Good Morning!

Such a nice weekend. I was talking to the kids last Friday about what a “winter reprieve” is and they got one! Too nice to stay in and post here!

This week, our little geography plane will fly from Africa to Mexico. We will look at the history, the geography, the animals, the plants, the customs and sights of Mexico. We will eat a Mexican meal at school today, and then hopefully, if the weather holds, go to a Mexican restaurant on Friday.

Lots of art projects in the hopper.

We are still working on Civil War songs and folk songs. The kids seem to be enjoying this. Ask them to sing Goober Peas – it begins “Sittin by the roadside…”

Please expect a letter and form about this coming summer. We always send this out in February because it’s expensive, and needs some thought and some planning for most families.

In the event of snow this week, please watch WFIE, channel 14 for The Garden School Closing. It comes in the Ts!

Tacos today with fresh fruit. Apple muffins for breakfast and chocolate cupcakes for snack.

If you have not gotten your candy money in, please do so. Please plan to add this to your tuition.

Have a great week!

So often people ask me, “How do you do it?” And the answer is easy. It’s fun; it’s a hobby; it’s play. For me, working in the kitchen is play. When I was a little girl, I loved to make what I called pretty salads from all kinds of plants I found in my wanderings. I would balance the colors, arrange them nicely in a pile and then add flowers and berries. I made my first pie at four and my first turkey dinner at eleven. I lured my husband in by making a blueberry stuffed capon with all the trimmings when I was seventeen. It’s simply a matter of two things: interest and doing. If you have an interest, but you never get off your duff to actually do, you will never learn. I tell the children in music, “If you don’t sing, you won’t know the words.” Same thing with all of life. If you don’t participate, you won’t know how to do anything.

Today, the grocery store and the kitchen are two of my favorite places. I know most of the people who work there, and I speak with them frequently about new foods and bargains. It helps. I always use the mini carts to shop because I shop with thought not habit. I buy carefully and with a plan. I spend relatively little compared to most people simply because my rule of thumb is, “If I can make it, I will buy the parts, and the parts are always cheaper.”

With a scheme of what can and can’t be done with and to foods, it’s not hard to throw just about any meal together in under an hour with ease. It’s a matter of knowing how tastes mesh, how long things cook, and what each food needs to be at its best.

Today at school, we will have an pseudo African meal. I will bake yams, mix peanuts with brown rice, serve fresh fruit, and make a kind of baked steak that hopefully will taste like it came off the grill.

So on Sunday, when I shopped for school, I made sure I had brown rice and dry roasted peanuts. I bought enough yams to bake in the oven and slice that would feed forty children and faculty. I bought enough fresh fruit to serve everyone, and then I concentrated on the meat which is the center of this meal.

I was able to buy sirloin steak cheaply at the Grocery Outlet. On Monday, I cut the steak into strips and tossed it into a re-seal able bag. I added olive oil, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, ketchup, pepper, Worcestershire, and soy sauce.

To produce this meal for forty children and faculty, I will put the yams into the oven first at about 350 degrees for about an hour. Then 45 minutes before lunch I will start the rice in the ricer and open the peanuts. Thirty minutes before lunch, I will put the meat on a tray and bake it. Then I’ll cut the fruit. Ten minutes before lunch I will remove the yams and slice them and add a honey butter, pour the milk, mix the peanuts into the rice with some butter, remove the meat from the oven, and voila!

At home, a simple meal of slightly breaded fish, broccoli and noodle medley takes about thirty minutes. Here’s how:

Thaw or open your fish pieces. Take three soup bowls. Into one bowl, place 1/2 cup of flour; into the next a beaten egg with a little milk; into the third, bread crumbs or cracker crumbs or ground walnuts and Parmesan cheese – whatever you like. Dip fish into flour, egg, and then bread crumbs and place on a plate and set aside.

Place hot water into a big pan and bring it to a boil. Add your noodles and cook till tender but not limp. Buy whole grain noodles because they are better for you and taste better.

While your noodles cook, cut your broccoli into manageable plate pieces and place into a microwavable bowl with a few drops of water and cover and set aside. If you like tartar sauce now is the time to make it. A spoon filled with mayonnaise and some salsa makes a great fish sauce. Cut some onions and mushrooms or green peppers now.

When the noodles are done, drain. Place 2-4 tablespoons of olive oil, and 1 tablespoon butter into a frying pan. Melt, add ground pepper and some chopped onions and mushrooms. Stir in enough noodles for dinner and then add 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese and leave on very low temp or turn off your burner.

In another frying pan, use the same oil and butter and pepper combo and cook fish at medium high temp until cooked – probably 8 minutes.

When you start your fish, place your broccoli into the micro and cook five minutes. When broccoli is done, drain, and put a little cheese on it, cover and set aside.

When fish is done, grace your plates with your food and serve – thirty minutes tops.

Cooking is not as hard as some people think it is. It’s really quite simple, and with a little thought and some creativity, it’s fun and rewarding.

Good Afternoon…hectic morning…so I thought I’d catch up this afternoon. We had our inspection this morning and it went very well. Miss Lisa is back to school and looks good. She had a very very serious case of the flu and was really down for the count. Mr. Terry was also down with the flu, but it only lasted a couple of days. It’s a really nasty flu. Chills, a high fever, headache, body aches, and some delirium. Please be careful and stay well!

This week we are looking at the Serengeti Plain in Africa. This is the place where you would go to see giraffes, zebras, lions, wildebeests, hyenas, and elephants. We think the children will like this study very much. On Thursday, we will watch a spectacular video on the Serengeti Plain.

Today in French class, we learned hot and cold and the four seasons.

We have begun to watch the old movie, Swiss Family Robinson as our third choice of “Real Films.”

It is a wonderful idea to remind children to listen. It is our primary job – to teach children to listen so that they will be good students in big school.

We are planning some moves up from Littles to Middles again.

Another wonderful week started…have a blessed one!

Education Week: Teacher-Led School Innovates With Student Regrouping

Comment: A great plan and something that should happen in schools beginning with Early Childhood!

Heather McCowan, center right, a 7th grade English teacher a Palmer Park Preparatory Academy in Detroit, hands a “pom,” or token, to Monique Whittaker, while Micah Whittaker, left, and Dezhane Norton work on a grammar lesson last week. Students are rewarded with poms when they answer questions correctly and participate in class.

—Brian Widdis for Education Week

Detroit’s troubled school system remains in emergency management, its enrollment dwindling and its labor-management relations contentious. Yet in spite of those challenges, a school there is making a bid to innovate with many of the formal structures that have long guided not just teachers’ roles, but also how students are organized in classes.

At Palmer Park Preparatory Academy, teachers are gradually assuming administrative duties to become the city’s first teacher-led school. An extended day, part of the district’s reform policy, gives the staff time every afternoon to compare teaching strategies. And finally, a new, pilot schedule for 7th and 8th graders lets teachers regroup the middle school students in different English/language arts and math classes frequently, based on the students’ performance and how quickly they are learning new material.

The changes are the K-8 school’s attempt to get concrete about the much-touted but often vague concept of “differentiated instruction” for students, especially for those who have struggled to grasp key concepts and risk falling further behind.

They are also the product of a partnership among teachers, the local teachers’ union, the central administration, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the educational publisher hired in fall 2009 to revamp Detroit’s curriculum.

In a sense, the 650-student school is also an incubator of several ideas that in recent months have caught renewed attention from education reformers around the country, including: the notion of the teacher-led school; extended school hours, a concept favored by the Obama administration; and on-the-job professional development based on data analysis. While still in its infancy, the school is being praised by district leaders as an example of organic reform.

“I think the teacher-led concept was so new it gave us the opportunity to think out of the box” on classroom scheduling, said Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the chief academic and accountability auditor for the Detroit district. “We worked all summer to have this school up and running, and if we had not spent that kind of energy, had not pushed and challenged ourselves, this new idea would not have generated itself.”

Organic Reform

The genesis of the changes occurred last summer, after a group of teachers at Palmer Park approached the district with the proposal to convert to a teacher-led arrangement, in which the school’s teachers take on the budgeting and management duties generally carried out by an administrator.

Though not a new concept, teacher-led schools have gained fresh attention in the past year, with new examples under way in California, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York, among other places, and a spate of recent articles in a number of publications, including The New York Times.

Ms. Byrd-Bennett and the Detroit Federation of Teachers agreed to the arrangement with some conditions. Based on prior experiences with similar schools while she was the chief executive officer of the Cleveland schools, Ms. Byrd-Bennett insisted on formal training for teachers and a graduation transition. An executive administrator, Bessie K. Harris, is training the school’s four lead teachers on the governance process, such as how to run budget meetings.

Discussions among those teachers homed in on how to boost attendance, keep students more engaged in their work, and minimize their frustration when they were struggling with lessons, said Ann K. Crowley, one of the lead teachers who will assume most administrative duties in the school.

In consultation with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt officials, the teachers arrived at the idea of personalized schedules for all the students, varying on whether they need more-intensive instruction on basic concepts or are ready for more in-depth instruction. Using a data-analysis tool, the publishing group culled information from state, local, and classroom tests. Then the school placed students in one of three classrooms each in math and English/language arts with peers at the same level of performance.

Crucially, teachers are expected to target the same standards, but their lessons explore them in different levels of breadth and depth depending on the performance level. The extended learning time—a change that’s being tried across the district—helped usher in the final piece of the plan: professional development to help monitor students’ progress.

Teachers have common planning at the end of every school day, in addition to their regular prep periods. At those meetings, they’re able to discuss the results from their lessons and go over data generated from quarterly “benchmark” assessments. Then, they can decide whether a student needs to be moved to one of the other classes—something that can occur on a weekly or, potentially, even daily basis as necessary.

“It’s so much easier to move the kids and challenge them and address them when they need more attention,” Ms. Crowley said.

Heather McCowan conducts a grammar lesson at Detroit’s Palmer Park Prep. The teacher-led school is experimenting with grouping to aid student achievement.

—Brian Widdis for Education Week

The seemingly simple idea of differentiated scheduling is one that, historically, has been difficult to execute. For one thing, such schedules essentially require teachers to take charge of far more students than is usual in lock-step class schedules.

“Scheduling is not something that, quite frankly, gets a lot of attention,” said John J. Winkler, the vice president of enterprise solutions at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “What we’re doing is scheduling based on student issues, not adult issues.”

It has taken a commitment by teachers to stick with the schedule, but teachers seem to feel that they have more ownership over student success, Ms. Crowley added.

“That kind of scheduling can drive adults crazy,” she said, “but kids can really adapt to it.”

Concerns Raised

The concept appears to be relatively new to education as a whole. Only a handful of other schools, all in New York, have used data to create personalized student schedules, and none of them is currently teacher-led, Houghton Mifflin Harcort officials said.

The idea, however, raises the specter of prior methods intended to gear instruction to different student needs, like “ability grouping” and “tracking,” that have had many detractors. Much research and academic debate occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, when such practices were said to benefit high achievers but widen educational disparities between them and their low-achieving peers, especially when the criteria used to assign students to groups were not related to instructional goals.

Even today, there is little agreement among scholars about the best way to make differentiated groupings work well for all students, according to Adam Gamoran, a professor of sociology and education policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied both practices.

He said that figuring out the logistics of constant reviews of data, monitoring student progress, and regrouping students as needed pose constant challenges.

“If you’re going to make a move like this, to use some form of differential placement and differentiated instruction, you need to do it in a way that keeps high-quality instruction for low-achieving students,” Mr. Gamoran said.

But teachers in Detroit note that the placements aren’t static, and students aren’t stuck indefinitely at a particular level of instruction. A student who succeeds in algebraic concepts but struggles with geometric ones could be regrouped for those specific lessons, while others whose performance rises steadily could move ahead.

“It is more about needing to know your objectives; it’s almost like mastery of skills—have you mastered them, have you demonstrated them,” Ms. Crowley said.

“It’s like an [individualized education plan] for each child.”

Monitoring Progress

Some obstacles have cropped up, teachers and administrators acknowledge.

The flexible scheduling, in fact, was nearly scrapped after the school had trouble attracting middle school teachers who were on board with the changes in the school.

Although the city’s collective bargaining pact allows certain schools’ staff, including Palmer Park Preparatory Academy, to select the teaching force, a mass retirement of many middle-grades teachers the previous year had reduced the number of eligible candidates. And other teachers were initially concerned about the changes, said Ms. Harris, the school’s executive administrator.

But the school’s lead teachers have held firm to the concept, believing that it was crucial to better outcomes. Students appear to be more engaged and focused on the task at hand; some have asked of their own volition to move to a different class, Ms. Crowley said.

The changes, especially the school’s new schedule, are still so new that there’s little hard evidence to suggest they’re working, but the district will be monitoring its progress closely. To gauge the school’s success, it will rely on the data from a variety of indicators the district collects, which include several that go beyond standardized-test scores. If they show progress, the district is considering expanding the concept.

“Is attendance up? Are expulsions/suspensions down?” Ms. Byrd-Bennett said. “If at the end of the year, our data and numbers moved in the right direction, then there’s no reason why we would not think of this for our scheduling the next year.”

I know it’s a pain in the neck when our regular schedules can’t be maintained, and we are given the added burden of finding care for children when we absolutely have to go to work and schools are closed.

I always think of January as the rest month. It’s the month following three months of holidays and frantic rush. It’s the time when nature says, “slow down and take it easy.” It’s too cold to “play outdoors” and it shouldn’t be a time of racing around. It’s a hibernating month with long nights and short days. Nature is saying something – look at the trees; they are as dormant as death. My cat runs out at 3:45, is out an hour and then spends the day curled up on a pillow. He’s telling me something.

Illness has abounded these last weeks. Teachers have been out days at a stretch. We send home children every day who are kindling fevers and who have fallen asleep “on the job.”

With the snow, I think nature is telling us to stop look and listen, and when you do on a day like today, it’s just beautiful outside. It’s crisp, clean and pristine, and for a couple of days, we have a new earth to admire and to watch. All the seasons are beautiful and rich, and that includes winter and its snow.

Last time it snowed a majority of the children did not go out and play in it, and that was a shame. I hope more kids get to experience this bigger fall today for the memory and the knowledge of what winter is all about and what snow means. Too often we lose this teaching moment for TV.

For Garden School parents who are reading this, please have your child draw AND color a picture of the snow and bring it to school on Friday or Monday for a treasure box pass! Have fun with your children today!

Go Here:

Focus on food waste for future food security, says Worldwatch

Post a commentBy Caroline Scott-Thomas, 17-Jan-2011

From Food Navigator.com

Comment: This is an interesting article. It’s amazing how much we take food for granted and how much we waste. It’s especially confusing when the Health Department, restaurants and grocery stores advocate food waste in practices that they think increase sales.

Related topics: Financial & Industry

Waste prevention strategies and promoting self-sufficiency could be key to feeding the world’s fast-growing population, according to a new report from the Worldwatch Institute.

Good Morning…yes, we are in school today and we open at 7:00 a.m.

This week we will be working on Australia among the other wonderful things we do at school.

Please check your Flower Box to keep abreast of all the things your child will do this week.

We hope to get out for at least a few minutes this week. We expect lots of rain this week, but perhaps it will only be sporatic!

We continue to renovate. Our next project is to include a ball pit and a Calico Critters Corner. If you know anything about Calico Critters, please see Miss Judy or Mrs. St. Louis.

Please remember that if your child is ill and requires OTC meds in the morning, you are expected to keep him home. It is a state requirement. Bringing an ill child to a child care facility breaks the state codes for childcare. If your child becomes ill at school, he will be required to remain out of school for at least 36 hours.

Please take notice of your child’s medal and how many silver, black, and gold beads he or she has on their medal. Children receive a gold bead every week they keep their medals all week.

We will be taking medals for deliberate disobedience, harmful play, and deliberate disruption this week. When it is time to clean up, everyone cleans. When it is time to wash hands, we don’t play in the bathroom. When it is time to listen, we all listen.

On the other side of the coin, we will be rewarding our wonderfully obedient and helpful children all week with toys, prizes and candy.

We hope you have a great week!

Some of our parents asked for the recipe for Chicken Curry. This is one of my favorite dishes – it’s my “comfort” food – the thing that seems most like growing up food.

You can “curry” just about anything. I use curry and mayonnaise for a steak dip. I curry rice, and put curry in lots of soups and even my tomato sauce for spaghetti. It’s not something everyone likes, but to me it’s about as familiar as salt.

Making curried chicken is not only about the easiest thing to do, it’s one of the healthiest things you can eat. Served on brown rice, the chicken dish has very few calories, and the fresh condiments added to the dish just before eating add lots of different vitamins.

Before making your curry dish, arrange your sideboys. A sideboy is a small container like a pyrex glass cup or teacups or tea saucers that will hold your “addons” to your cooked dish. Adding extra raw and fresh fruits, nuts and vegetables add a distinctive taste to your dish. With curry’s every bite is supposed to taste different from your last bite.

This makes a wonderful and easy party dish. Imagine a big ring of rice on a platter. In the center of the rice is a great bowl of bright yellow curried chicken. Surrounding the platter are two dozen “sideboys” of pretty vegetables and fruits. You don’t need a salad, bread, or anything else. It’s a quick and beautiful party fare.

Here are some examples of good additions for chicken curry:

cooked bacon bits
crumbled egg yolks
almonds
peanuts
walnuts
celery
raw onions
apple bits
raisins – dark and light
date bits
dried cherries
pickle relishes
coconut
Chow chow
Chutneys
dried apricots cut up
green peppers
mushrooms
cauliflower
pineapple bits fresh or dried
cubed cucumbers

Here’s how to make your curry: cube your raw chicken. In a low pan like a saute pan or a frying pan, saute in olive oil or butter onions, apples, and celery. Add the chicken cubes and a heaping teaspoon of curry powder. As the chicken cooks, stir fry to mix the spice with the chicken and the veggies.

When the chicken is done, add two cups of water and a heaping tablespoon of chicken bouillon. When the bouillon is dissolved, add a roux of 1/4 cup water to a heaping tablespoon of cornstarch. When the dish has a nice thick soup consistency, it’s ready to serve.

Enjoy

Friday was a great day for up, and for parents visiting for International Feast. We had a nice turnout of parents. Thank you all for coming and for bringing such great treats for the kids. The children had a ball experimenting with different tastes. They ate just about everything. Several of the children actually sampled the curry with all the condiments. I think the favorite was Connor’s Australian biscuits, Miss Lisa’s homemade fortune cookies, and Avery’s and Edan’s egg rolls. Miss Nita’s Chicken Paprikash was a big hit as well. Mrs. St. Louis made the poppyseed chicken and Dillon’s parents brought shrimp and noodles. We had spiced peaches and a nice Chinese chicken dish — all delicious and scrumptious.

The children were great right through lunch, and then got rowdy. Not sure why. Usually we attribute this to a weather change. We had some rough customers yesterday, and a faculty decision has been made to send continuous offenders of ordinary rules home.

Ordinarily, we have few rules, but the ones we have create order from chaos. One rule we have for the safety of the children is “no talking in the bathrooms.” When children visit in the bathrooms with breakfast or lunch waiting for them, two things happen: visiting becomes playing and playing means someone is pushed and hurt. Meals get cold on the table while children dawdle in the bathroom.

Another rule we have is: there is no playing after the bell rings. When fifty percent of children are continuing to play, the day just halts.

We ask that no child bring the following to school: food, drink, jewelry, toys, or money, and that no child take toys home with him from school.

These are simple things every child can learn. When they know the rule but don’t abide by it, the discipline goes down the drain.

In the morning we gave away a lot of golden beads, and those beads were given to children who typically behave and don’t break the rules. If you want to know if your child is a rule breaker or abide-r, just look at his medal. Lots of the beads have turned silver and black from age, but each bead represents a week your child did not lose his Honor’s Medal.

We also had some winners of the Knowledge Bee — Savanna and Phoenix. This was a great Bee and the children all did very well — amazing what they know.

In the afternoon, we finished our Davy Crockett movie and did some Japanese art. Mrs. St. Louis showed the children how to paint in the style of the Japanese. Some of them “got” it and some did not.

All in all it was a nice little week!