Playing Golf with Friends
Three men were playing golf. The course was a wicked dogleg with a large water hazard.

The first man stepped up to the tee and hit a sharp slice into the water hazard. He walked up to the water; it parted and he lofted his ball within one foot of the hole.

The next man steped up and hit the ball. Sure enough, he sliced it so that it landed on top of the water. He walked across the surface of the water and and hit the ball within six inches of the hole.The third man stepped up, hit the ball, and sliced it. The ball was just about to land in the water when a trout jumped out of the water and grabbed it in his mouth. An eagle swooped down, scooped up the fish, and flew off. As the eagle banked over the green, lightning struck it, it dropped the fish, the fish dropped the ball, and it landed in the hole for a hole in one.

Moses turned to Jesus and said, “I really hate playing golf with your Dad.”

We had such a nice day on Friday. It was effort-full and effort-less all at the same time. It was fine arts day, so we used the day for teachers with special interests to teach skills pertaining to holiday crafts and activities. Of course it was raining all day – a treat I could enjoy every day. I love rain, and find it delightful.

Mrs. St. Louis made actual hand and feet pumpkins, tracing hands and feet for the art work.

Miss Judy pulled out the sweet dough, and the kids made cranberry fritters for their snack. Tastes like donuts.

Miss Kelly sang with the kids and taught them some darling songs – better than I could do – and then sat down with some gumball wreaths she had painstakingly hot glued together to make candy corn decorations with the kids.

Miss Jana’s pumpkins were a huge success on Thursday. Each child has planted a pumpkin seed to watch sprout. And Miss Jana carved a GS in one of them.

Today we all got together and took a CPR class. Ryan at Knight Township did the training. He’s a really really nice guy.

Because of the new 1-5 star rating designated to early childhood places, I’m working to make our place a 4 star place. I am not interested in an accreditation from the National Association for the Education of Young Children, which would make it a five star place. I have read enough of their stuff and find it too young for what we do. So we are going for a four star.

We have an OUTSTANDING staff, one I could not be prouder of. Never have we had a more loving group of teachers.

As part of my work – food – I am determined to create more kiddie foods that the children just love. I want them to say “Oh yeah!” when I tell them what we are having for any meal. I have found three new meals for this week: Applesauce cookies for snack, a fall snausage and potato thing for lunch and something called muffin meat again for lunch. I’ll keep you all posted on the new likes and dislikes.

The picture is of the cranberry bogs.

Where is God?

A couple had two little boys who were always getting into trouble. Their parents knew that if any mischief occurred in their village, their sons were probably involved.

The boys’ mother heard that an elder in town had been successful in disciplining children, so she asked if he would speak with her sons. The elder agreed, but asked to see them separately.
So, the mother sent her youngest son first, in the morning. The elder, a huge man with a booming voice, sat the boy down and asked him sternly, “Where is God?” The boy’s mouth dropped open, but he made no response.So the elder repeated the question in an even sterner tone, “Where is God!!?” Again the wide-eyed boy made no attempt to answer.

The elder raised his voice and bellowed, “WHERE IS GOD!?” The boy screamed and bolted from the room, ran directly home and dove into a closet, slamming the door behind him.

When his older brother found him hiding, he asked, “What happened?”

The younger brother, gasping for breath, replied, “We are in BIG trouble this time. God is missing, and they think WE did it!”

A child goes after another with a pair of scissors. One child repeatedly slaps another. Another child doubles up his fist and threatens a teacher’s life. The question is, why do some children respond to life like that, while others respond with affection, love, smiles and hugs? Why do some children like bean soup and pumpkin pie, while others like pop tarts and pop tarts?

Anger is a passion. It is neither a positive nor a negative passion because passions are neither negative nor positive. It is simply a passion which either leads us to vice or virtue. The interesting thing about anger is there is no antitesis like the other ten passions like love and hate, and pleasure and pain.

What to do about anger is not much at all unless the anger is “inordinate” which means “out of control.” Anger that is out of control seeks vice; it seeks to do harm and that is the control issue we are primarily concerned with.

Anger is simply anger until it does harm. If Adolf Hitler spent his life angry who would have cared? Big deal, so he’s angry, but he not only spent his life “honked off,” he spent his life acting on his anger and as a result killed or had 15 million people gassed, starved and beaten to death.

With a child, the idea is to remove the child from doing harm to himself and to others, but not only does the child have to cooperate, he has to want to cooperate. Dragging a child off to a place of safety when a child is angry means anything and everything in his path will take abuse and the level of work to get him there will be completely bogus if he won’t stay.

So the idea is to get the jump on the child and have him agree to go to a place of safety with a reward attached to his keeping ordinant about his anger.

Anger is one child glitch. There are lots of glitches to rearing children like the kid who can’t keep marbles out of her mouth. That’s about the boy who cried wolf. I’m glad the ambulance is only four minutes away. Childcare – it’s a challenge!

Anyway, here’s an article about anger:

Helping Young Children
Deal with Anger

Children’s anger presents challenges to teachers committed to constructive, ethical, and effective child guidance. This Digest explores what we know about the components of children’s anger, factors contributing to understanding and managing anger, and the ways teachers can guide children’s expressions of anger.

Three Components of Anger

Anger is believed to have three components (Lewis & Michalson, 1983):

The Emotional State of Anger. The first component is the emotion itself, defined as an affective or arousal state, or a feeling experienced when a goal is blocked or needs are frustrated. Fabes and Eisenberg (1992) describe several types of stress-producing anger provocations that young children face daily in classroom interactions:

• Conflict over possessions, which involves someone taking children’s property or invading their space.
• Physical assault, which involves one child doing something to another child, such as pushing or hitting.
• Verbal conflict, for example, a tease or a taunt.
• Rejection, which involves a child being ignored or not allowed to play with peers.
• Issues of compliance, which often involve asking or insisting that children do something that they do not want to do–for instance, wash their hands.

Expression of Anger. The second component of anger is its expression. Some children vent or express anger through facial expressions, crying, sulking, or talking, but do little to try to solve a problem or confront the provocateur. Others actively resist by physically or verbally defending their positions, self-esteem, or possessions in nonaggressive ways. Still other children express anger with aggressive revenge by physically or verbally retaliating against the provocateur. Some children express dislike by telling the offender that he or she cannot play or is not liked. Other children express anger through avoidance or attempts to escape from or evade the provocateur. And some children use adult seeking, looking for comfort or solutions from a teacher, or telling the teacher about an incident.

Teachers can use child guidance strategies to help children express angry feelings in socially constructive ways. Children develop ideas about how to express emotions (Michalson & Lewis, 1985; Russel, 1989) primarily through social interaction in their families and later by watching television or movies, playing video games, and reading books (Honig & Wittmer, 1992). Some children have learned a negative, aggressive approach to expressing anger (Cummings, 1987; Hennessy et al., 1994) and, when confronted with everyday anger conflicts, resort to using aggression in the classroom (Huesmann, 1988). A major challenge for early childhood teachers is to encourage children to acknowledge angry feelings and to help them learn to express anger in positive and effective ways.

An Understanding of Anger. The third component of the anger experience is understanding–interpreting and evaluating–the emotion. Because the ability to regulate the expression of anger is linked to an understanding of the emotion (Zeman & Shipman, 1996), and because children’s ability to reflect on their anger is somewhat limited, children need guidance from teachers and parents in understanding and managing their feelings of anger.

Understanding and Managing Anger

The development of basic cognitive processes undergirds children’s gradual development of the understanding of anger (Lewis & Saarni, 1985).

Memory. Memory improves substantially during early childhood (Perlmutter, 1986), enabling young children to better remember aspects of anger-arousing interactions. Children who have developed unhelpful ideas of how to express anger (Miller & Sperry, 1987) may retrieve the early unhelpful strategy even after teachers help them gain a more helpful perspective. This finding implies that teachers may have to remind some children, sometimes more than once or twice, about the less aggressive ways of expressing anger.

Language. Talking about emotions helps young children understand their feelings (Brown & Dunn, 1996). The understanding of emotion in preschool children is predicted by overall language ability (Denham, Zoller, & Couchoud, 1994). Teachers can expect individual differences in the ability to identify and label angry feelings because children’s families model a variety of approaches in talking about emotions.

Self-Referential and Self-Regulatory Behaviors.Self-referential behaviors include viewing the self as separate from others and as an active, independent, causal agent. Self-regulation refers to controlling impulses, tolerating frustration, and postponing immediate gratification. Initial self-regulation in young children provides a base for early childhood teachers who can develop strategies to nurture children’s emerging ability to regulate the expression of anger.

Guiding Children’s Expressions of Anger

Teachers can help children deal with anger by guiding their understanding and management of this emotion. The practices described here can help children understand and manage angry feelings in a direct and nonaggressive way.

Create a Safe Emotional Climate. A healthy early childhood setting permits children to acknowledge all feelings, pleasant and unpleasant, and does not shame anger. Healthy classroom systems have clear, firm, and flexible boundaries.

Model Responsible Anger Management. Children have an impaired ability to understand emotion when adults show a lot of anger (Denham, Zoller, & Couchoud, 1994). Adults who are most effective in helping children manage anger model responsible management by acknowledging, accepting, and taking responsibility for their own angry feelings and by expressing anger in direct and nonaggressive ways.

Help Children Develop Self-Regulatory Skills. Teachers of infants and toddlers do a lot of self-regulation “work,” realizing that the children in their care have a very limited ability to regulate their own emotions. As children get older, adults can gradually transfer control of the self to children, so that they can develop self-regulatory skills.

Encourage Children to Label Feelings of Anger. Teachers and parents can help young children produce a label for their anger by teaching them that they are having a feeling and that they can use a word to describe their angry feeling. A permanent record (a book or chart) can be made of lists of labels for anger (e.g., mad, irritated, annoyed), and the class can refer to it when discussing angry feelings.

Encourage Children to Talk About Anger-Arousing Interactions. Preschool children better understand anger and other emotions when adults explain emotions (Denham, Zoller, &Couchoud, 1994). When children are embroiled in an anger-arousing interaction, teachers can help by listening without judging,evaluating, or ordering them to feel differently.

Use Books and Stories about Anger to Help Children Understand and Manage Anger. Well-presented stories about anger and other emotions validate children’s feelings and give information about anger (Jalongo, 1986; Marion, 1995). It is important to preview all books about anger because some stories teach irresponsible anger management.

Communicate with Parents. Some of the same strategies employed to talk with parents about other areas of the curriculum can be used to enlist their assistance in helping children learn to express emotions. For example, articles about learning to use words to label anger can be included in a newsletter to parents.

Children guided toward responsible anger management are more likely to understand and manage angry feelings directly and non aggressively and to avoid the stress often accompanying poor anger management (Eisenberg et al., 1991). Teachers can take some of the bumps out of understanding and managing anger by adopting positive guidance strategies.

We will have a party on Tuesday at 3:00. Parents and grandparents are welcome anytime that day. Refreshments are served about 3:00. Costumes should be easily removed for bathroom ease. Please leave masks at home. Swords and other weapons can be worn to the party, but may not be worn all day at school for obvious reasons. If you costume is heavy or uncomfortable (I remember a costume my dad made for me that made me balance a pumpkin on my head) please send along street clothes – that’s old fashioned for regular clothes.

Please send a snack to share – The last party was ideal.

More to go home today.

The fund raiser has been an enormous success! Miss Molly is thrilled! Thank you so much.

We’ve started something new and exciting. We have always used a discipline system – lately it’s Kelly’s system of blue and green faces for breaking rules. Now we’ve enhanced it with little signs of congratulatory remarks and it has been our pleasure to reward the children for good deeds, bright comments, good work and illustrious living. Please check your child’s envelope in Community or circle time. We are keeping score on this, and it will be tabulated for report cards. Kelly is so creative.

Last week with the food inspection, it was very stressful. We always want to do everything perfectly and exceptionally well. We passed with some suggestions but also with flying colors for our meal. Our tribute to safety is our ability to get lunch made in a clean environment and put it on the table before what they call the “danger zone” even begins. What we serve is of course another matter.

We have begun using homemade bread as often as we can. I love baking, and the kids love eating. We tried multiple bean chili this week, and it was received nicely. Some kids loved it. Hadley had two bowls.

Today is egg and cheese day. If I can remember, I’d like to make an egg pizza, but we will probably make do with grilled cheese. All things can be new under the sun with a little nerve and some invention and a smile.

The kids have made the weather transition exceptionally well. Triston has made a huge jump in maturity and we congratulate him – perhaps a party.

A note about Halloween will be coming home today.

Today is the final day to turn in fundraiser orders; however, if you need a few more days, I will be totaling them up and turning them in on Wednesday. As always, you have done a fantastic job!

We have a young mother with a bundle of joy on the way. She needs some help clothing this little guy. If you would like to donate baby boy clothes, used or new, bring them in and leave them in the office. Keep in mind that it’s getting cold outside! The clothes that we collected for the N.I.C.U. are going to be delivered this weekend. They are hosting an annual N.I.C.U graduation at the new children’s museum for all of their babies!

This year for our Christmas project, we have been asked to donate new items to the Albion Fellows Bacon Center for battered women and children. Every class will be responsible for collecting items for their children. I will get a list together in the upcoming weeks.

We still need immunization records for several children. If you received a yellow note last week, please get those in A.S.A.P.

BabyFit Success Story – USMC_Mommy

This Marine Delivered Twins While Stationed in Japan
— By Kathleen, BabyFit member stationed in Okinawa, Japan

With my twin girls (now three months old!) sleeping peacefully in their cribs, I prepared the bottles for daycare, and let my mind wander…

I thought back to when I first joined BabyFit, concened about staying fit and healthy during my first (and totally unplanned) pregnancy. As a 23-year-old single Marine stationed in Japan, I knew I would have to be strong, both physically and mentally. I didn’t know what the father would do, I didn’t know what to expect with twins, and I didn’t have support from my family. I was totally alone and confused.

Then I got involved with BabyFit’s “March Moms” as actively as I could. I got to know some of the women who were involved in similar situations. It was really helpful to know that I wasn’t the only one, and that I wasn’t alone.

I loved carrying twins, but the process of giving birth terrified me! At 7 months (being very, very pregnant), I finally moved out of the barracks and into a small apartment in town. It is very nice and cozy. By this time, my relationship with Olly, the father, had blossomed into a very loving and close friendship, and in November he asked me to marry him (I said yes of course)! When my mother came to stay, now warmed up to the idea of having grandchildren, the three of us waited for the girls to arrive.

After a few bouts of false labor and dilation of less than a centimeter, I was scheduled for a c-section at 38 weeks. I was frantic! I stayed awake crying for a couple of nights. I was afraid of the surgery, recovery, and of losing closeness with Olly. I experienced horrible dreams of things going wrong, children dying, ME dying! At the last minute the surgery was pushed back and I had to wait for 2 more agonizing days!

Wait I did, and on the morning of the 9th, 1020 they called me and said to come in and have my babies. It is the oddest feeling to be called in to have your babies, after preparing for a breaking water and labor pains. The shots for my spinal block were terribly painful. I cried—I didn’t want the babies to come out. Why did it have to hurt…?

The medication kicked in and it felt like sinking into a warm bath. They let Olly in and I felt better. I heard ” I’ve got feet!” After a few tugs, Tianna arrived, screaming and kicking. McKenzie followed shortly, just as noisily. Olly took tons of pictures and it was so wonderful.

Now that it is over, I am so in love my daughters. It will be some time before I have the courage to do it again, but I will someday. Olly wants a son—but just one.

Sharing at the Sand Table 101
Do you need a college degree to teach preschool?

By Emily Bazelon

In the current issue of the Atlantic, Clive Crook argues against the encroachment of the college degree as a job-entry requirement. “Failing to go to college did not always mark people out as rejects, unfit for any kind of well-paid employment,” he points out, and comes up with a list of occupations in which employers now look for degrees for no good reason. His list includes preschool teachers. My mind flashed to the unfailing smile and wraparound hugs of one of my son’s past teachers. Crook is right: She didn’t learn that in college.

So, do you need a degree to teach preschool? Study after study shows that 3- and 4-year-olds are better served by more-educated teachers in myriad ways. As you might expect, these teachers tend to offer superior curricula and formal teaching. But they’re also, on average, “more stimulating, warm, and supportive” and “provide more age-appropriate experiences.”

That finding is from a 2004 overview of the relevant research by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and it represents the consensus view. The experts disagree over how much college coursework preschool teachers should have—a two-year associate degree vs. a four-year baccalaureate. The more vexing question is how to take what is now an underpaid, low-skilled workforce and magically restock it with college-educated professionals.

The current preschool market rarely rewards teachers for getting additional credentials.

Salaries are as low as $16,000 a year and rarely more than $26,000. One teacher pointed out to me that you can make that much money parking cars, which helps explains why the field often doesn’t attract the most qualified people. Traditionally, if you were 18, didn’t have a communicable disease, and loved kids or could fake it, you were hired. Preschool teachers still sometimes have to put up with being thought of as glorified babysitters (the retort of choice at one of my sons’ former schools is that no one ever sits on babies there).

But this attitude may begin to change. States are putting more emphasis on “school readiness” programs designed to prepare children (especially low-income children) for kindergarten. With state involvement comes degree requirements for teachers—the lawmakers and regulators see them as a proxy for quality. Given the low wages paid to teachers, states that move in this direction have a choice. They can pay to send teachers to school now by footing their college bills and hiking their pay after graduation. Or they can gradually phase in higher-education requirements in hopes that teachers will take on the training expense themselves.

New Jersey is an example of the first approach. In 31 school districts with 48,000 preschoolers, the state employs more than 2,600 teachers at public-school-scale salaries. Ninety-two percent of the teachers had a bachelor’s degree in 2004. This was four years after a court ruling established this as a requirement for the 31 districts, which serve the bulk of the state’s poor children. The state didn’t track the money it spent on sending the teachers to college, according to Ellen Frede, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. But the starting state salary for a preschool teacher increased from an average of $18,000 to $40,000. It’s too soon to know what the long-term effects for kids will be, but Frede thinks New Jersey’s degree requirements are entirely necessary if preschool is to be truly educational.

Connecticut, by contrast, is taking the slower route. The state now requires 12 college credits (three courses) in child development for head teachers in state-funded programs; the bar will move up to a bachelor’s degree in 2015, according to Carla Horwitz, director of the Calvin Hill Day Care Center in New Haven, Conn. Head Start, the preschool program for poor kids founded in the 1960s, has opted for the gradual approach, too: It recently began requiring that half its head teachers have two-year degrees and has debated raising the requirement to a four-year degree.

It’s one thing to tell child-care centers to hire teachers with more education; it’s another to make sure people with those credentials are lining up for the job. The best bet for higher salaries is probably to fold preschool into the existing public-education system, as New Jersey has done. That has a potential downside—lots of bureaucracy, standardization, and the other problems that beset public schools.

If your child has gone to a preschool where the majority of teachers have gone to college, though, it’s hard to overlook the benefits. My son Eli attended Calvin Hill for two years and loved it. Almost all his teachers had gone to college; when Christo and Jeanne-Claude did The Gates in Central Park, Eli’s class made their own collective (and smaller) version. Still, a few teachers who were the exceptions to the college norm could light up a classroom—three years later, an assistant who was not long out of high school is the teacher Eli most often asks after.

Horwitz, the day-care director, worries about squeezing out this kind of talent. Doing so could hurt the kids as well as those teachers. “Some of the people who go into child-care tend not to be great at school, the reading and the writing,” Horwitz says. Which is OK, because it’s possible to thrive in the field without those skills. But it shouldn’t be the rule, in light of the research about the benefits of educated teachers for kids. The National Association for the Education of Young Children, an accrediting organization for preschools, recommends a two-year associate program that includes learning about child development, observing and assessing kids, dealing with parents, and teaching a preschool curriculum. That seems like a pretty sound list.

Some child-care centers compromise by requiring degrees of head teachers but not of their assistants. This makes sense—except when it’s the assistant who really knows how to soothe the kids and make the day run smoothly, and who will face an institutional barrier for promotion and better pay. The hard-nosed response to this injustice is, essentially, tough. Or maybe, follow New Jersey’s lead and send those valuable undertrained teachers back to school. W. Steven Barnett, a professor of education economics at Rutgers and author of a recent article on preschool and social mobility for the Brookings Institution, argues that college-educated teachers are particularly important for disadvantaged kids, who often can’t rely on their parents for the broad exposure that college-educated adults can offer. He also thinks that babies and toddlers would also probably be better off with college-educated caregivers. There’s little research on 1- to 2-year-olds to back this up. But if going to college correlates with greater warmth, you’d want it for the little guys, too.

How to possibly pay for all of this? Sending preschool teachers back to school is relatively cheap, Barnett says. It’s raising their salaries afterward that drains budgets. But then you look at the benefits associated with excellent preschool—higher reading and math skills throughout school, better high-school graduation rates, and richer lifetime earnings—and it sounds like a good front-end investment. The states are already spending more on their youngest students.

Perhaps their youngest teachers (or the older ones willing to head back to college) deserve the same treatment.

Comment: The difference between college educated teachers and those who are not is a matter of confidence. It’s also a matter of what’s important. A combination of college educated teachers and those who are not make a place great for kids because there is a combination of ideas, affections and most of all points of view.

Side Effects of Ritalin Greater in Preschool
By Denise Gellene
LA Times Staff Writer

October 17, 2006

The first systematic study of using Ritalin to treat preschool children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has found that the drug reduced their symptoms but caused greater side effects than usually seen in older children, researchers said Monday.

The findings mean “very small children may benefit but they should be closely monitored,” said Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which paid for the $18-million study.Among the side effects, researchers said the drug appeared to slow children’s growth rates. They grew about a half-inch less in height and weighed 3 pounds less than expected, based on estimates of their growth.

Stephen Hinshaw, chair of the psychology department at UC Berkeley who was not involved in the study, said the findings showed that the drug should be given only to children ages 3 to 5 with more severe symptoms — and only if they can be regularly seen by their doctors.

Ritalin, also called methylphenidate, is approved as a treatment for ADHD only in children age 6 and older.

The research was initiated in response to the outcry that ensued after the Journal of the American Medical Assn. reported in 2000 that as many as 200,000 preschoolers were on Ritalin, an unapproved, or “off-label,” use of the drug. At the time, then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed concern about widespread use of the drug and called for more research.

The research, published in the November issue of the Journal of the Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, was conducted at six academic centers in the U.S. over the course of 70 weeks. It looked at 183 children with moderate to severe ADHD.”You have children who are very aggressive and doing things that are unsafe, like running into the middle of the road or jumping off high pieces of playground equipment,” said Dr. James McGough of UCLA, one of the study authors. “These are kids who, if they did not get treatment, would get kicked out of preschool.

“Before being assigned to receive Ritalin, children and their parents received 10 weeks of behavioral therapy.

The children were then assigned to receive up to 22.5 milligrams daily of Ritalin. Daily doses for older children range from 15 to 50 milligrams daily.

Side effects, including insomnia, weight loss and decreased appetite, caused 21 children, or 11%, to drop out of the study. One child had a seizure that was thought to be related to the medication.

Children who completed the study had improved symptoms according to assessments by their parents and preschool teachers. But about a third of parents reported moderate to severe side effects throughout the study, including emotional outbursts and irritability.

Researchers will follow the children for five years to see if their growth catches up as they get older.

Comment: Perhaps the problem with high energy children is low energy parents.