Good Morning! It’s going to be another beautiful day. In fact it’s going to be a really beautiful week! Please remember to dress children in shorts and sleeved t-shirts – no long clothes yet. Morning is not the only part of the day, and kids get hot in the afternoon when they are dressed for only a couple of hours of morning. Doesn’t make sense!

Classes have been finalized and your child has been assigned to a group of learners. We group by ability not by age. We have many fine learners this year. There were lots of surprises in this year’s group. Many of our children are very very bright.

Last week the children were very tired from all that we do. If your child is accustomed to taking a nap, you might want to add that nap time to his bedtime routine. Children should be in bed and drifting off to sleep by 8:00. Children who linger up with parents until 9:00 or 10:00 have the most trouble with behavior. Our program is a busy and active program that demands rest at night.

Please remember your child’s baby picture for the beautiful baby contest.

Please read the notes going home and please read the handbook to avoid confusion about regular and ordinary things!

Have a great day!

Last week I found myself in a conversation about Walmart versus Schnucks cost. I mentioned that my groceries are usually lower than most people because I shop for scratch only groceries. Very little of what I buy is pre-made. As I looked at my groceries on the check out today for both my family and the school, I looked at what is pre-made and found: whole grain noodles, corn chips (Terry is addicted to corn chips) tomato sauce, and applesauce. Of these things, I can’t make one – corn chips. I bought $150.00 at the store today, and everything was food. $50.00 was mine, and $100.00 was the school’s.

I bought meat, vegetables, fruit, and cheese – enough to feed forty children breakfast, lunch, and snack for five days. Tomorrow, Terry will pick up another $150.00 at Aldi’s and Sams. It will include paper products and soap.

I bought two beautiful chuck roasts @ five pounds. I got three pounds of ground chuck, cottage cheese, and two other cheeses for the lasagna we will have tomorrow. I got three pounds of chicken breasts on sale for chicken pot pie on Thursday. We will have two meatless days – Wednesday we will have tuna casserole with our famous cheese sauce, and on Friday we will have homemade pizza.

We will have homemade muffins tomorrow, whole grain cereal on Tuesday, whole grain waffles on Wednesday, sticky buns on Thursday, and whole grain pancakes on Friday.

Snacks will be whole grain, home baked, all week with an exception on Tuesday. It’s a grab bag day.

We serve three fruits and vegetables at every lunch and aside from the applesauce, the fruit and vegetables we serve are fresh.

If I bought this pre-made, the cost would be prohibitive. If I had to spend breakfast money on Eggo Waffles, it would cost me $16.00 just for the waffles. If I had to spend money on syrup, add another $5.00. As it is my waffles cost about $2.00 to make for forty children. And I use whole grains so they are actually beneficial to the children rather than detrimental like Eggos.

When you consider the cost of bread products, a school could literally go broke trying to supply bread products three times a day, and it’s the same at home. When I shop, I shop for the very best meat and vegetables a store has to offer, and I come away with the lowest tab because I’m willing to make the bread products from scratch.

Many women will say they don’t have time to do this, but the truth is it doesn’t take any longer to make most foods from scratch. The key is setting up your kitchen so that your flour and your sugar are not rubber banned in the ziplock at the back of your cabinet.

Kitchens are a utility room, not a “House Beautiful never do we touch affair. “I once had a friend with white carpeting in her kitchen. She, of course, never cooked. When I look at some of the kitchens at Lowes, I wonder how it would be to cook on furniture. My kitchen at home was built in 1830 and my “cabinets” consist of a hutch made probably 1860, and an oak sideboy from 1890, and a kindergarten cabinet from 1920. I have a sink and two “Johnny on the spot make me there” cabinets that hold nothing and about 2.5 square feet of landing space on either side of the sink. Yet in this small kitchen with its brick floor, I can prepare anything for as many as fifty people simply because I’ve set it up so that I can grab anything I need in one second. Setting up a working kitchen means having equipment out and ready to use. If your mixer is shoved in the back of the closet behind the old dog dishes, you are not likely to pull it out to use. If your food processor is on the top shelf and you have to get a chair to get it down, and then figure out how to put it together, you are unlikely to use that either.

Food that is used often needs to be out of the original container and put in a container you can grab in a second. Flour and sugar need to be housed in containers that grace your kitchen.

Lots of women complain about the mess in the kitchen after cooking. The trick to this is the first step. Run a sink of hot soapy water and wash as you go. Clean everything up and put it away as fast as you got it out. When I finish baking, the kitchen is as clean as it was before I even started, and that’s the key to keeping it going. If your product is wonderful, and it took you no time to do, and your kitchen remains clean, you are much more likely to do it again.

The cost will be much less, the product much healthier, and your bill will come a tumbling down.
Next time we’ll talk about making quickie foods that taste great.

It’s been one heck of a week and weekend. We finished the week with a nice story about the War of the Angels. The kids were very impressed with the creation Bible Story, and settled nicely into creating a world of their own with clay. They played outside, and we sent part of a poem home for the children to begin to learn. It’s by A.A. Milne and part of the original Christopher Robin books. I have a set my first boy friend gave me in 1956 when he left for England.

The pizza was a big hit with the kids Friday afternoon and we had all kinds of fruit and left over veggies to go with. We make white pizza with salad dressing because the red pizza hypes the kids up. If you are going to hype up a child, might as well dig out the chocolate – chocolate hype is cute and red sauce is a mean hype – no kidding.

On Saturday, we met to put in the fence and we hit a gas line first try. Now why the gas line was absent one minute and there the next beats me. But after the fire trucks came, and Vectren finally decided to arrive forty five minutes later, we were fixed and ready to abandon ship. They will come out and mark next week and we will try again.

We have kittens from the barn visiting us these days. They are gray and orange. Mom is a brindle and dad is a charming black and white. We are feeding them tuna, cottage cheese, dry cat food and baked chicken ;-}

Comment: My son is the project manager of this site. It was his work and his crew that brought this cancer treatment plant to treating patients nine months early.

August 27, 2009

IBA AND PROCURE SET NEW WORLD RECORD IN PROTON THERAPY, OPENING THE OKLAHOMA CENTER NINE MONTHS AHEAD OF STANDARD SCHEDULE

Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, August 27, 2009 – IBA (Ion Beam Applications S.A.) and ProCure
Treatment Centers, Inc., (ProCure) announced today that the ProCure Proton Therapy Center in Oklahoma City, U.S.A., delivered proton radiation treatment to its first patient using IBA’s Proteus 235 proton delivery system. It took only 27 months to build the facility, install the equipment and treat the first patient, setting a world record by nine months. Patients from Oklahoma, across the country and around the world can now benefit from this technology.
Before the Oklahoma center, at least three years were needed to build a proton therapy center.

IBA and ProCure worked closely and very effectively together to reduce the development time for the four room center, which will treat about 1,500 patients a year.

“This achievement represents a new and substantial milestone for the proton therapy community. The team we have put together with ProCure is proud of this record achievement and making this technology available to patients in the Oklahoma region,” said Pierre Mottet, Chief Executive Officer of IBA. “IBA has demonstrated its leadership in the development of proton centers and its ability to equip simultaneously multiple large facilities around the world.”

“We value our relationship with IBA and can count on them to be responsive, innovative and devoted to quality,” said Hadley Ford, Chief Executive Officer of ProCure. “Getting the center built quickly is important because so many patients are waiting for this therapy, but our overriding focus has been on excellence. The result is a center that is exceptional.”

Oklahoma City is the first installation with Inclined Beam technology, which was developed by ProCure and IBA as an alternative to a gantry. The inclined beam can treat approximately 80% of the tumors treated with a gantry at only about 50% of the cost. Moreover, the treatment room requires much less space than a gantry.

With this center now open in Oklahoma, seven proton therapy centers equipped by IBA are treating patients every day in Asia and the U.S. IBA is also involved with the simultaneous construction and installation of seven additional proton therapy centers. Six of the centers are on-site installations: three are in the U.S. and three are in Europe.

Proton therapy is an advanced alternative to X-ray radiation therapy for certain types of cancerous and non-cancerous tumors. Proton therapy has superior dose distribution, depositing the majority of its energy within a precisely controlled range, directly within the tumor, sparing healthy tissues. Higher doses can be delivered to the tumor without increasing the risk of side effects and long-term complications, improving outcomes and quality of life for patients. Proton therapy has limited availability around the world, but now that patients are being treated at the ProCure Proton Therapy Center in Oklahoma, more patients can benefit from this effective treatment.

ABOUT IBA
Founded in 1986 in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, IBA is primarily active in the medical industry. It develops and markets state-of-the-art equipment and radiopharmaceuticals for cancer diagnosis and treatment. In addition, it uses the scientific expertise thus gained to provide electron accelerators for industrial sterilization and ionization. Listed on the pan-European stock exchange Euronext, IBA is included in the BEL Mid Index (IBA: Reuters IBAB.BR and Bloomberg IBAB.BB).

Website: http://www.iba-worldwide.com
Contact
IBA
Thomas Ralet
VP Corporate Communication
Telephone: +32 10.20.12.48
thomas.tralet@iba-group.com

ABOUT PROCURE
ProCure Treatment Centers, Inc., based in Bloomington, Ind., was founded in 2005 to improve the lives of patients with cancer by increasing access to proton therapy. ProCure collaborates with leading radiation oncology practices and hospitals and provides management leadership and a comprehensive approach for the design, construction, financing, staffing, training and day-to-day operations of world-class proton therapy centers. ProCure’s solution reduces the time, cost and effort necessary to create a facility. ProCure is the only company in the world with a center open and treating patients, another under construction and three others in development. ProCure’s Training and Development Center is the first facility in the world dedicated exclusively to proton therapy. For more information, visit www.procure.com.
Contact
ProCure
Andrea Johnson
Telephone 312-558-1770
ajohnson@pcipr.com

From Teacher Magazine

Here is a really nice little article on teaching art and the importance of art.

Published: August 26, 2009

Engaging Students Through Art

WENATCHEE, Wash. (AP) — Lighten up! That’s was art teacher Terry Valdez’ message to a group of teachers who work with children in kindergarten through second-grade.

Teachers used white charcoal pencils to sketch on black paper the highlights of popcorn viewed through a jeweler’s magnifying glass. The exercise was a way of seeing things anew and putting them on paper with more dimension than a flat outline, said Vargas, a local artist and Eastmont High School art teacher.

It’s important that grade school teachers be fluent and knowledgeable about art so they can better engage young students, who are all natural artists, he said. Today’s students, in particular, are very visually oriented and technology connected.

Art, he said, is an important, but often overlooked, tool for communicating with kids in all kinds of teaching. Engaging students through art and creative teaching methods helps make student feel comfortable, he said. Art and music can help create an environment where students are more apt to learn, he added.

Teachers can’t do that, however, unless they are comfortable and confident in their ability to be creative, he said.

“We’re all pretty artsy until we reach about sixth grade and then start having it drummed out of us,” Valdez told the teachers, who came from several North Central Washington school districts for a workshop hosted by the Wenatchee Art Education Consortium.

“Adults are really scared. They’re afraid they’re not good at art. It’s not a question of being good or bad. It’s whether they’re open to art,” Valdez said during a break in the class. “If teachers don’t feel comfortable with art, they’re not going to use it.”

Julia Cantrell, a second-grade teacher at St. Rose of Lima Catholic School in Ephrata, admitted to being a good case in point.

“I’m here to learn how overcome my fear. I’m afraid of art,” she said. As a teacher in a private school, Cantrell said she should have more freedom to come up with original ideas to connect with students and help them be creative. “But I’m not taking advantage of that.”

She had teachers in school who were always very regulated and didn’t allow that artistic side to come out, she said.

“It’s an important part of teaching and I want to make sure I offer more than I was offered. Who knows, the next Picasso might come from my classroom.”

Brooke McPhee, who will teach first grade at Lewis and Clark Elementary School this fall, said the sketching exercises helped her reconnect with something deep inside that is better expressed with pictures rather than words.

“It brings me back the love, the core spirit,” she said. “Art is an important way to engage all kinds of learners.”

_______

Information from: The Wenatchee World, http://www.wenatcheeworld.com

Rice Snack Bars from Kids Lunch Box Cards

Are rice cereal bars healthy? If you believe the big letters on the box, yes. But the small print tells us that Kellogg’s, General Mills, Quaker Oats etc… don’t care if our kids soak up preservatives, fillers and HFCS- a corporate behavior that, frankly, irks me. How about the picture of the product, is anyone fooled by the big words like “high fiber” or “fortified” while looking at a rice cereal bar that is covered in chocolate and rolled in candies? If they were called cereal candy bars, I wouldn’t be so insulted- but they are not. At least Rice Krispies say “treat”- there are so many others that would like us to believe we are making a healthy choice.

If you must buy these bars, give them as candy bars- not as a mid-morning snack in a lunch box!
Here are our winners: Of all the brands we tried (and there were a lot), Enviro Kids Peanut-Choco-Drizzle was by far the favorite with 6 kids and 4 adults- we couldn’t get enough of this one! Second & third place went to Enviro Kids Peanut Butter and Chocolate flavors ( the chocolate tastes just like Koala Crisp cereal that my kids love). Enviro Kids won hands down, and with nothing artificial, low sodium, zero trans fats and gluten free, these bars are real winners that you CAN feel good about giving to your kids when they need a snack or pick-me-up!

Tastefully sponsored by:
Lassen’s Health Foods
Trader Joe’s Markets

I was reminded a couple of days ago just how emotionally hard it is to be the boss. In a rather lengthy discussion with someone I love, I realized just how difficult it is to always have to take that step away from popular opinion and do what needs to be done no matter what for the sake of the children in my care. Because of it, I am never the good guy. So once in a while I take a big step back and ask myself what am I doing? Catholics call it examining the conscience.

When you take the big life step to build a school, you really make a commitment. It can’t be a spare time commitment when all your other cares are satisfied. You don’t put time into the school only after your house is clean, your laundry washed, your own bills paid, your garden in perfect order, your book read, your visitors appeased, your appointments kept, your friends called, your play over, etc. If you did it that way, there wouldn’t be a school.

Building a school is a lifetime of work that takes you away from your own projects and your appointments and your books and visitors and bills and doubles your work and shortens your time to spend on anything, because it’s a commitment. Building a school or anything else takes the kind of selfless devotion few people can muster because self has to be given away every day, all day, in every way.

But creating a school or anything worth while is not about the self; it’s not about personal interests or personal woes. It’s about the students, so the focus leaves the adult and flies to the child, every day, all day.

The hope is that what you have to offer will appeal to the public. If it does, then the school grows. If it grows, then you need to take the next step, and that next step is hiring. Employing people is always a risk. The big questions are: “Will they contribute? Will they bring a positive point of view to the school? Will they really understand the goals and purpose of the school?”

The hope is that new teachers will contribute in positive ways that share the work load, bring new talents to the school, and that they will grow as people right along with the growth of the students in their care. When that happens, it’s golden, and it does happen, but it doesn’t happen all the time simply because people are different in their ability to be fully engaged.

In a small school, the hope is that the faculty will be united, friendly and work well together. Scripture says, “Anticipate one another.” I always thought that meant, “Know someone well enough that you can intervene so that he or she does not stumble and fall if possible.” This is the boss’s job, but it’s a job that often earns contempt rather than affection.

It’s also the boss’s job to balance employee’s abilities. My big questions are: Will someone be able to do the job to completion or will they drop the ball? Many people will be a fire lit on energy for a couple of weeks or months, and then the fire goes out. Trying to identify that kind of person is a hard call. Some people emotionally quit after a time because they find that the limelight has gone from them to the children, and they can’t stand it. Some people can’t muster the energy or the stamina to keep the ball rolling. Some people come to the job with the idea it is one thing, and find quickly, it is something very other. And some people have the strange notion that “anyone can do this,” and they find out quickly, it’s not so.

Is the job too big? Sometimes there is simply too much to prepare for, too much to do, and too much time demanded, and someone can’t spend the hours the job demands. This is a big stress point. If the team member is worth it, the boss must build a schedule that accommodates that team member and every other member of the team. A successful schedule is one that everyone says in a moment of reflection, “I love my schedule.” But that doesn’t last, and a boss needs to be flexible and be able to make changes as necessary.

Are there opportunities for failure? Not everyone is capable of doing every job. If someone is skilled at one thing, that does not mean they are skilled in everything, and a good boss understands that using skills is better than forcing failure. The balance is sometimes skewed when one of the members is either unwilling to acknowledge a skill because they are unwilling to participate in the extras that make a school shine, or they are simply unskilled in most things. A boss needs to keep a balance of volunteerism because most of the work cannot be done by a few; it must be shared for the sake of harmony.

Does the job at hand reach too far out into seclusion for someone to achieve success alone? Team members feel utterly alone and abandoned when they take on a project and nobody helps with the effort. Even questions about its success help. But teachers who push through a project alone find a lot of resentment when the extra work is on their shoulders and everyone else is having coffee in the kitchen. It doesn’t work, and the boss must step in and delegate and once again be the bad guy.

When you know what the end product is of a year of teaching is supposed to be, will the employee be able to reach that end product? A boss doesn’t keep score, exactly, but a boss is ever vigilant and always watching. And when the car seems to be going off the track, it’s the boss’s job to re-rail that car, and this is where more friction comes, and that makes the boss look like the bad guy again.

But someone has to be in charge and a good boss knows that that charge means charging down one of the roads – there are two- capitulation and admonishment – and the one less taken is the one that any boss worth salt must frequent. If someone is in trouble, it means the whole school is in trouble. If someone suddenly pulls away from the other members of the staff, it’s a caution light, and for the sake of the school, the caution light must either return to green or go red, and that means the boss needs to play boss and cut the team member loose and bring on a new team member.

The balance in changing team members always comes with the question: For the sake of the children, should we change or hang on to someone to finish the job for the sake of continuity? Continuity in a world of change is a blessed thing, especially for children, but the truth is, when a team member is done with a job, the job should be done with the team member – for the sake of the children.

People will come and go from jobs in any situation, and that’s the truth of the matter. The boss’s job is to know when the team member is no longer a team member, but a team assailant and cut him or her loose, and that is what makes the boss the bad guy because nobody can know what’s really in your heart.

The boss’s job is never a fun job. It’s like always being on a teeter totter. The demands come at you like baseballs in a throw and dunk game. But when the night slides in and you sit down with that adult refreshment, if you can look in the mirror or into your heart and know you’ve made the right choices for the children in your care, you can wink at the mirror and cock the bad guy hat and know that the road less taken might be lonely and misunderstood, but it’s a beautiful path and one well worth taking.

Next week: The boss’s appraisal of children who fit in and children who don’t.

Good Morning! Do you like the picture of “Water on Mars?”

Another week starting. It will be an interesting week with the fence down. Lot’s to do inside, however. Lots of classes, lots of learning. The kids seem to really enjoy the class work and having all the teachers. The focus is on “Who am I” this week.

Parents, don’t forget to read your handbooks! Especially review the section on clothing dos and don’ts.

September is coming and we will be off on Labor Day. Otherwise it’s a full month.

Don’t forget to bring your baby picture for the Beautiful Baby Contest. It starts the First of September!

If you have put in an order for Scholastic, I will send that in this week. It’s new for me too, but we will get there!

Please note the garden and all the work that Jeremy and Rhonda Ross did this weekend. It was a fantastic weekend with them. They are marvelous people. Terry could not stop saying how wonderful they are. It is always a pleasure to have parents like Jeremy and Rhonda at the Garden School.

Have a great week!

From Teacher Magazine at www.teachermagazine.org

Published: August 17, 2009

Jamming to Learn Grammar

Comment: Here’s a great way for young people to learn grammar. Believe it or not, it will be more and more important for people to succeed if they know how to use the language properly. Grammar is something parents hand down to children. So this might be a family gig.

NICHOLSON, Ga. (AP) — Crystal Huau Mills knows it’s tough for 9-year-olds to focus on learning nouns and verbs — grammar can be too boring and technical to hold the attention of an energetic third-grader.

So, to get the young scholars excited and to help them memorize a confusing and boring subject, she wrote a song.

Three years later, what started out as one song has grown into “Grammar Jammar,” a 42-minute DVD based on a compilation of Mills’ jams teachers and parents can use to relay basic grammar skills to children in kindergarten through fifth grade.

“(Grammar is) like learning a different language, with all the different rules and the parts of speech,” said Mills, who taught for five years at Benton Elementary School in Jackson County. “It’s a lot to take in, and it’s not very exciting.”

Students in her third-grade class struggled to recognize different types of nouns, so she wrote the first song to explain the difference between proper nouns and regular nouns, then recruited friend and musician Bryan Shaw to blend her words with a catchy tune.

“(Shaw) pretty much took my words from an e-mail and turned them into a song,” Mills said. “He’s good at that. He can take your words and twist them around and write the music for it. We kind of did that one song after another, and before we knew it, we had 13 different songs.”

Shortly after Mills debuted the songs in her class, other teachers started using them to help students with their grammar.

“The tunes are just so catchy that (students) want to sing along with it, but at the same time, they don’t really realize that they’re learning grammar,” said Ashley Watkins, who teaches kindergarten at Benton Elementary. “It’s a great tool to introduce and reinforce those concepts that they have to learn.”

As they took the state-mandated Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, students mouthed words to the songs before bubbling in answers, said third-grade teacher Laura Becker.

“I saw it being really effective in that way,” Becker said. “These kids really remembered the songs.”

Eventually, Mills produced a script combining the songs into a school musical.

In the musical, Mills acts as a teacher frustrated with an apathetic class of students. When she falls asleep, her unenthusiastic class transforms into a crowd of eager students, and inanimate objects like clocks, globes and flags come to life.

One performance caught the eye of Justin Carter, owner of Justin Wayne Casting in Athens, a casting company for independent films.

“I saw people who would not necessarily like theater or the arts really just get into it,” Carter said. “They really responded well to it for just a little school production. That’s how I knew it had potential. It was a good starting point.”

In May 2008, Mills and a mostly volunteer crew of performers started work on the “Grammar Jammar” video. The crew spent three months taping at places like the cafeteria of Prince Avenue Christian School and North Oconee High School.

In an early part of the video, Mills’ students dance at a ’50s sock hop to a song about subjects and predicates.

In another scene, a life-size bottle of ketchup sings to students around a cafeteria table about imperative sentences.

“Imperative is a command like, ‘Go to school.’ It ends in a period or an exclamation point,” the condiment explains.

Mills started college as a theater major but switched to education in her freshman year at the University of Georgia.

She started teaching at the Jackson County school in 2003, and decided to keep her passion for the performing arts alive, acting in plays at several local theaters and running an after-school drama club for students.

“There’s not enough music or performing arts in the classroom or the public schools any more,” Mills said. “So that’s how ‘Grammar Jammar’ came to be. I see a need for the arts in education, and I saw that need and figured kids learn better through songs, so why not help that along?”

In July, Mills debuted “Grammar Jammar” at the Athens-Clarke County Library and took the DVD on the road to promote it at the Southeast Home School expo held in Atlanta.

The producers are selling the video and have a Web site, GrammarJammar.com, where parents and teachers can order copies.

For her next project, Mills is attempting to adapt a student workbook to go with the video.

“I see it going many places,” Mills said. “Children’s books, picture books … who knows — maybe even a Saturday morning special on PBS.”

Bryan Shaw, Grammar Jammar’s lead musician, sings about subjects and predicates — “two parts to every sentence” — as Crystal Mills plays the part of the teacher. Danny Conkle is on base and Charlie Garland on guitar.

From Food Navigator at Foodnavigator-usa.com
Healthy eating ‘disorder’ on the rise

17-Aug-2009

Comment: One of the best books I’ve ever read about food said, “Eat the widest variety of food possible.” Over the years we have been told that one food after another is not good for us for one reason or another. The point is to avoid eating great quantities of anything, but at the same time enjoying everything. There is a place for McDonalds; a place for beer; a place for greasy pizza and chocolate cake. There is even a place for soda pop – it’s good for kids on long trips because they don’t have to pee! The other point is to keep an eye on balance. This can be done with the eye: is the plate filled with color or is it a “yellow” plate? Chicken nuggets, French fries and corn or applesauce is a yellow plate. It lacks something green or red; it lacks nutritional balance.

This article is about imbalance and the desire to maintain a “perfect” diet. A perfect diet only exists in the mind. A good diet allows for enjoyment. I truly believe that God did not intend for us to take the pleasure of eating and reduce it to either a chore, or a bland affair. Eating is supposed to be a delight, so let’s keep that in mind as well as keeping in mind that too much, too many treats, too many calories is not balance, it’s imbalance.

Related topics: Science & Nutrition

An obsession with healthy eating is on the increase, but cutting out of large number of foods, or foods that contain certain ingredients may increase the risk of malnutrition.