[Middle Grade Novels in Australasia / Oceania]

My eleven year old son studied Boy Overboard by Morris Gleitzman last year in fifth grade in an Australian public school.  Contemporary, refugees - he enjoyed it.

I second Playing Beatie Bow - time travel and lots of details of life in colonial Sydney.  I loved this as a 12 year old.

The Silver Brumby books are also wonderful if you like horses, as someone else said.

[Zaccaro Challenge math + blood pressure formula]

Years ago they used to say 100 plus your age was the upper limit of acceptable blood pressure (I am an Australian GP, trained in the 90s). But it must have been back in the 1970s or early 1980s as when I trained the older lecturers would say this as an anecdote of outdated ideas.

[Research-based homeschool methods]

Hi all, 

Longterm lurker, first time poster, as a guest.

I thought I would post in this thread because I am completely fascinated with educational research, so have made it a hobby since my nine year old was a toddler.  And I thought I would pay back all I have learned from these forums, over many years, as an afterschooling parent now teaching my son Latin and Shakespeare and Grammar.  Thank you.

Also from Australia and am eclectic in my reading so I follow a lot of UK and Aussie teachers and research as well as US.

Relevant books/resources I love:

1.  Why Students Don’t Like School, by Daniel Willingham - he is a University of Virginia cognitive psychologist who writes about the research into how people learn.  He and this book is quoted by dozens and dozens of teachers  I follow as the single most important book that helped them start to engage in brain science.  “Memory is the residue of thought” is one famous quote from him, but he is brilliant and passionate and lovely.  A new edition is coming out soon!!!!

2.  Why Knowledge Matters by ED Hirsch, or The Knowledge Gap, by Natalie Wexler - Wexler’s is more chatty and anecdotal, but links to research about how important background knowledge is.

3.  The Learning Scientists website- goes through the importance of Retrieval Practice (the Testing Effect renamed), Spaced Practice, Interleaving, Concrete Examples, Elaboration and Dual Coding.  This is based on a lot of work by Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, among others, who really have experimented deeply in the area of how we remember what we remember, and how to make it stick.

4.  Honourable mentions to Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction - a little booklet about this paper was a UK Amazon best seller briefly, but the original paper is available for free on the Internet.  Links to lots of relevant research.

Cognitive Load Theory - “the single most important idea teachers should know about” according to Dylan William’s tweet from a few years ago, which reverberated around the UK educators I follow.  Greg Ashman writes a lot about it, if you want to visit his blog.

Then this seminal paper is so fabulous.  Really, it is fabulous.  

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1?needAccess=true&utm_medium=email&utm_source=other&utm_campaign=opencourse.GdeNrll1EeSROyIACtiVvg.announcements~opencourse.GdeNrll1EeSROyIACtiVvg.QMY7AC14QLCC5F41KfL_6g