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The January/February issue of Connect focuses on Kids and Money. To make room for other authors, we had to trim it down to one page, but here's the article in full:

Using Money in a Larger Study

One of the best and most comfortable ways for children to master new skills is through applying skills in practical settings. A very authentic study of money—recognizing coins, counting money, and making change—arose during a study of restaurants in my five- to eight-year olds’ classroom.

Problem Solving as a Matter of Survival

What is most important for schools to focus on? Well, it sounds rather dramatic, but giving kids lots of experience in problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity could actually save lives, or at least make them much more comfortable.

I was surprised, shocked even, to have such difficulty in locating anything about time and money in the NCTM Standards (2000).Telling time and knowing how to identify and count money are two critical skills we must teach elementary students. In the decade that I taught five- to ten-year-olds, these topics were definitely on my agenda and I rather enjoyed teaching them in differentiated ways.

A Permaculture classroom? Not a classroom where people learn permaculture, but a classroom that is itself a permacultural phenomenon… Is there such a thing? Could, or should there be?

Permaculture (“permanent” “agriculture” or “permanent” “culture”) is an approach to farming and human settlement that is sustainable and interconnected. No one aspect is considered in isolation; everything is part of a system. Additionally, in permaculture, one observes first and then looks for the smallest amount of change or interference to impose while gaining the greatest effect.

I've been thinking about factors that affect planning for elementary science and math curricula.

If you want to know how to run good schools, ask someone who's built a giant corporation. That seems to be the message this week, as Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, and New York's Mayor Bloomberg weigh in on how to make our kids number one in the highly competitive global marketplace.

A human mission to Mars could be a lot cheaper and faster if it were a one-way trip. Think of all the money we’d save by not having to rehabilitate returning astronauts who endured long-term, low-gravity living and greater exposure to radiation! So say Drs. Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies, authors of “To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars,” published in the October-November 2010 issue of the Journal of Cosmology, http://journalofcosmology.com/Mars108.html.

In a New York Times article dated September 6, 2010, about the efficacy of long-held study habits, author Benedict Carey writes, "Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are visual learners and others are auditory; some are left-brain students, others right-brain."