#occupyedu: challenge schools to change. One of my fellow bloggers on Cooperative Catalyst, Chad Sansing, has started a group with a mission of giving EACH child a personally meaningful education and a community of learning that includes, involves and inspires
Parents, Students, Teachers & Administrators are ALL on the same learning team!
Welcome to Kidzmet’s Recipes for Success!
At Kidzmet, we believe that just as a pre-packaged product is not the ONLY way to cook a dish, nor the ONLY dish we should consume, we cannot continue to think about a pre-packaged standard of intelligence to which we
Necessity PLAY is the Mother of Invention

I stumbled across our Monsters, Inc DVD last night and one of the key themes replayed in my mind…the realization at the end of the movie that joy/laughter creates significantly more power than fear. I think we need to
Smart Reasons to Keep Kids Learning Over the Summer

article originally written by Jen Lilienstein for FamilyShare. For many kids, their mid-July mantra is “lazy”— not “learning.” While summer fun is on the daily agenda, some conceptual calisthenics also needs to make it onto the calendar during July and
Five years later…

In 2011, I started Kidzmet in the hopes that, as parents and educators, we start celebrating and embracing the strengths that our kids were born with rather than trying to school them into molds that society deems optimal at the
Butterfly Parents vs. Tiger Mothers

I don’t know about you, but the message of the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua rubs me the wrong way. And this is not to say that I don’t expect my kids to always do their best…but
YOUR favorite (or least favorite) teacher story

It seems like very few days go by when I don’t hear one story or another about the positive impact a teacher that “got” them made on someone’s life. I also hear lots of stories about unbearable school years where

article originally written for LessonPlanet by Jen Lilienstein For many kids, annual standardized testing is one of the highest periods of stress1 during the school year. In fact, according to the Kids Health1 website, the number one kid stressor is
On intrinsically motivating students

In late February 2012, EdWeek’s Susan Sandler wrote about Personalization 3.0, or “a hybrid approach of humanity and technology…that uses technology to enhance teacher-student relationships, not replace them.” Sandler references Theodore R. Sizer’s work (late founder of the Coalition of Essential

