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Hi friends, if you have school aged children, or just enjoy learning about reading, check out this documentary. You can watch it for free today only (February 1st). It’s only an hour long and highlights a very important social justice issue; literacy. Please message me if you watch it. I’d love to chat about it.

The Right to Read Celebrate Black History Month with The Right to Read `; } if (isBetweenGivenTime()) { showVideo(); } else { console.log("not showing video"); } To watch the film with Spanish subtitles, visit this webpage.Para ver la película con subtítulos en español, visita esta página web.This screening is br...

I remember building forts as a kid and feeling so proud!

Educational and environmental psychologists, along with educators in the field, have taken a keen interest in fort building. It’s a constant presence in early and middle childhood, the creation of places, often in plain site, and the experts agree that den, fort or secret space creation offers a host of cognitive and psychological benefits for the developing child.

“When children build new spaces for play, they create a new world to experience, and that experience creates a new world – one that runs according to different material and social rules.

What this means is that play gives children the opportunity to change their world to suit them. When children construct their own play environments, they naturally create ones that are most responsive to their needs, both at the moment and in terms of their long-term development.

The benefits to the children are clear – stronger senses of self and community, belief in one’s own abilities to construct, adapt and demolish, the chance to identify and satisfy one’s own social, material and spatial needs.”

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This is incredibly brave 💕

Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor at Russia’s state-run Channel One television station, burst onto the set of the live nightly news broadcast tonight shouting “Stop the war. No to war." She held a sign reading: “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” It was signed in English: “Russians against the war”. Through a Russian human rights group, OVD-Info, she also released a pre-recorded video statement in which she stated:

"What is happening in Ukraine is a crime. And Russia is the aggressor here. And responsibility for this aggression rests on the conscience of a single man: Vladimir Putin. My father is Ukrainian. My mother is Russian. And they’ve never been enemies. And this necklace I’m wearing is a symbol of that fact that Russia must immediately end this fratricidal war. And our fraternal peoples will still be able to make peace. Unfortunately, I’ve spent many of the last few years working for Channel One, doing Kremlin propaganda, and I’m deeply ashamed of this. Ashamed that I allowed lies to come from the TV screen. Ashamed that I allowed the zombification of Russian people. We were silent in 2014 when all this had just started."

She went on to urge her fellow Russians to join anti-war protests, asserting: "We just silently watched this anti-human regime at work. And now the whole world has turned its back on us. And the next 10 generations won’t wash away the stain of this fratricidal war. We Russians are thinking and intelligent people. It’s in our power alone to stop all this madness. Go protest. Don’t be afraid of anything. They can’t lock us all away."

According to OVD-Info, Marina was arrested shortly after her protest. Under newly passed media suppression laws in Russia, she could face significant prison time; violators of the new law criminalizing the spread of what the government deems to be "false information" about the military face possible sentences of up to 15 years. As a result of these repressive new laws, multiple Russian independent media outlets were forced to shut down and numerous journalists have fled the country. The crackdown on the media corresponds with a similar crackdown on public protest; nearly 15,000 Russians have been detained for protesting the war, including for such acts as simply holding a blank sign in public.

** UPDATE 3/15/22: After a 14-hour interrogation by the police, during which she was denied legal representation, Marina Ovsyannikova was issued a fine for 30,000 rubles (about $287) for the video statement she released. While she has been released from custody at present, Russian state media reported today that the Russian Investigative Committee has now opened an investigation around possible violations of Russia's new "false information" law which carries a possible sentence of up to 15 years in prison. Moreover, Krelim spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters today that Marina had committed “hooliganism,” a charge that can carry up to eight years of prison time itself.

To help support OVD-Info, the Russian human rights group which is providing legal assistance to anti-war protestors including Marina Ovsyannikova, you can donate to the group via Global Giving at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/ovd-info/ -- or visit ОВД-Инфо's website at https://ovdinfo.org/ **

For books for young readers about girls who bravely stood up against dictators, we highly recommend "Words on Fire" for ages 10 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/words-on-fire), "We Will Not Be Silent" for ages 10 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/we-will-not-be-silent), and "Resistance" for ages 12 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/resistance)

For older readers, we recommend "White Rose" for ages 13 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/white-rose), "In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer" (https://www.amightygirl.com/in-my-hands), and "In the Time of the Butterflies" for ages 15 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/in-the-time-of-the-butterflies)

For two excellent books about past Russian invasions told through the experience of teen girls, we highly recommend "The Endless Steppe" for ages 10 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-endless-steppe) and "Between Shades of Gray" for ages 13 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/between-shades-of-gray)

To inspire children and teens with the true stories of girls and women who dared to fight for change throughout history, check out our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364

And more books for tweens and teens about girls living under real-life authoritarian regimes throughout history, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426

Have a child with an IEP? This is a great piece of advice.

Happy Pluto Rotation Day! We love Pluto! Do you think it should still count as a planet? Apparently this is a very controversial topic, but our family agrees that it’s a dwarf planet.

Love this necklace one of my students gave me! Happy (belated) Valentine’s Day! 💕

So excited for Vincent for making honor roll! He has worked so hard over the last 6 months and deserves this! Keep up the hard work, Vince! 🎉

Looking for a fun, free activity to do with your kids? Balboa Park museums offer free admission on a rotating basis to San Diego county residents or active military personnel and their dependents every Tuesday (with the exception of any fifth Tuesday). Make it a day and pack a picnic! Link in comments for the list of which museums are free.

If you want your child to be good at mathematics, it’s important— and — that they begin by counting on their fingers.

“A mother called me to report that her 5-year-old daughter had come home from school crying because her teacher had not allowed her to count on her fingers.” — This is not an isolated event. Schools regularly ban finger use in classrooms or communicate to students that they are ‘babyish’ for following their to make representations with their fingers when engaging in mathematics. This is despite compelling areas of that show the importance of a part of our that “sees” fingers, well beyond the time and age that people use their fingers to count.

Neuroscientists often debate why finger knowledge predicts mathematics achievement, but they clearly agree on one thing: It does. And that knowledge is critical.

As Brian Butterworth, a leading researcher in this area, has written, if students aren’t learning about numbers through thinking about their fingers, numbers “will never have a normal representation in the brain.” In fact, the quality of the 6-year-old’s finger representation was a better predictor of future performance on mathematics tests than their scores on tests of cognitive processing.

In a study published last year, the researchers Ilaria Berteletti and James R. Booth analysed a specific region of our brain that is dedicated to the perception and representation of fingers known as the somatosensory finger area. Remarkably, brain researchers know that we “see” a representation of our fingers in our brains, even when we do not use fingers in a calculation. The researchers found that when 8-to-13-year-olds were given complex subtraction problems, the finger area lit up, even though the students did not use their fingers. This finger-representation area was, according to their study, also engaged to a greater extent with more complex problems that involved higher numbers and more manipulation.

Other researchers have found that the better students’ knowledge of their fingers was in the first grade, the higher they scored on number comparison and estimation in the second grade. Even university students’ finger perception predicted their calculation scores.

One of the recommendations of the neuroscientists conducting these important studies is that schools focus on finger discrimination—not only on number counting via their fingers but also on helping students distinguish between those fingers. Still, schools typically pay little if any attention to finger discrimination, and few curriculums encourage this kind of mathematical work. Instead, many teachers have been led to believe that finger use is useless and something to be abandoned as quickly as possible.

Finger research is part of a larger group of studies on cognition and the brain showing the importance of visual engagement with mathematics. Our brains are made up of “distributed networks,” and when we handle knowledge, different areas of the brain communicate with each other. When we work on mathematics, in particular, brain activity is distributed among many different networks, which include areas within the ventral and dorsal pathways, both of which are visual. Neuroimaging has shown that even when people work on a number calculation, such as 12 x 25, with symbolic digits (12 and 25) our mathematical thinking is grounded in visual processing.

And people who are not strong visual thinkers probably need visual thinking more than anyone. Everyone uses visual pathways when we work on mathematics. The problem is it has been presented, for decades, as a subject of numbers and symbols, ignoring the potential of visual methods for transforming students’ mathematics experiences and developing important brain pathways.

To engage students in productive visual thinking, they should be asked, at regular intervals, how they see mathematical ideas, and to draw what they see. They can be given activities with visual questions and they can be asked to provide visual solutions to questions. Such activities not only offer deep engagement, new understandings, and visual-brain activity, but they show students that mathematics can be an open and beautiful subject, rather than fixed, closed and impenetrable.

Stopping students from using their fingers when they count could, according to brain research, be akin to halting their mathematical development. Fingers are probably one of our most useful visual aids, and the finger area of our brain is used well into adulthood.

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