During my research for camp programs, I found that Southern Methodist University (SMU) has 2 programs that will keep your teens having FUN over the summer and by the way they learn something along the way too.

Keep your teens engaged in learning something new, something fun and remarkable things will happen!

Girls Talk Back! Only for girls that will be going into 11th grade next school year.

Talented and Gifted (TAG) students that will be entering 7th 8th or 9th grade

A careful reading of the blog posts on this page and on the pages of many of our owners will reveal that we, as a group are deeply concerned with the education trends in this country and how, as a culture, we seem determined to teach the creativity, individualism, and genius out of our children. This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award who brilliantly touches on these issues. For more information on Sir Ken's work and to learn about his current best selling books, The Element and Out of Our Minds, you can visit his site here.

AMARILLO, Texas (AP) — Most teenage girls today wouldn't go to the trouble of saying "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" It would be more like "Y R U Romeo? READ MORE
http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles/2009/08/05/21stcenturyshakespeare_ap.html?tkn=LVLFUMLGNs87P5dvBsphoTcZGapD8SYik0S1

All-female schools are "models of equivocation," the author, a Smith graduate, writes. They "reinforce regressive notions of sex difference" while at the same time helping women into the professions
by Wendy Kaminer

American women won the opportunity to be educated nearly a hundred years before they won the right to vote, not coincidentally. In the beginning women were educated for the sake of family and society: the new republic needed educated mothers to produce reasonable, responsible male citizens. But although the first all-female academies, founded in the early 1800s, reflected a commitment to traditional gender roles, which reserved the public sphere for men, they reinforced a nascent view of women as potentially reasonable human beings -- endowed with the attributes of citizenship.

Read more »

If you have a student that can't manage their "paper school calendar" or if you are a family with multiple calendars.... you need to visit Google Calendar Tools and consider how effective it will help your family become; saving time and managing time well is one of the most valuable tools you can teach and train your family. Good Luck!
www.creativetutors.com

From http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlecalendar/tour.html

Organize your schedule and share events with friends
Wouldn't it be great to be able to keep track of all the events in your life, coordinate schedules with friends and family, and find new things to do -- all with one online calendar? We thought so, too. Learn More

Seeing the big picture
With Google Calendar, you can see your friends' and family's schedules right next to your own; quickly add events mentioned in Gmail conversations or saved in other calendar applications; and add other interesting events that you find online.

Sharing events and calendars
You decide who can see your calendar and which details they can view. Planning an event? You can create invitations, send reminders and keep track of RSVPs right inside Google Calendar. Organizations can promote events, too.

Staying on schedule
You can set up automatic event reminders, including mobile phone notifications, and instantly bring up anything on your calendar with the built-in search tool.

Author: Lori Stewart
Categories: Middle School, Math

Great estimators are made, not born. The most practice your child gets with making estimations about the world around her, the better she'll be when it comes time to keep her math calculations in the right ballpark. Here's an activity to make your child an estimation master.

Enrico Fermi was a twentieth-century, Nobel Prize winning Physicist known for his ability to rapidly estimate calculations in his head. “Fermi Questions” emphasize determining an answer on the correct order of magnitude instead of a specific number. The goal of answering a “Fermi Question” is to make rough, educated estimates at each step of the problem and come up with a reasonable estimate to the problem. For example:

1. Fermi Question – How many pet cats are there in the U.S.?
2. Fermi Solution – There are about 300 million U.S. citizens. Most households have more than one person, let’s estimate 3 people/house or 100 million households in the U.S. I would guess 1 in 4 house holds have cats so about 25 million households have cats. Typically people have more than one cat, let’s say 2, so there are about 25 million x 2 or 50 million pet cats in the U.S.
3. Explanation – Of course you may have chosen different numbers, but in the end the answer should be on the same order of magnitude (5,000 would be too low and 5 billion would be too high!).

What You Do:

READ MORE http://www.education.com/activity/article/Fermi_middle/