Creative Minds Tutoring & Learning

08/10/2026

I have very strong opinions on the pushing down of curriculum to younger and younger children. We are not doing children favors by expecting non-age appropriate skills at earlier and early ages.

We are worrying about the wrong thing when it comes to “kindergarten readiness.”

Many adults are concerned with whether a child can read, write, and meet "academic expectations" by the time kindergarten begins. Those questions feel responsible. They are also incomplete.

The more important question is this: Am I willing to compromise my child’s ability to regulate, attend, and remain emotionally available for learning in exchange for early academic exposure that research shows does not improve (and can undermine) long-term outcomes?

Kindergarten has shifted from a developmental bridge to an academically intensified environment. Increased sitting, constant direction-following, early benchmarks, and reduced play are now treated as normal. Developmentally, they are not.

Self-regulation, attention, working memory, and cognitive flexibility are still wiring in early childhood. These systems develop through movement, play, autonomy, and co-regulation—not through pressure or performance demands.

When academics are pushed before these systems are ready, stress increases, regulation stays external, and learning becomes fragile. Any early gains fade, while the long-term costs show up as disengagement, weaker executive functioning, and poorer academic persistence.

This is why research on delayed kindergarten entry consistently finds stronger self-regulation, attention, and emotional readiness for learning. Not because children missed academics, but because their brains were given time to build the foundation learning depends on.

08/04/2026

06/20/2026

We need to stop thinking about education as simply a transfer of knowledge from teacher to student, and we MUST return to a place of providing opportunities for children to be children and simply explore their world without pressure to “learn”.

06/05/2026

If anything, we need in INCREASE recess time and up the age until which kids get a “recess” break in their day — that along with later school start times would do wonders for our children.

06/05/2026

Not “disabled”… DIFFERENTLY abled! We must recognize that distinction.

The decision that produced Elizabeth Bonker's commencement speech was made by her fellow valedictorians — the people who knew her, studied alongside her, and understood what she had to offer. They chose her to speak to the class. They made that choice knowing she would use AAC to communicate. The choice itself is a statement about what the people closest to her understand that the broader culture around disability sometimes doesn't: intelligence, insight, and the capacity to lead a meaningful address are present in Elizabeth regardless of whether she produces speech.
AAC — Augmentative and Alternative Communication — is the mechanism that made the speech possible, not the thing that limits it. The device, the symbol board, the eye gaze system — whichever method is in use — is giving language access to a person who has language. It is not generating the ideas. It is transmitting them. The distinction matters because the persistent assumption that non-speaking people are less capable is exactly the assumption that a non-speaking valedictorian commencement address exists to challenge.
Her speech addressed service, communication, and the value of every person — chosen themes, not prompted ones. The content of what Elizabeth said was hers. The platform was provided by the classmates who recognized she had something worth saying. That recognition is what communication access is supposed to make possible.

06/05/2026

05/27/2026

I’ve long held the belief that the American education system has messed more things up then it has fixed with “No Child Left Behind”, Common Core Standards, and the pushing down of curriculum to younger and younger students. Gen X’rs will recall Kindergarten as a time of play, fun and getting “used to school” (mostly a half day adventure away from home)… today, Kindergartners are expected to already be reading and writing, and those who aren’t are seen as “behind” or “struggling”. What’s changed in the past 40 or 50 years? Kids haven’t changed! How the human brain develops hasn’t changed! What’s changed is societal pressure and “norms” demanding more and more of children at younger and younger ages. We are doing our children a great disservice with these expectations!

From Children Stories — Struggling to read at 5 doesn't mean behind. It often means the brain isn't ready yet — and that's normal. The anxiety most parents feel when their child is not reading at the pace that other children appear to be reading is understandable in context — a cultural context that has made early academic achievement a primary metric of a child's trajectory, and made the comparison of children's milestones a near-constant feature of modern parenting. The child who is not sounding out words at five when someone else's child is apparently reading chapter books is, in most parents' internal experience, a child who is already falling behind in a race that has not been honestly explained to them.

The developmental neuroscience behind reading readiness tells a fundamentally different story. Reading is not a natural skill. Unlike language — which humans acquire through immersive exposure without formal instruction — reading requires the brain to have built a specific set of prerequisite capacities that are not present at birth and do not arrive on a fixed schedule. Phonological awareness — the ability to hear and manipulate the individual sounds within words. Working memory — the ability to hold information in mind long enough to decode and comprehend. Attentional control — the ability to sustain focus on a demanding task. Language comprehension — the depth of vocabulary and semantic understanding that makes decoded text meaningful rather than mechanical. All of these are built through years of play, conversation, storytelling, physical movement, and the rich relational experiences of early childhood. None of them are accelerated by early phonics drills! Some of them are disrupted by the stress and shame that early reading pressure can produce.

Finland's model is the most frequently cited example because it is the most striking: formal reading instruction begins at age seven, two years later than in many Western countries, after years of play-based early childhood that prioritizes exactly the foundational capacities that reading depends on. The outcome is a country that ranks among the highest-performing literacy systems in the world — not despite the late start, but because the early years were used to build what the later instruction required rather than attempting the instruction before the foundation was present.

The child who is five and not yet reading is not behind. They are in the process of building the brain that reading will one day run on. Filling those years with pressure and drills and the experience of failing at something their brain is not yet equipped for does not accelerate that building process. It adds a layer of anxiety and shame to an experience that was designed to eventually feel like discovery. The race is not real but the development is.

04/20/2026

Play IS work for young children. Play should NOT just be a supplement in the early childhood classroom, but rather the FOCUS of the classroom!

04/09/2026

This may be an unpopular opinion but I happen to agree (and this goes for girls as well)… the best learning happens in real life, not confined to a classroom with 4 walls and desks in rows (or even group learning tables). The reason we see so much struggle happening with young learners is that they were not designed to sit and be still for 5, 6 or 7 hours a day (with once a week gym class) and once a day 20-30 minute “recess” (hopefully outdoors). Kids need real life, outdoor, play, context, involvement, and engagement.

04/02/2026

Play is the WORK of children learning!!