English has many:– homophones: two or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling such as to, two & too, – homonyms:  two or more words having the same spelling or pronunciation, but different meanings and origins such as dog’s bark vs. tree bark,– homographs: two or more words spelled the same but not necessarily pronounced the same and having different meanings…

The New York Times sent photographers to seven states to document the thrum and buzz in buildings once known for silence. Step into a public library and you know what to expect. First, there’s the smell: a paper bouquet of nothing and everything, including notes of vanilla, sawdust, wet coats, rubber soles and school. Then there are the spines lined…

Back in the ’30s, 30 high schools around the U.S. turned traditional practice on its head, especially for college-bound students. In place of grade-driven, teacher-controlled, fact-based instruction, the learning was interdisciplinary, conceptual, experiential, collaborative, often ungraded, and fashioned jointly by teachers and students. Hundreds of colleges agreed to set aside their usual admissions requirements so that students from these progressive…

[Reading Kingdom LOVES this idea for encouraging students to write and explore their love of animals at the same time.] Brooke Corridoni’s students at Susquehanna Waldorf School have been practicing their writing skills with a pen pal named Jude. The students ask Jude about his life and his friends, and in turn, tell him about their own worlds and their…

So how will your kids spend this summer? Building sand castles at the beach? Swimming at summer camp? Shedding I.Q. points? In educating myself this spring about education, I was aghast to learn that American children drop in I.Q. each summer vacation because they aren’t in school or exercising their brains. This is less true of middle-class students whose parents…

A very frequent problem in students learning to read is forgetting what a word “says” even after learning that word several times. Often, this is a result of poor visual memory (which affects many students). This results in words appearing as “new” even after repeated exposures.The best thing to do to help students with this challenge is to work on…