Enjoy some cozy downtime with your youngster during this Holiday Season with any of these “Jingle Book” recommendations from Lower School Librarian Betty Castello. Let them form the basis of new bedtime traditions this year and for years to come. They can also make excellent Christmas gifts or stocking stuffers for the young ones in your life. 

Those who struggle with Executive Functioning can often face challenges with activation (getting started on a project), focus (avoiding distraction), effort (following through on tasks), emotion (self-control and self-regulation), and action (monitoring progress and staying on track).

In a webinar for parents entitled “Executive Functioning 101,” Oak Knoll Upper School Academic Support Counselor Kelly Ross explained, “Executive Functioning is critical for social behaviors, emotional well-being, and goal-directed behaviors.” She stressed that under-developed executive functioning skills are not a character flaw, but a neurological issue, that can affect social emotional skills across the board, but can be improved through targeted assistance.

Though Ross works with Upper School students at Oak Knoll to recognize areas for improvement and assist them in honing their executive functioning capabilities, she offers this advice to all parents on how they can support executive functioning skill development at home.

Technology is everywhere and has become an essential aspect of our school, home, personal, and business lives. Walk into most pre-K or kindergarten classrooms today, and you are likely to see interactive whiteboards, students utilizing iPads, robotics activities, and other tech-based learning aids and apps. By high school, students are engaging in ever more complex uses of technology to learn advanced coding, engineering, 3D modeling, and all manner of internet and artificial intelligence-based research techniques.

The proliferation of technology in education and the need to support healthy media use has prompted many schools to adopt acceptable use policies and other guidelines for supporting mental, physical, and social-emotional growth in the real world measured against the many hours students spend surfing the digital world. 

The Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Business School have joined forces to create the Digital Wellness Lab, and their “Best Practices for Digital Wellness” calls for families to mirror the work of educators by sitting down with their teens to create shared media use agreements in the home.

After weeks of summer fun, a relaxed bed-time routine, more screen time with video games or nighttime movies, and a casual approach to daily responsibilities, your child may be experiencing some anxiety about the return to school in a few weeks, or may be feeling a little less than excited about the prospect.

Experts say there are a number of ways in which parents can ease the transition back to school by using the last few weeks of summer prior to the start of class to physically and mentally prepare for the new academic year.

A major forte at an independent school such as Oak Knoll is the bespoke nature of its college counseling program. Smaller class sizes, lower faculty to student ratios, and individualized learning allow students to be known and honored for their unique abilities and personalities. At Oak Knoll, this enables our college counseling team to tailor a highly personal approach to researching and applying to universities which is introduced to freshman and sophomore parents each year at our College Counseling Roadmap — a late Spring session for families of ninth and tenth graders that offers the following expert advice for gradually navigating school visits, applications, interviews, and acceptances.

Fifteen years ago, a helpful blog post might have listed five ways parents can assist their children in becoming computer literate. As the wave of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine intelligence (MI) crashes over society, it is now vital that parents assist their children in becoming “reality” literate. 

One of the cunning aspects of chatbots such as ChatGPT and others from Microsoft and Google are that they return information to users in natural language. Unlike a simple Google search that returns text and links scraped from the internet, AI synthesizes millions of bits of information and seeks to “chat” with the user as a means of cultivating a relationship. Users, especially younger users, may be fooled into thinking there is a real person on the other side of the conversation. That could be costly.

New York City Schools have just blocked access to ChatGPT for all students and faculty. If you aren’t a technical person, you may be asking, “What’s ChatGPT?” If you are a tech person, skim over the next paragraph because you’ve probably been hearing about nothing but ChatGPT since last November when it was released.

We recently posted a blog entitled, Reading Aloud to Your Pre-Kindergarten Student. Yes, research supports the notion that this act improves cognitive development, but who needs an excuse to cuddle up with a wee one during the holidays or any other time of year!

As a follow up, Lower School Librarian, Betty Castello, put together this list of some of her favorite holiday-themed book recommendations for the little elves in your life. Book descriptions are courtesy of amazon.com.

This holiday season, give your pre-kindergarten student the gift of a lifetime–give them a story a day. Whether it’s reading aloud to them at bedtime, listening to an audio book in the car, or sharing a story during bath time, research overwhelmingly supports the fact that exposing young children to aural storytelling at an early age, improves their cognitive development.

The start of November kicked off National Native American Heritage Month, also known as American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month. It is a time to recognize Indigenous people's history, culture, and contributions. Additionally, part of Native American Heritage Month involves reckoning with the past.

Here, we've curated a variety of resources for parents and teachers who would like to initiate conversations and learn more.