When my son was a few months old and I was a new mom, I had no idea how or when to introduce him to solid foods. I fell asleep one night in the midst of reading an article about the topic. The article explained that solid foods should be introduced in very small bites, over the course of several days. “Let the baby test a bite or two at each meal. Don’t expect him to get nutrition from the food, at first. Just let him get used to the texture and slowly figure out what to do with it.” The last thing I read before drifting off to sleep was a warning not to overstuff the child. “If you push too much, the baby will just spit it all back up!”
The next morning, I went to a reading conference and sat with several teachers from a different school district. They told me about an exciting new reading program they had organized to build fluency scores. It was a systematic, five-minute routine built into the first few minutes of the day. As the students entered the classroom, they met with a pre-assigned partner. Each student read for one minute from specific reading passages, while the partner kept time with a timer. Then, the partners switched. After reading, each student counted the number of words he/she read and recorded the total on a graph. The objective was to beat their best pace. They were competing against themselves and they loved it! (more…)
