If you are really concerned about your child in school, it might be time to make a referral to special education. This doesn’t mean that he or she will automatically be in special education, but if a child is having difficulty, a referral begins the process of finding out if special ed is necessary. According to the law, anyone can make a referral for special education services. Before children enter school, pediatricians are often …

When I was in high school, I had a biology teacher who would sit at the front of the room with her text book in front of her. Her lesson basically consisted of sitting at the front of the room, reading through the highlighted words of each section. At the end of each page, she would say, “Questions, any questions? No questions? Good.” The problem was, she never looked up from the book, and we sat in our rows with our hands waving through the air. Clueless.

When I was a kid, mine was the backpack with the three-week old peanut butter sandwich. My bedroom was a disaster area. My roommate from collage picked me out because mine was the only application with food stains. You get the idea–I was an organizational disaster.

One of my friends once called and told me that she planned to hire a tutor for her five-year old child to teach him how to read. When I told her that at his age he was not expected to read, she told me that although she knew that he didn’t need to read at that point, she did not know how to help him. She was trained in business–had an MBA from one of the top schools in the country–but that didn’t help when it came to helping her child know how to read. Here are some of the tips that I gave her.