From the blog
Classroom-tested ideas from 20+ years in early elementary classrooms.
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September 11, 2026
Ask a room full of kindergarten teachers what they wish every incoming student knew, and letters come up before numbers, before shapes, before almost anything else. That’s not tradition talking. It’s data. The National Early Literacy Panel spent years reviewing early literacy research and landed on a striking conclusion: alphabet knowledge is the single strongest […]
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September 11, 2026
Long before a child writes a legible letter, their hand is doing quiet, invisible work. Holding a pencil without a death grip. Guiding a crayon in a straight line instead of a scribble. Sitting still enough, and focused enough, to finish a single page. None of that happens automatically. It’s built, slowly, through fine motor […]
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August 20, 2026
There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over a car in the school pickup line on the first day. A parent replaying the goodbye scene in their head, wondering if they should have hugged longer or left faster. A kid who cried at drop-off and then, according to the teacher, was completely fine ten […]
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August 20, 2026
Every August, the same question shows up in school pickup lines and parent group chats: is my kid actually ready? Usually the person asking already knows their child can count to twenty and sing the alphabet song without missing a letter. What they’re really asking is something harder to answer, and it has almost nothing […]
