school

My son starts third grade next week, and this is the first year where instead of being all, “Yay for friends and learning!” he’s more like, “yeah, school, great.” I can understand how he feels. He’s got nine months of work ahead of him and dude would rather watch reruns of Pokémon. Crash-landing from a…

Photo: Meghan Moravcik Walbert Since the mid-1990s, parents have been clipping small rectangular “Box Top” symbols from the tops of our Cheerios, Lucky Charms and Ziplock boxes. We stash them away in our junk drawers, largely unforgotten, until 1. we feel like we finally have enough to bundle up and send in to our kid’s…

Gone are the days when parents could swing by the drugstore for a new Trapper Keeper and declare back-to-school shopping done. The lists of required school supplies are intense. It’s not surprising that moms and dads will drop an estimated $519 per household on school items this year, according to Deloitte’s annual survey. To save…

Photo: Marc Romanelli (Getty Images) One of the hallmarks of the Montessori method is an emphasis on independence. I’m seeing this firsthand as—I kid you not—my seven-month-old infant came home from his first week of Montessori having learned how to hold his own bottle with two hands like a Stanley Cup champion. Simone Davies, a…

These greens are among the hydroponic crops grown by students at Brownsville Collaborative Middle School, in Brooklyn, N.Y. In June, the students started to sell discounted boxes of the fresh produce to community members. Robin Lloyd/for NPR hide caption toggle caption Robin Lloyd/for NPR These greens are among the hydroponic crops grown by students at…

The idea is so engrained we hardly even question it anymore—while our kids spend their summer vacation sleeping in, watching TV, swimming and playing freeze tag at camp, all that precious knowledge they learned throughout the school year is melting away. Summer learning loss. The Summer Slide. Summer brain drain. We read about it on…

I made this card using Canva and a fake phone number. School is almost out, which means your kids are about to lose their built-in weekday social life for a long, hot stretch. As a working mom, I admittedly haven’t connected with the parents of every child my six-year-old daughter hangs out with on the…

School children line up with bags filled with plastic recyclables. Akshar Foundation. As a way to make school more accessible and help clean up their local community, this primary school began to accept grocery bags full of plastic waste instead of school fees. Each week school children ages 4 to 15 line up in front…

During the course of the school year, my son’s school has needed volunteers for more activities and events than I could possibly recall. They need volunteers to run the PTA. To man the food tables at the annual “Donuts with Dad” and “Muffins with Mom” events. To supervise a slew of second-graders at the science…

Photo: Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images When my son was in preschool, I saw an idea floating around my parenting circles: Choose a sentimental book and, starting in kindergarten, have his teacher write him a note on a page in the book. Do this every year through high school. On graduation day,…