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"Educational and developmental psychologists have tried to understand how skills and motivation are linked to academic achievement. While research supports ties between individuals' concepts of their abilities and their achievement, we lack a complete picture of how these relations develop from childhood to adolescence. A new longitudinal study looked at how youths' self-concepts are linked to their actual academic achievement in maths and reading from middle childhood to adolescence. The study found that students' self-concepts of their abilities in these two academic domains play an important role in motivating their achievements over time and across levels of achievement."

New studies show play losing out to formal lessons and tests, even though multiple benefits of imaginative play are well documented

Childhood is not for sissies.

For teachers working with memoir and teachers interested in archival research, this might be of interest: a multimedia composing project that works with the journals and correspondence of a southern writer who spent much of his life recollecting, in ever finer detail, his childhood during the Depression in East Texas. I teach creative nonfiction and I'm always trying to push myself to think about the possibilities new media composing affords that my students could explore.

"During one of the standard visits to see family and friends recently, I came across a childhood game that had captured the imaginations of many a youngster in my generation…Scalextrics! A friend of mine had bought the classic car racing game for his five-year old son and I could not turn down the opportunity of a race…with the reasoning of showing my 11-month old daughter how it works ***cough, cough***."

We offer research-based, classroom-proven programs that help educators effectively address the diverse needs of every student. Our award-winning products include reading, mathematics, intervention, language arts, test prep, special education, early childhood, and more.

Parents nervous about the safety of vaccinations for their children may be causing a new problem: the comeback of their grandparents' childhood diseases, reports a new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.

Can tablet computers "parachuted" into remote areas transform childhood learning, asks Nicholas Negroponte .. One Laptop per Child (OLPC), even after giving out nearly 3 million laptops, is still criticised along the following lines: "Negroponte believes that you can give a child a laptop and walk away." Whether I ever believed that or not is now secondary. It became such a refrain that I finally asked myself about a year ago: "What if you could?"

What to do when children use creativity to reveal horrors at home.

 Chrome Experiments of fun with html5 are meant to show off the clean and fast beauty of the new code.  Of  course Google wants you to see it in Chrome for full effect, and I would encourage that as Chrome is an easy and responsive browser, you try it out.  The Wilderness Downtown is a great example of an interactive and connected multimedia experience that mashes together Google Maps and Earth with a driving tune to blast you to your past.  Go in and enter your old address and feel the nostalgia of swooping over your childhood home with a soundtrack and pacing just for you. Students are making digital stories.  They may not be writing html5 apps, but they are accessing, or can access, many sources of media to deepen their message.  A showing of a story like what you help create with The Wilderness Downtown experiment can inspire students to consider how they can use everyday tools like Google Earth to connect with an audience. Just go to http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ and type in your address. 

"Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings-at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces. By focusing on media practices in the everyday contexts of family and peer interaction, the book views the relationship of youth and new media not simply in terms of technology trends but situated within the broader structural conditions of childhood and the negotiations with adults that frame the experience of youth in the United States. Integrating twenty-three different case studies-which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music-sharing, and online romantic breakups-in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out is distinctive for its combination of in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis."

The rationale and guidelines for rulemaking with young children.

Starting up a directory for Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) teachers who use twitter.

"Here's an article written in 1944 by Stephan M. Cory (University of Chicago January 1944 edition of Childhood Education). It is a classic satire written in the first person of a seventh grade student discussing his experiences in elementary school. I think it's a great example of the contrast of learning in rigid formal environments and learning in the context of meaningful problems and authentic tasks. The focus is public education but it's not a stretch to extend to classroom training in the workplace."

 compiled a list of affirmations for children recently from a wish to help mine with self-mastery and positive programming . As adults, many of our limiting thought patterns can be attributed to childhood conditioning or having unconsciously adopted negative societal beliefs. 

"Teens who were severely bullied as children by peers are at higher risk of mental health issues, including suicidal thoughts and behaviours, according to new research in CMAJ(Canadian Medical Association Journal). "Our findings showed a general tendency, in about 15% of the children, of being exposed to the most severe levels of victimization from the beginning of their education until the transition to high school," writes Dr. Marie-Claude Geoffroy, McGill Group for Suicide Studies, McGill University, Montréal, Quebec, with coauthors. "Those children were at greater risk of debilitating depressive/dysthymic symptoms or anxiety and of suicidality in adolescence than less severely victimised children, even after we accounted for a plethora of confounders assessed throughout childhood.""

"Children from disadvantaged backgrounds and certain ethnic minority backgrounds, including from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds, have lower levels of vigorous physical activity, according to researchers at the University of Cambridge. The patterns mirror inequalities seen in levels of childhood obesity, suggesting a need for a greater focus on the promotion of vigorous physical activity, particularly for those children from more disadvantaged backgrounds."

A lovely, simple site for making art with virtual sand. Takes me back to my childhood. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Art,+Craft+&+Design