On "Dear Kaia" & Comments4Kids

Meet Kaia: she's a three year-old from Qatar. You can read her blog here.

Photo courtesy Kaia's blog.

This is a remarkable story about how innovative teaching and global connectivity can interact and inspire students. By not only encouraging Kaia's direct interaction and engagement with her environment, but also giving her tools with which she could reflect upon and share her experience, Kaia's "lesson" was cognitively engaging, structurally nuanced, and emotionally compelling.

But equally remarkable is the reinforcement Kaia's readers can provide, practically immediately after she creates and shares her work. I can't imagine how exciting it must be for an eager young learner to get such positive feedback from a global audience. Frequent positive reinforcement is a hallmark of great education, and vital to the inspiration and encouragement of proactive, self-motivated learners. Consider Kaia's likely future, growing up in a world where education too often fails to engage bright students, in the context of her examination of the desert's beauty: not bereft of promise, but bright, vast, wide open, and full of riches to be unearthed.