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" FINALmyON.jpg Through myON, Oregon students have access to about 4,100 books for free until September 15. Print Laura Frazier, The Oregonian By Laura Frazier, The Oregonian Email the author | Follow on Twitter on July 04, 2013 at 9:00 AM, updated July 04, 2013 at 9:06 AM Email For the first time this summer, all Oregon students have free access to more than 4,100 digital children's books through a partnership with the Oregon Department of Education and myON, an online library collection geared toward students. "

"'We must reimagine middle school science and math not as a way to prepare students for high school, but as a place where students are inventors, scientists, and mathematicians today.' So say Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager in this exciting guest article about the Maker Movement and its implications for kids, schools and STEM studies. Martinez and Stager are the authors of a must-read book, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. In this informative post, they encourage STEM educators, school leaders and teachers across the curriculum to transform our classrooms into centers of innovative thinking and experimenting. ~ Anne Jolly"

"A professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Education has launched a new free math curriculum designed to help engage students more deeply in math. Dubbed the "Week of Inspirational Math," the program is aimed at students in grades 5-9 and includes five lessons, one for each day in a week, featuring math problems designed to be fun and engaging along with videos with positive messages about math. Teachers using the curriculum will also be able to join a network offering additional support and resources throughout the school year. "We want to give kids inspirational math tasks that help them see math as a lovely subject of beautiful patterns and deep inquiry," said Jo Boaler, the program's designer, in a prepared statement. "And we want teachers to see what happens when kids are really engaged in math." Boaler said she hopes teachers will use the program at the beginning of the school year to give students a positive experience right off the bat and set the tone for the rest of the year, but the program can be used at any point. "The lessons address five key areas of math: geometry, algebra, numbers, patterns and connections," according to a news release. "The problems are so-called 'low floor, high ceiling' tasks that are accessible to all students but can be solved in different ways to challenge those just being introduced to the topics as well as high achievers. They also emphasize different messages: Mistakes help you grow, for example, and it's not how fast you complete a task that's important but how deeply you understand it." The Common Core-aligned program is the latest offering from YouCubed at Stanford, a program Boaler helped launch that aims to make new research into math learning accessible to teachers and parents. "We're researching and using new brain science to find out how best people learn," said Boaler, in a prepared statement. "Then, we're giving teachers things they can actually do in their classroom based on this research." The program

"In this thoughtful article in Kappa Delta Pi Record, consultant/authors Mike Schmoker and Carol Jago say, "Done right, the ELA Common Core has the potential to right the ship of literacy, to facilitate, at long last, the creation of coherent curriculum in every course, and to rescue us from the fads and pseudo-literacies of recent decades." They believe the CCSS appendices and ancillary documents are the "true strength" of the document, providing resources for students "to engage in close reading of large amounts of high-quality, complex text, combined with opportunities to engage in discussion and writing grounded in text." "

It's always a little disconcerting when your students aren't understanding an objective you feel you've taught. It's even more frustrating when materials to support that Common Core State Standard don't seem to exist in read-to-use format anywhere. This is the case with our objective on writing structure in third grade. After a week of getting nowhere, I wrote some paragraphs, armed my kids with highlighters, and broke out the trusted flip book template for a lesson that finally connected.

"WASHINGTON (AP) -- Those federally mandated math and reading tests will continue, but a sweeping rewrite of the nation's education law will now give states - not the U.S. government - authority to decide how to use the results in evaluating teachers and schools."