Pinterest Seasonal Pin of the Week: Back to School Idiom Task Cards

Free Back to School Tracing Packet  

[Source:  Artfully Occupied]

The start of the school year is just on the horizon for many of us parents, teachers, therapists, and children.  Summer break is full of activities that promote gross motor, sensory, fine motor, and other developmental skills. Many children do not pick up a pencil all summer and that is totally fine!  There are so many other ways of working on developmental skills that are needed for school tasks.  However, now that the summer is ending, it is a good time time to get back in the groove of school specific activities.  I have created a set of tracing worksheets to get those pre-writers and early writers going this school year.

Pinterest Pin of the Week: Autumn Inferencing

Primary Inspiration via Pinterest]

Here's a seasonal freebie for you that will have your K-2 students determining key details in 24 riddles, applying their prior knowledge, and inferring the answers.

These riddles are a form of informational text, featuring autumn social studies and science topics, including apples, Johnny Appleseed,  Columbus, fire safety, pumpkins, leaves, autumn months, bats, Halloween, and Thanksgiving.

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School Nurses Corner: Helping Principals Combat Student Vaping

[Source: Education Week]

Educators  are grappling with widespread student vaping and use of e-cigarettes in schools, a problem my colleague Arianna Prothero and I wrote about this week.

While some schools are doubling down on a discipline-heavy, punitive approach to students found with vaping devices and e-cigarettes on campus, the National Association of School Nurses says principals and educators must be mindful of the addictive nature of nicotine in any response to the vaping "epidemic." Any policies used to address vaping should incorporate education, intervention, and efforts to help students quit, the association says.

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School Psych Corner: How Can Schools Help Kids With Anxiety?

[Source: MindShift]

I met Brianna Sedillo when she pitched my radio station a personal perspective on anxiety, a topic that comes up over and over as teachers and parents  try to support young people.

"Everything kind of started with the anxiety and depression after the passing of my grandfather," Brianna said. "He was kinda my safe space. And losing that was really big."

Brianna missed her grandfather's supportive presence acutely during her middle school years, which were difficult. Middle school can be a difficult time for anyone, but for Brianna it was particularly hard socially because her family moved several times. She had trouble 

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[Source:  Bilinguistics]

Can a child demonstrate a speech impairment in one language but not the other? My immediate response to this is, "No." That said, let me tell you about a student I tested last week. Meet Miguel. Miguel is a 7-year, 3-month-old child whose native language is Spanish. He spoke only Spanish until he started school at age 3 and it continues to be the language he hears and uses most of the time. 

Since starting school, Miguel has received academic instruction in English with some Spanish support, and the family has continued to use Spanish in the home. His mother reported that Miguel speaks Spanish more often than English. Based on a detailed language history, I estimated that he uses Spanish 60% of the time and English 40% of the time.

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Editor's Note:   Congratulations to friend of PediaStaff, Lindsey Biel, who is featured in a Parents Magazine Article this month:

[Source:  Parents Magazine]

"My 6-year-old is a squeezer," says Amanda Ponzar, of Alexandria, Virginia. "He used to squeeze the flabby underarm of every lady he encountered: Me, his grandma, his teachers." Sometimes he'd accidentally squeeze too hard, or sometimes he'd squeeze a stranger. "I was always apologizing for him, and his father punished him," says Ponzar. "We didn't know why he was doing this."

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