http://www.globalvillageschool.org/k8-curriculum.html

Take a look at our curriculum samples by grade here:

http://www.globalvillageschool.org/k8-sample.html

Rachel Brazie, a Spring 2010 Woolman graduate, created Sustainable. Affordable. A Young People’s Guide to Sustainable Food Shopping for her Environmental Science Project.  You can read all about how to shop ethically without breaking the bank. Just click on the title and you’ll be taken to a page where you can read the guide.

http://urbanhomestead.org/about

http://medicine.arizona.edu/spotlight/learn-sarver-heart-centers-continuous-chest-compression-cpr

QUEENSLAND children are so anxious over national tests they are wetting the bed and being physically sick, a federal inquiry has been warned.

Concerns over the exam regime has also prompted a rare public statement from staff at one state school, who described Education Queensland’s “mandate” to lift results by 4 per cent as “unreasonable”.

A raft of concerns about NAPLAN (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy) has been raised in hundreds of submissions from parents, schools and educators to a federal inquiry, which is examining the administration and reporting of the tests.

A submission to the Senate inquiry from Moggill State School’s Queensland Teachers Union members warned the exams caused anxiety in children and had “a disastrous impact on teaching time”.

“Some students were visibly stressed over the tests and required lots of reassurance – I was told of bed-wetting issues,” it said.

“Teachers at Moggill State School have found that preparing children for NAPLAN has caused the most disastrous impact on teaching time in the classroom.

To continue reading please go to:  http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/children-worried-sick-by-testing/story-e6freon6-1225889540099

By Michael Preston

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/Preston-Protecting-salmon-ceremonies-and-culture-98107114.html

The book is called Teaching as an Act of Love: Thoughts and Recollections of a Former Teacher, Principal and Kid, written by Richard Lakin.  Here’s a brief description:

“The 55 thought-provoking, humorous and heartwarming pieces in this collection are geared to teachers, principals, parents, and all those concerned with making schools more loving and effective. It presents a close look at a school staff working together to create a caring and challenging learning environment where children come first, as well as at a real partnership between school and home.”

Download the book online here:
http://www.thanks2teachers.com/Portals/0/docs/Teaching_as_an_Act_of_Love.pdf

How did this happen so fast?

“I went to public school in Georgia until fourth grade,” says Pyron, “but I didn’t find it very engaging.” His mother decided to home-school him for two years, after which Pyron took the ACT and scored well enough to enter Georgia’s Piedmont College at the age of 12, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in biology at 16.
Looking at prospective graduate schools, Pyron contacted Professor Frank Burbrink of the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Biology, whose lab is based at the College of Staten Island and whose research focuses on the phylogenetics of snakes, reptiles, and amphibians.

Burbrink’s lab was a perfect fit. “I was extremely excited to be accepted at CUNY, as I knew that was where I really wanted to do my graduate work,” Pyron says. So a 17-year-old from rural Georgia headed to New York City to study his passion, snakes.
“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know I wanted to work with snakes,” he says.

In research for his thesis, Systematics and Historical Biogeography of the Lampropeltinine Snakes, Pyron found that the biodiversity of these types of snakes is greater in temperate North America than in the tropics—the opposite of which is true for most animals. He has also studied the evolutionary patterns of non-venomous snakes that mimic venomous snakes.

Next January, Pyron will become the Robert F. Griggs Assistant Professor of Biology at George Washington University, which runs a graduate program in his field of systematics and evolution jointly with the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian. There, he will be on the fast track to becoming one of the nation’s leading herpetologists, and perhaps the youngest.

Original Source: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/press_information/current_releases/2010/May/commencement.htm

For more information contact David Manning at dmanning@gc.cuny.edu

We are talking about two completely different paradigms: One, the traditional one that is failing, assumes that children are naturally lazy and need to be forced to learn. If you believe that then you need competition for grades, passing and failing, tons of homework, long school days, long school years, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

But modern brain research doesn’t confirm that assumption. Rather, it confirms a second paradigm, that children are natural learners, that the brain is naturally inquisitive. If you operate on that paradigm, as many progressive educators and homeschoolers do, almost none of the approaches mentioned above should be used. The teacher’s role is to actively help the student find resources to explore and learn about everything they are interested in.

In fact, forcing students to be in traditional schools operating on the first assumption creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: After about six or seven years of forcing students to learn things that they aren’t interested in and are often irrelevant to their lives, they do appear to lose interest in learning. That natural ability to learn is gradually extinguished. Anyone who has ever administered standardized tests to that group can see clearly that the rate of improvement on the whole decreases to a crawl, even on those flawed standardized tests. But beyond that, you see the light go out of their eyes. They retreat to watching television and playing video games. Even worse, they retreat to drugs, or in some notorious cases, decide to try to kill people in their schools or themselves.

The latter cases may be rare, but they do reflect that culturally we simply accept as fact that children hate school. Why do we accept that? If children are natural learners and they say they hate school, something is wrong with their school. Something is wrong with many, many schools.

There are schools that children love, and love to go to. These are under the general heading of alternative and progressive. They are learner-centered in their approach. I know of one democratic school in which the children voted to ban all snow days. They didn’t want to miss anything.

Did you wonder why the government never gives statistics comparing home-educated children to publicly educated ones? In many states homeschoolers are required to take standardized tests. The answer might be because in at least one study homeschooled students scored in the 86th percentile nationally.

We need to end No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Education is not a race. Nobody tests you in order to allow you to leave the public library. You are assumed to be a natural learner. All people are. All children are. We need to understand the new educational paradigm before it is too late.

———-

Feel free to forward, reproduce, or send to your local newspapers as an op-ed.  Please attribute the following information along with it:

Jerry Mintz

Executive Director, Alternative Education Resource Organization

jerryAERO@aol.com

www.educationrevolution.org

(516) 621-2195

Source: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/06/want-to-feel-more-alive-study-shows-you-need-to-go-outside.php

by Jaymi Heimbuch, San Francisco, California

We kind of already know this – if not intuitively then through past studies – but a new study has shown that when you spend more time out in nature, you feel more alive. Published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology, the study shows that getting out and communing with nature is better for feeling rejuvenated than reaching for the ever-so-urban cup of coffee. “Nature is fuel for the soul, ” says Richard Ryan, lead author and a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. Both physically and mentally, we’re zippier when we step into the wild.

Science Daily writes, “The findings, adds Ryan, are important for both mental and physical health. ‘Research has shown that people with a greater sense of vitality don’t just have more energy for things they want to do, they are also more resilient to physical illnesses. One of the pathways to health may be to spend more time in natural settings,’ says Ryan.”

The idea of getting out in nature to improve our spirits and therefore our physical health goes hand in hand with nature deficit disorder – the diminished use of the senses, difficulty with attention and higher rates of illness associated with an estrangement from nature, from the real world. Past studies have even shown that we’re kinder, more gentle folks when we feel in-touch with the natural world.

It really should come as no surprise that as we pull ourselves away from the world in which we evolved, that sustains us and keeps us ticking, we’re going to function less efficiently. Think about it – how often have we witnessed animals living in captivity just wither away from depression or unexplained illness? Well, humans are animals. We need our green scene.

The authors of this particular study wanted to find out the effects of nature alone, apart from other factors. So, they performed five experiments on 537 college students, including sending them on a 15 minute walk through either a hallway or a tree-lined path, showing scenes of cityscapes or landscapes, and imagining themselves in scenes either sedentary or active, inside or out and with or without others. Across the board, those participants who spent time or imagined themselves in natural settings consistently felt more energetic, and the final results are that if you spend just 20 minutes a day in nature, vitality levels will significantly rise.

“We have a natural connection with living things,” says Ryan. “Nature is something within which we flourish, so having it be more a part of our lives is critical, especially when we live and work in built environments.”

So, if you’re feeling tired, listless, worn out, if you’re pooped at parties… Go. Out. Side. In fact, there’s an app for that.

Source: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/06/want-to-feel-more-alive-study-shows-you-need-to-go-outside.php