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I published my first round-up list of our unit study of Hawaii back in 2015. Last year (okay, we actually only finished it up a couple of weeks ago, but we STARTED it last year!), the kids and I accomplished another unit study of Hawaii, and it was just as fun with older kids doing more advanced work.Instead of making two separate unit study write-ups, I went back and revised my 2015 blog post on our Hawaii study to reflect all of the new activities that more advanced students can do, and the specific areas of interest to older students. ...

In Acrossing the Miles, the Beat’s intrepid Animal Crossing travel reporter Avery Kaplan will leave her home base on Dharma Island to soar across the Dodo skies and visit comicdom’s finest creators on their respective virtual isles. For this entry, she’s heading to the appetizing island of Salt Falls. It was the afternoon on May 27th, 2020 when I headed toward the Dharma Airport, ready to visit Salt Falls. Avery at Dharma Island’s airport on the way to Salt Falls. Salt Falls is the Animal Crossing island of Wendy Xu, an accomplished cartoonist whose work you may recognize from many different places, including Mooncakes, which...

While many people have had to come to terms with devastating loss, financial stress, and unemployment throughout quarantine, it’s easy to overlook the impact that the pandemic has had on children. They’ve had to spend months confined to their homes, trying to keep up with school work, while having very few social outlets.  As spring turns to summer, kids now face even more time locked up at home, away from friends. Although we are seeing lockdown restrictions eased all over the world, there are still social distancing guidelines in place. While these must be respected, it’s also important to try...

Photo: Pinterest For more than a century, the game of bingo has been used as a teaching device. In Germany, during the 19th Century, bingo was used as a means to teach children the alphabet, how to recognize animals and multiplication tables. Today’s educators are still using bingo as a way to teach students mathematics at every level from basic vocabulary concepts to full problems.  Kids are much more apt to retain math concepts if they are made fun of them. Games are a great motivator to get kids to participate in class. Students will often wholeheartedly dive into a math...

At a small farmhouse not far from Colombia’s capital, Bogota, Marlene Beltran sits at a small table and turns on the radio to help her little brother with school work. The five-year-old is learning how to draw on paper cubes to tell a story. There is no internet at the farm. The hour-long radio program keeps them busy while schools remain closed under COVID-19 measures. At one time, radio was widely used in Latin America to teach basic math and reading skills. Now, such programs are expanding again to serve the public during lockdown. The radio and television programs are...