I had the opportunity to teach Kindergarten for a very short period of time as a beginning teacher. One of my favorite teaching memories from this time was calling students to the back table, one by one, to paint their hands for a handprint craft before sending them over to the sink to wash up and back to their seats to continue the task the rest of the class was working on. I was naive enough then to think I could simply tell a Kindergarten student “wash your hands” without explaining any further or modeling the process.  I gained the kind of wisdom only earned by experience that year. As…

Both of my daughters knew their ABC’s by 18 months old. When I say this, I don’t mean they could sing their ABC’s. I don’t even mean that they had letter recognition as long as the letters were listed in alphabetical order. I mean that my girls could recognize all 26 letters, capital and lowercase, presented in any order and any context. They pointed them out on their own all around town. True mastery. By 2 years old, Savannah knew all of her letter sounds. Charlotte is a week shy of 22 months and, at the time of writing this, it seems she’s on track to hit the same milestone.…