When a parent is deployed overseas, reading a bedtime story becomes problematic. Teachers have known for years that having parents read to their children goes as far as anything a teacher can do to support early literacy. And both parents and children cherish the time spent together with a good story. When duty calls now, technology can assist:

Even though service members at Camp Eggers, Afghanistan, are separated from their families by thousands of miles, they still can read to their kids.

Thanks to the efforts of one noncommissioned officer assigned to the Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan, more than 200 parents deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom have done so over the past four months.

The “Read To Your Kids” program was established in late November by Army Reserve Master Sgt. D. Keith Johnson from the OMCA public affairs office as a way to bring deployed troops closer to their loved ones while they are away from home. On March 18, Johnson reached a new milestone as he completed his 200th taping.

Read the entire article.

This program is supported by Any Soldier and by United Through Reading.

Special thanks to Jamie Wheeler for the heads up on this one!

The next time students ask why they have to learn grammar and sentence structure, let them read a few of these:

• The burglar was about 30 years old, white, 5′ 10″, with wavy hair weighing about 150 pounds.
• The family lawyer will read the will tomorrow at the residence of Mr. Hannon, who died June 19 to accommodate his relatives.
• Mrs. Shirley Baxter, who went deer hunting with her husband, is very proud that she was able to shoot a fine buck as well as her husband.
• Organ donations from the living reached a record high last year, outnumbering donors who are dead for the first time.
• The dog was hungry and made the mistake of nipping a 2-year-old that was trying to force feed it in his ear.
• We spent most of our time sitting on the back porch watching the cows playing Scrabble and reading.
• Hunting can also be dangerous, as in the case of pygmies hunting elephants armed only with spears.

(Special thanks to Pastor Tim for these!)

This announcement comes from the Library of Congress:

More than 79,000 newly digitized newspaper pages, along with several new site features, have recently been added to the Chronicling America Web site at www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/. With this update, the site now provides access to more than 500,000 digitized newspaper pages, dating primarily from 1900 to 1910, and representing 61 newspapers from California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah and Virginia. Chronicling America is a project of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), which is a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The NDNP is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of public-domain U.S. newspapers with select digitization of historic pages, as well as information about newspapers from 1690 to the present. Supported by NEH’s “We the People” program, this rich digital resource will continue to be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress.

New features in Chronicling America include:

• “See All Available Newspapers” page - A list of all newspapers with pages available on the site.
• RSS feed and E-mail Update service - Users can subscribe to Real Simple Syndication (RSS) updates or e-mail delivery (see list under Topics/Newspapers and Journalism). Updates will include notices of added content and other points of interest.
• Newly available content includes pages from the Hopkinsville Kentuckian and Liberty, both published in Kentucky (and including coverage of the assassination of William Goebel in 1900, the only state governor ever to be killed in office); additions to The Times Dispatch (Richmond, Va.), New York Tribune (New York, N.Y.), Deseret Evening News (Salt Lake City) and others.

Highlights of content available in Chronicling America include:

• News of original discovery of the historic “Waldseemüller Map” of 1507. (More information about this map and the Library’s acquisition.)
• The assassination of President McKinley in 1901
• The San Francisco earthquake of 1906
• The construction of the Panama Canal

Ultimately, during the next 20 years, NDNP will create a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 from all the states and U.S. territories. Also on the Web site, an accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information directs users to newspaper titles in all types of formats. The information in the directory was created through an earlier NEH initiative: the United States Newspaper Program. The Library of Congress is also digitizing and contributing to the NDNP database a significant number of newspaper pages drawn from its own collections during the course of this partnership.

The research paper process is just hard work. Instead of being the joyous discipline of learning and sharing, the unit too often deteriorates into a nightmare of 3×5 and 4×6 cards (sometimes color-coded), magazines missing from the school library, a debate over the use of Wikipedia, and formatting margin and font size.

Then there’s the whole plagiarism thing:

A national survey published in Education Week found that 54% of students admitted to plagiarizing from the internet; 74% of students admitted that at least once during the past school year they had engaged in “serious” cheating; and 47% of students believe their teachers sometimes choose to ignore students who are cheating. (Plagiarism.org)

Enter Plagiarism.org, a site that can help us teach academic integrity. It provides definitions, examples, and strategies for avoiding plagiarism; a plagiarism FAQ; and printable handouts. It also links to a number of style guides, including MLA, APA, and CBE.

This site is valuable ally in the battle to help kids respect the ideas of others as much as they respect their own.

Do you teach English to kids whose first language is not English? A valuable resource is headed your way from the folks at Merriam-Webster: the Learners Dictionary.

The site offers several features your kids will find helpful:

1. Help with commonly misused words
2. Pronunciation help
3. Learner’s Word of the Day

Merriam-Webster will announce more developments on its site at the 2008 Convention of TESOL (Teachers of Speakers of Other Languages) in April at the New York Hilton. Bookmark this site and check back often!

Randy Glasbergen is a gifted cartoonist who “gets” the clash of old and new technologies (and their users). Bookmark his website and use it to take a break now and then. His cartoons cover a variety of contemporary topics, including education.

Sometimes a good laugh can save the day.

Visit the Mark Twain Boyhood Home in Hannibal, Missouri; follow a guided tour through Mark Twain Cave; ride a Mississippi Riverboat; and journey to Twain’s birthplace in Florida, Missouri: does this sound like the kind of professional development you’d give up a week of your summer for?

The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum announces its second annual summer workshop series, June 16-20, July 14-18, and July 28-August 1.

Participants will spend a week exploring The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with scholars and local experts. You can earn graduate credits or continuing education units as you prepare a unit you can take back to your classroom in the fall.

And, of course, you can spend some time with the Mississippi River, as Twain did, and as Huck describes sunrise in this passage:

The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line — that was the woods on t’other side; you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn’t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away — trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks — rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you’ve got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!

More information and a registration form are available.

The Library of Congress sponsored a poetry reading in February featuring poets Li-Young Lee and David Kirby. A webcast of the event is available for download. It’s 85 minutes long, but clips might be appropriate for the classroom. It’s an example of tax dollars at work that teachers can really support.

If more students could see and hear real poets reading their work, we might be able to demystify poetry for kids — make it less a matter of rhythm and rhyme and more a matter of meaning. Who knows what poets sit in our classrooms now, waiting for just the right model or encouragement?