary? If you are not a grammar enthusiast, being forced to follow complicated rules can do a number on a student’s motivation to learn.

Punctuation has a deeply rooted history and tends to follow a pattern of popularity. The semi-colon for instance has risen and fallen in popular usage. In France, the semi colon has even been the cause of political mischief.

While punctuation has always been debated, the debate doesn’t have a place in classroom. Students writing formal papers for school need to have, at minimum, a cursory understanding with the rules of punctuation.

In informal writings such as in emails, text messages, and instant messages, the rules can be a bit more lax. Of course, informal writing opens the door to informal spelling, but that’s an issue for another day.

We’ve included a few comma mistakes in this post. Can you spot them?

Remembering all the rules can be next to impossible. Even the best grammarians use a reference for time to time. Here are some grammar guides that we like:

• The Bedford Handbook by Diana Hacker, 7th edition
• The Little, Brown Handbook by Aaron and Fowler
• The Grammar Girl Website

Rising gas prices change the school experience

For students, a new school year means adapting to new things—a new grade, new teachers, new classrooms, and new subjects. But this year, there could be one more thing to learn to deal with: the elimination of school fieldtrips.

Like peanut butter sandwiches in lunch bags, school fieldtrips are going the way of the dodo. However, the death of fieldtrips has nothing to do with food allergies or even with the safety of students. School boards across the US are considering banning—or have already banned—fieldtrips due to rising gas prices.

For most schools districts, a virtual fleet of yellow school buses are involved in transporting students to and from the classroom. Schools have a hard enough time coping with funding issues and budget problems without an even bigger portion of their meager budgets going to cover the cost of school buses for extracurricular fieldtrips.

Funding issues have already hit schools hard resulting in decreased numbers of teachers, lower salaries, and crowded classrooms. As well, athletics and extracurricular programs are getting the axe.

A survey of school boards by the American Association of School Administrators shows that ninety-nine percent of schools surveyed felt that rising gas prices had an impact on their school.

Some school boards are even considering switching to a four-day school week to help deal with the rising cost of fuel. A shorter school week would decrease fuel costs associated with transportation, heating and cooling, and energy consumption.

Are wired classrooms changing the way that students learn?

Chalkboards, one room school houses, apples for the teacher, walking to school, using both sides of the paper, desks with flip open tops, writing with pencils right down to the nub…there is something in the air during back to school time that prompts nostalgic thoughts of academia.

All those images of schooldays persist as icons of academia, even though not a single one of the items in the list above is used in a modern classroom—they are nothing more than relics, quaint memories from educational history.

My, how education has changed! Now the chalkboard is nothing more than a relic of classrooms past. Today’s classrooms are wired, interactive, and media-rich. Gone are the chalkboards and the notebooks; in their places are digital displays and laptops.

But have these new technological teaching tools helped or hindered the way that kids learn in the classroom? Multi-media visual tools have certainly improved the scope of a teacher’s lesson preparation and delivery. Teachers can teach a lesson all while showing resources, three-dimensional mind maps, color images, video clips and every possible resource available to help drive home the message of the lesson. But, has technology in the classroom limited the scope of how far a student’s brain has to stretch to understand that lesson?

Is too much technology doing the hard work for students—the visualizing, the imagining? Is it making it so that students don’t have to rely on their brains to make the necessary connections? They don’t have to fill in the gaps or do the mental legwork to understand so that they can have the “A-Ha!” moments of true understanding. They don’t have to extend their mental capacities beyond what they see in front of them, because it was all there for them, all laid out in full-color and pretty pictures. Why remember the answer when you can just Google it?

Consider classrooms of the past: with little or no high tech tools, great thinkers made important intellectual leaps using nothing but brain power…no word processors to fill in words as they typed great dissertations, no spell check, no computers to help them fill in the gaps. If they could accomplish these tasks with no help, shouldn’t today’s students be able to as well?

The irony here is that chalkboards, in their day, actually revolutionized the classroom. They made it possible for the teacher to teach multiple students at once using visual aids. It was the first time teachers could write a message and have all students see it.

Chalkboards haven’t disappeared from classrooms just yet. They are still there at the front of many classrooms—sometimes hidden behind projector screens—a quaint reminder of the way things used to be.

Oxford Learning students are helping children in Uganda tell malaria-infected mosquitoes to buzz off by raising funds for BUY-A-NET, a charitable organization that supplies bed netting and medicines to families in Africa.

BUY-A-NET is a volunteer organization based in Kingston, Ontario, Canada that provides World Health Organization (WHO) approved mosquito nets to families in Uganda. For many children in Africa, the basic comforts of life are a luxury. Millions of families live in such extreme conditions of poverty that they are unable to purchase to a simple bed net to prevent to prevent infected insects from biting.

Malaria is a life-threatening parasitic disease transmitted by mosquitoes. It kills an African child every 30 seconds. Those who don’t die form the illness can have lasting learning impairments. (WHO: Roll Back Malaria) Yet, Malaria is highly treatable and preventable.

Oxford Learning students have been raising funds for BUY-A-NET by participating in read-a-thons and other fundraisers such as art auctions.

So far Oxford Learning has provided the funds to purchase enough bedding nets to supply multiple villages!

If you would like to support BUY-A-NET with a donation, please visit BUY-A-NET’s website.

Oxford Learning students in Kingston, ON raise funds for
BUY-A-NET with an art action.

A look at multitasking from both sides of the coin…

What is multitasking anyway? Is multitasking good or bad for us? Multitasking is one of those topics that we never seem to be able to decide on. Is it a positive attribute to boast about on resumes, or is it a risky habit that is harmful to those with attention issues? Is there areas in life—at home, in the office, in the classroom—where multitasking is OK, and others areas where it is not? Sure, multitasking can help us accomplish multiple items on a to-do list, but does doing multiple things at the same time affect our ability to do those tasks well?

And what about where students are concerned? Doing multiple tasks at a time must influence how they learn and the information that they retain…or does it?

Let’s take a look at multitasking from a pro-con approach:

The PROs of Multitasking:

1. It is easy to switch mental focus when doing simple tasks, allowing people to do multiple things at once. For example: at home, talking on the phone while making dinner and sweeping the floor; At work, listening to radio, writing an email, talking on the phones.
2. Multitasking can help you learn how to deal with distractions and interruptions—because life doesn’t stop happening just because you are busy.
3. Multitasking allows progress on multiple tasks, even if the progress is minimal. Helps move several projects/chores/assignments toward a single deadline.
4. Multitasking helps you develop the ability to cope when there is lots of commotion going on around you. It helps develop the ability to filter out the excess.
5. Society is continually more and more technologically wired. The ability to use multiple technologies simultaneously will keep people of all ages with adaptable, relevant, and employable.
6. When deadlines loom at the office and in the classroom, it is better to complete portions of all tasks, than to only complete one. In the classroom, part marks add up to better grades than no marks at all.

The CONs Of Multitasking:

1. Tasks that require deeper concentration are more difficult to switch between. Research shows that the actual act of switching between two things actually takes longer mentally. That’s because our brain assigns rules to how we do something, and switching between tasks means closing one set of rules and opening another.
2. Interruptions—a ringing phone, the chime of an instant message—can disrupt train of thought making it difficult to return to the original task.
3. Multitasking often results in busywork—doing a lot, but accomplishing nothing. Whether in the office or in the classroom multitasking creates a drop in efficiency.
4. Constant distractions can lead to frustration and loss of attention. Instead of accomplishing much, very little gets done. Interruptions are especially difficult for children who have attention deficiencies and are only just learning how to activate their internal filtering mechanisms.
5. The more technologically savvy we become, the less we tend to use basic, old-fashioned social skills. Some companies are even a taking an anti-technology stance and implementing email-free days to force employees to develop improved problem solving and teamwork.
6. Instead of using technology as tool to multitask, it is used as a distraction. What would appear to be multitasking is really procrastination. Ideally, multi-tasking should accomplish many tasks simultaneously but instead many projects end up half complete.
7. The brain is the ultimate multitasker. It computes millions of message from neurons at a single time. But just like any other muscle, it can be taxed and get tired. Known as executive function, the brain’s ability to make multiple decisions can easily tire it out thus making it a less-effective decision maker.

This list is by no means complete, but, at this point, it seems that the cons of multitasking are just a little bit more heavily-weighted than the pros. As educators, Oxford Learning advocates that students, especially those with attention issues focus on a single thing at a time—at least until they develop the ability to filter out distractions and learn how to focus.

What do you think?

A list in fives

5 things to do for your BODY this summer:

1. Climb a tree
2. Swim in a lake
3. Go for a hike
4. Ride a bike
5. Get a good night’s sleep every night

Five things to do for your BRAIN this summer:

1. Read a classic novel
2. Learn five new words and use them as often as possible
3. Play games that challenge your mind
4. Keep a scrapbook of your daily activities and wildlife observations
5. Start a short story and add a new paragraph every day

5 things to learn and do TOGETHER as a family:

1. Learn the names of trees in your area
2. Start a collection of rocks or seashells or anything that you can collect together
3. Identify birds that you commonly see
4. Learn how to tie a knot
5. Take a hike at a new trail

5 things to do this summer to Get Ready for the next school year:

1. Establish a back-to-school routine. Begin following school day bedtimes and morning routines well in advance of back to school for an easy transition back to the classroom.
2. Turn off the TV. Research has shown that watching TV before bed over-stimulates the brain and prevents sleep.
3. Get organized. Time management is a learned skill, not acquired one. Use a family calendar to stay on top of appointments and schedules all summer long.
4. Keep reading. Reading continually improves reading comprehension skills and develops vocabulary.
5. Don’t run on autopilot. With school closed for the summer, kids can easily fall behind. To prevent this, kids should engage in some sort of learning or other mentally stimulating activity throughout the summer to keep their minds sharp and always ready to learn.

Summer Camps to keep students on track

So, the final bell of the school year has rung; even though the classroom is closed for the season, it doesn’t mean that a child’s potential to learn has stopped. In fact, summer is a critical time for learning. Without some measure of formal education, kids can experience a significant drop in their learning momentum that can affect how they perform next year.

Research into the study of summer learning shows some pretty surprising findings. Here are The Facts that you need to know—

• All students experience SUMMER LEARNING LOSSES when they do not engage in educational activities in the summer.
• On average, students lose approximately 2.6 months of grade-level equivalency in mathematical computational skills during the summer months.
• 56% of students want to be involved in a summer program that “helps kids keep up with summer schoolwork or prepare for the next grade.”
• Research shows that teachers typically spend between four-six weeks re-teaching material that students have forgotten over the summer.
• Since 1996, researchers have studied the effect of summer break on student learning. A common finding across these studies is that students generally score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the summer.
• Research demonstrates that all students experience significant learning losses in procedural and factual knowledge during the summer months.

How the summer break can impact your child’s learning: some numbers:

• 2.6—the numbers of months that it can take to get back into the swing of learning in the fall
• 60—the number of days that children spend not learning over the summer
• 6—the number of weeks that teachers have to spend reviewing material from last year

And two very important numbers to consider when planning your children’s summer schedule:

• 2-3—the number of hours per week of supplemental education needed to prevent summer education losses and keep your child on track for education success.

With these very important numbers in mind, doesn’t it make sense to include learning in your child’s summer? Summer camps at Oxford Learning make it easy. Find a location near you and beat summer learning losses for good.

End-of-year report cards are almost here…with their arrival comes the potential for shocking and unpleasant revelations.

Report cards are generally upheld as the ultimate indicator of student progress—after all, they are the final word on a child’s academic progress in the school year—but the wait and the wondering about what the report card will reveal can be very stressful to both kids and parents alike.

In an attempt to remove the wondering and the unpleasant surprises from the reporting process, school boards across the US have implemented online programs such as EdLine, to help parents monitor their children’s daily academic standing.

According to an article in the New York Times called I Know What You Did Last Math Class these programs open the lines of communication and to keep parents informed at every possible opportunity throughout the school year, not just when report cards arrive.

The reporting technology fuels the debate about a parent’s level of involvement and what is or isn’t private in a child’s education. As you might expect, responses to programs that allow parents to monitor their child’s progress online vary from one end of the spectrum to the other.

Keeping informed of your child’s academic progress however is not dependent solely on new online technologies—there are many other warning signs throughout the year which signal that a student may be heading into academic hot water.

There are the newer technology or web-based indicators; school blogs, teacher sites, and class webpages where parents can log on and read what particular assignment a class is working on now. There are behavioral indications—bad attitudes about school, lack of motivation, lying, skipping classes; and there are the more obvious warnings—a poor mark on a test, homework not completed, or even the dreaded a call from the teacher.

Regardless of any warning signs that may have been missed during the school year, the end-of-year report card is the final update. And while it may be the end of the road for progress in the school year, it doesn’t mean that all hope for the academic future is lost.

After all, there is still the summer to get the kids back on track, even if there is no online monitoring program.

More on that next time.

Science fairs submissions are usually fairly predictable… there’s hot air balloons, and growing mold on bread, the solar system, waves, generating electricity from a potato, wind energy, magnets, and of course, the ever-popular exploding volcano.

But one high school student has set the bar for all future science fair submissions. For his tenth-grade science fair 16-year old Daniel Burd did more than describe the science behind a common scientific problem—what to do with all the plastic bags—he searched for a real-life solution.

And so began Daniel’s award-winning science fair project. He began with what he already knew—that microorganisms are involved in the breakdown of plastic—and then set about isolating, identifying, and measuring those microorganisms.

He measured, counted and retested for about three months until he was able to prove his theories successfully, and identify a real-world application for his discoveries. And then it was off to the Canada-wide Science Fair in Ottawa to win the top prize.

Burd may seem to be a gifted or exceptionally talented student—and certainly he stands out when compared to other 10th graders and their more predictable science fair submissions.

But the one thing that truly make’s Burd’s Plastic Not Fantastic project so outstanding is not the fact that he could isolate microbes, run control groups, and accurately follow the scientific method. It’s not even that he attempted to find a solution to one of the biggest ecological problems of our time.

What makes Daniel Burd stand out from the crowd is his active mind and the fact that he was able to make connections from what he learned in school to home life to environmental issues. The ability to transfer skills, understand interconnectivity, and look for solutions to everyday problems—these skills represent educational ideals at their best.

It’s these skills that make Daniel Burd a winner in our books.