Ethan Demme

Thoughts and Policy for Building a Better Pennsylvania

Summer Learning and Local Parks

Caledonia State Park

One of my favorite places to visit during my staycation is Caledonia State Park located between Chambersburg and Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. The furnace was owned by Thaddeus Stevens. Right before the battle at Gettysburg, a Confederate raid burned down the furnace. Stevens suffered devastating financial loss but continued to pay his employees and eventually rebuilt the ironworks. You can read more about that story here.

It can be fun and educational for you as a family is to discover when, why, and how your state was formed. You can also explore how your city or town was created and who were the first people to live where you do. Teaching your children the history surrounding the location where you live is helpful not only in providing them with geographic roots but also in inspiring them to care for and cultivate their community by being active and involved locally.

Sometimes a two-hour trip to a national state park can be just as meaningful and fun as an exotic trip abroad. As you prepare for your summer, consider planning a staycation! You never know what exciting adventures lie just around the corner.

And if you’re looking for some summer fun that’s also educational, check out our new KinderTown summer camp:

KTown-SummerCamp

 

Digital Learning Report Card 2014

Image by MIKI Yoshihito CC BY 2.0
Image by MIKI Yoshihito CC BY 2.0

The Foundation for Excellence in Education released their 2014 Digital Learning Report Card. Introducing the report, the CEO of ExcelinEdu, Patricia Levesque, writes:

“Digital learning has the power to connect students with the best teachers in the world. It can offer all students access to hard-to-serve courses and groundbreaking career and technical education as well as vocational training. Digital learning promises better instruction, tailored to the progress and needs of each student. It can allow advancement when a student masters a concept. It can provide additional support for subject areas where students are struggling. Digital learning policies offer a new way to fund education and learning, not fettered by old constraints linked to time, but rather linking funding to learning and the needs of students.”

The report highlights 10 elements of high quality digital learning.

  1. Student Eligibility: All students are digital learners.
  2. Student Access: All students have access to high quality digital content and online courses.
  3. Personalized Learning: All students can customize their education using digital content through an approved provider.
  4. Advancement: Students progress based on demonstrated competency.
  5. Quality Content: Digital content, instructional materials, and online and blended learning courses are high quality.
  6. Quality Instruction: Digital instruction is high quality.
  7. Quality Choices: All students have access to multiple high-quality providers.
  8. Assessment and Accountability: Student learning is the metric for evaluating the quality of content and instruction.
  9. Funding: Funding creates incentives for performance, options and innovation.
  10. Delivery: Infrastructure supports digital learning.

To gauge states’ progress, Digital Learning Now identified 42 actionable metrics that examine state laws, administrative rules and other policy levers that identify what is needed to ensure the 10 Elements of High-Quality Digital Learning are addressed. These metrics are divided among the 10 Elements and provide states with a framework of the policies that should be in place in order to create an environment that supports a broad system of digital learning.

PA scored a 65%, earning the state a disappointing D grade. Here is the breakdown:

  1. Student Eligibility: D grade
  2. Student Access: F grade
  3. Personalized Learning: C grade
  4. Advancement: F grade
  5. Quality Content: A grade
  6. Quality Instruction: B grade
  7. Quality Choices: D grade
  8. Assessment and Accountability: F grade
  9. Funding: F grade
  10. Delivery: D grade

The report, which you can access here, provides the in-depth metrics that lead to the grades in each of these ten categories. The report also details the 50 new digital learning laws passed in 2014.

May the Fourth Be With You – Star Wars and Lifelong Learning

Me and my brothers. #StarWarsDay
My brothers and I #StarWarsDay

Growing up my brothers and I would get out our Star Was action figures and reenact the Star Wars movies.

  • We did this every Saturday.
  • We were teenagers.
  • We were are a little nerdy.
  • We were homeschooled.

Not only was our Star Wars reenactments lots of fun, research suggests that this kind of imaginative play is actually very beneficial. An article in Psychology Today entitled The Need for Pretend Play in Child Development, speaks to the benefits of pretend play for children.

“Actual studies have demonstrated cognitive benefits such as increases in language usage including subjunctives, future tenses, and adjectives. The important concept of “theory of mind,” an awareness that one’s thoughts may differ from those of other persons and that there are a variety of perspectives of which each of us is capable, is closely related to imaginative play (Jenkins & Astington, 2000; Leslie, 1987; Singer & Singer, 1990; Singer & Singer, 2005).”

Basically, when my brothers and I had to use our communication skills to resolve disagreements about who got to be Han Solo or how the next scene should play out, we were growing and developing our social skills. The article says it this way:

“. . .Make-believe games are forerunners of the important capacity for forms of self-regulation including reduced aggression, delay of gratification, civility, and empathy.”

Play is the work that a child is tasked with performing. And through imaginative “pretend” play, children learn key social skills that will help them succeed all throughout their life.

One of our core concepts at Demme Learning is the power of multi sensory engagement. We think it’s best for children to have tangible objects that they can interact with in their learning. This is why we emphasize the blocks in teaching and learning mathematical concepts.

Looking back on those Star War reenactments, I am convinced that those action figures enriched our play, providing tangible objects that enhanced our learning. Whether it’s dolls or action figures or a pretend vacuum cleaner, toys are an essential element of pretend play. But then again, as any nerd knows, the difference between a stick and a lightsaber is the sound effects.

Happy Star Wars day and may the Fourth Be With You!

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