Making a pizza is not hard. If you have never worked with yeast, it’s time you did. Yeast doesn’t bite. The only thing you can do to yeast is kill it. Don’t kill it.

Making a pizza requires three things: a pan large enough to bake it; a very hot oven; and cheese– lots and lots of cheese ;-}

First thing: preheat your oven to 450 degrees. I’m afraid of that kind of heat at school, so I use 400, and I cook my pizzas a little longer. You might put your rack on the lowest rung because you want to cook your pizza from the bottom.

Second thing, run hot tap water and heat a large bowl by letting hot tap water run into about two minutes. Then, run tap water to the degree that you would bathe a baby. Let your wrist be the indicator. Pour 1 cup into your warm bowl. Then sprinkle a package of dry yeast onto the warm water. You can stir this or just let it sit for about five minutes. It will create a sponge. I use a little sugar at this point to feed the yeast.

You will need three tablespoons of oil and about a teaspoon of salt. Add two cups of flour and stir. Add another half cup of flour and punch the dough again and again until all the flour is absorbed and the stuff is dough. At this point, you can let it rise or you can use it right away. If you let it rise, you will have two pizzas in about an hour.

Flour a pizza stone, a cookie sheet, or a pizza pan.

Roll the dough out with a rolling pin and don’t forget to use a little flour to keep the dough from getting sticky. When the dough is large enough to fit on your pan, fold it in half and half again, lift and place on your pan and unfold. Do this quickly.

Now it’s the fun part. Take any kind of sauce you have and place it on the dough covered board. I use blue cheese dressing and salsa combo. My favorite is left over spaghetti sauce. You can use canned tomato sauce or even ranch dressing.

Next step is the cheese. Use a lot of cheese and leave some of the dough exposed to prevent the cheese from melting over the edge of your pan.

Now it’s time to experiment. Anything you like on your pizza goes on now.

Bake for about 12 minutes. When the top is beginning to brown it’s ready to eat.

From Food Navigator

Kids’ soft drink habits predict teenage weight: Study

By Caroline Scott-Thomas, 12-Oct-2009

Related topics: Science & Nutrition, Carbohydrates and fibers (sugar, starches)

Five-year-olds’ consumption of sweetened beverages could give an indication of their weight status for the following ten years, according to a new study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Comment: Soda is a treat not a daily indulgence.

It was a nice week. Lots of good lines delivered by the children. They were funny and made each other laugh, and that’s the way play practice should be. Mrs. St. Louis brought some absolutely darling costumes in that she has painstakingly made with lots of heart and lots of humor. We are sure the children will love them. I won’t say a lot about the play because it’s just down the way…

We played a lot outside this week because the weather was just delicious.

Not a lot of us are sick, and that’s a very good.

We brought a lot of the plants in from their summer spots and the pet room has a whole new look.

We enrolled a new little boy named Nathan. We welcome him with great open arms.

We tried some new foods this week and the children were receptive. We stuffed a pumpkin, and when some of our grandparents came to lunch a little late, it was all gone.

Lots to do next week. Have a great weekend.

Marking School Time

When President Barack Obama prescribed “longer school days and school years” in a speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce last spring, it wasn’t the first time the subject had come up. For decades, experts and politicians have called for longer school days and an end to summer vacation. As academic achievement and our global pre-eminence have slipped, the campaign to extend school hours has heated up.

The issue isn’t whether we want American students to grow up to be literate, productive, responsible citizens. The question is, would lengthening the school day and year help achieve that objective? Even if it might edge us in that direction, what economic and social costs would be attached?

The Associated Press recently covered students’ responses to the president’s school-time proposals. One 5th grader declared her intention to “walk straight out the door” if they were implemented. Her comment and the AP’s willingness to spotlight it say more about America’s scholastic problems than any classroom clock could. A 10-year-old who thinks she can walk out of school when she decides she’s had enough probably also thinks she can decide what she should learn there.

I was hardly a classroom shrinking violet, but when I was 10, if my parents and teachers had told me I was staying in school till the moon rose, it never would have occurred to me to threaten a walkout. Experts gush about empowering kids, but we’re really just teaching them to think more highly of themselves than they should. When I made foolish adolescent pronouncements, the wire services never carried them.

Arne Duncan, our federal secretary of education, has joined the chorus deriding summer vacation as a relic of our bygone “agrarian economy.” Inconveniently, his complaint ignores a few facts. First, farms are busy places, even when it isn’t July and August, like during spring planting and autumn harvest. Second, it’s been a hundred years since most Americans lived in the country, let alone on farms. Summer vacation remained a positive aspect of American life even after most of us had moved to suburbs and cities, and while we were becoming a superpower. Third, our current two-month summer recess became an institution not because of farmers, but largely at the insistence of a 20th-century urban middle class that demanded an upper-class summer out of the city.

The president wants schools to “stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go.” I try to keep my students safe every day, but that’s not the purpose of my classroom. It’s been more than 25 years since A Nation at Risk warned that expecting schools to solve problems “the home and other institutions either will not or cannot resolve” exacts a crippling “educational cost.” We need to stop making that mistake.

If America’s homes aren’t safe places for children, that’s a problem school reform can’t fix.

Experts often attribute American students’ disappointing international test results to shorter school days and years. For example, in 2003, Japanese students averaged 926 hours in a school-based education program, while American students spent 799. Japan placed fourth in an international math assessment, while we placed 24th. Finland, on the other hand, spent 861 hours and placed first, while Italy spent more time than we did and placed behind us.

These statistics deserve skepticism, but two things are true. How much time you spend on learning matters. But what you do with that time matters more. That means what teachers do with the time, as well as what students do with it, and afterward, when they’re home.

Proposals for longer days include everything from remedial instruction, which used to be known as after-school extra help, to chess and drama clubs, which used to be known as after-school chess and drama clubs. Proponents also plan to nurture vaguer “nontraditional skills” like “leadership” and “resiliency” in a “seamless learning experience” that includes a “web of community services” as well as opportunities in “relevant real-world settings,” formerly known as after-school jobs.

Proponents of longer school hours contend that “poorer kids” face “problems that interfere with learning,” according to the AP, including “less involvement by their parents,” while children from more-affluent homes benefit from parents who “read to them, have strong language skills,” and “give them learning opportunities.” I suspect many nonaffluent parents would object to that generalization. But even where it is true, the solution doesn’t require longer days and years for every child. If some students need remedial help beyond current school hours, schools can offer it to them, as many already do. But we shouldn’t compel every child to stay just because some may need to.

Ironically, at the same time experts are prescribing more school hours, they’re also complaining that American children lack sufficient “playtime.” They’re demanding longer recesses during the school day to meet that “troubling health and school issue.” In other words, instead of sending kids home to play after school, let’s make the school day longer so we can give them more time to play before they go home.

How nuts are we?

If we’re serious about school time, we can address truancy. Roughly 10 percent of 1st graders nationwide are chronically absent. The percentage rises dramatically in districts serving poor children, in some cases ranging above 50 percent. Those children’s scores predictably depress overall school averages, and remediating those students cuts into teachers’ class time with their other students who don’t miss school. Besides, expecting kids who already don’t attend school to attend longer school days and years doesn’t sound like much of a solution.

We can also address how many minutes and hours teachers are compelled to spend on classroom management, and how much chaos their students are forced to endure at the hands of a disruptive few because perverse regulations, the threat of litigation, and pipe-dream behavior theories continue to rule in our schools.

We can address how much time schools divert to social services. We can address how vague, nonacademic objectives have supplanted academic content. All this folly costs more than a summer every year.

Finally, we can understand that giving children the summer away from school isn’t a waste of their time. Unless we’re saying that being home is a waste of their time.

If that’s the case, we’ve got a more perilous problem than an eternity in my classroom can cure.

What exactly is “knowing one’s letters?” We always ask parents of children aged four and five, “Where is your child academically?” And the answer is always “Oh, he or she knows his or her letters.” So the fair response from a teacher’s point of view is, “What DO you mean?” Mostly, what parents mean is that a child can sing the ABC song and only slur the L,M,N,O,P!

I could go on and on about what knowing your letters is not, so let’s cut to the chase and say what it is:

Knowing one’s letters means:

Recognizing all 26 of the upper case letters of the alphabet.
Recognizing all 26 of the lower case letters of the alphabet.
Being able to say all 26 phonemes (sounds letters make) with the variations on the vowels.
Being able to write all 26 letters on kindergarten lined paper both upper and lower case.

Da, Da!

This is supposed to happen in kindergarten if not earlier. Yes, three year olds are teachable and actually love playing with letters and are most capable of learning phonemes and reciting them and putting them together into sound groups. It’s a step by step process and completely fun if you approach it as a fun activity.

Most threes don’t recognize any letters because it’s something that must be taught. But by telling short stories about each letter, they will learn quickly. Best plan of teaching is to present letters that have no additional pictures. Each letter is its own picture and does not need more. When children learn letters with pictures, it presents a roadblock to learning. Any child will look at the activity picture and not the stylized letter, so it’s best to have just the letter.

When showing a child the letter A, the teacher turns the letter on it’s side, and says. “This is ‘A’ and ‘A’ is an airplane that flies in the sky, Airplane, A.” The child is welcome to say that the letter shown again is either an Airplane or A. B is another little story. B is like a butterfly, and then the teacher makes her hands into a butterfly by latching her thumbs and having the butterfly fly.

Every letter has a story, and very young children learn the stories first, and then slowly go over to saying the name of the letter. Teachers can invent stories that both the teacher and the child will remember. This way it’s a quick process and it’s fun.

One of the mistakes parents make with phonemes, or sounds of the letters, is adding a short “a” sound to consonants. It is not Ba but B like a bop on a bottle. Vowels have long and short sounds and children should be aware that vowels and consonants are like air noises giving life to words, and consonants are like mouth noises and can’t be pronounced without their sister and brother vowels.

When it’s time to start writing letters for real, about age four, it’s best to start with a marker rather than a pencil and rather than a crayon simply for the lack of drag a marker has compared to either a pencil or a crayon. Always, always, always, always teach from top line to bottom line. Children are determined to make letters from the bottom up and this always has to be re-taught simply because well formed letters cannot be made from the bottom line.

The other thing is to teach an upper case letter to start a name and all the rest lower case letters. This also has to be re-taught and that’s harder than learning the right way the first time.

Writing has a lot to do with hand strength and coordination. This is often determined by how much coloring a child does. Children who do not like to color and don’t know how will have a lot more trouble with making letters than children who like to color and learn to color well.

Tiny Legos, stringing beads, and doing play that creates a structure like Tinker Toys, little blocks, little toys that need assembly or dressing will add to a child’s ability to write because these activities build hand strength.

For parents who dread the coloring route at home because of the mess, the best solution is to put children at the kitchen table and that’s where the color crayons and all art supplies stay.

How necessary is it that a five year old know their letters? In a world of competition, it’s best that all children begin to learn their letters as soon as possible. Children love this activity. They want to know this material and enjoy the accomplishment of knowing.

A four year old who can put his or her name on his or her paper is a happier child. It’s a matter of being in command or dependent. Children love being independent.

There are four great independent milestones in a child’s live. The first one is toilet training, the second is reading. Start your child early and watch him grow.

Good Morning!

It’s going to be another fabulous day. Play practice this morning, so don’t forget to work on your child’s lines on the way to school. Treasure box passes for those children who know their lines.

During play weeks, we suspend a lot of classes in order to practice. This gives the kids a nice break. At the end of this period, what we have always found is that children actually do better for the break.

The theme this week is Pilgrims. We will be reading two books about Pilgrims I am hoping the children find interesting.

We will be eating a stuffed pumpkin today. The children seemed to really like this.

No field trips this week, just practice, practice, practice!

Have a marvelous week!

Sweet potatoes from
World’s Healthiest Foods

Although sweet potatoes may be part of the Thanksgiving tradition, be sure to add these wonderful naturally sweet vegetables to your meals throughout the year; they are some of the most nutritious vegetables around. Sweet potatoes can be found in your local markets year-round, however they are in season in November and December.

The sweet potato has yellow or orange flesh, and its thin skin may either be white, yellow, orange, red or purple. Sometimes this root vegetable will be shaped like a potato, being short and blocky with rounded ends, while other times it will be longer with tapered ends. There is often much confusion between sweet potatoes and yams; the moist-fleshed, orange-colored root vegetable that is often called a “yam” is actually a sweet potato.

Unique Proteins with Potent Antioxidant Effects

Sweet potato contain unique root storage proteins that have been observed to have significant antioxidant capacities. In one study, these proteins had about one-third the antioxidant activity of glutathione-one of the body’s most impressive internally produced antioxidants. Although future studies are needed in this area, count on these root proteins to help explain sweet potatoes’ healing properties.

For more information go HERE.

Comment: this is one of the wonderful articles about healthy eating From Food Navigator. It’s one of those sites you can go to and explore all the things you’ve ever wanted to know about good nutrition and food.

Here are some things to do with sweet potatoes:

Bake like a regular potato and serve with butter, honey, or crumbled bacon and cheese.

Cut in wedges and baked like French fries. Skins stay on. Honey butter makes a great “ketchup.”

Some people boil them and whip them with brown sugar and butter and make a kind of crust-less pie. They add all kinds of things like nuts and marshmallows to the top and re-heat in the oven until the marshmallows brown.

Some slice them and add ground oranges, nuts, coconut and or pineapple.

I like to glaze them with a glaze made from orange juice, butter and brown sugar boiled on the stove about three minutes. You can thicken this with cornstarch and water and then pour over the sliced potatoes. Then add your toppings and re-bake for about twenty minutes.

Here’s a new recipe:

Boil, cool and cube your sweet potatoes (one for each person served). To the hot cheese sauce posted in the right isle of the blog just under the cookie recipe, add raw shrimp and scallops. It will take about three minutes for your fish to cook. Pour over sweet potatoes. Add a garnish of crumbled bacon and raw onions.

Sweet potatoes can be mashed and added to cake batters, muffins, and cubed and added to stews, soups and just about any dish.

It was a great week! We had play practice three times, and the kids were wonderful. A couple of kids know most of their lines already.

On Friday, we went to see Peter and the Wolf at the Victory Theatre.

It was really quite cute. The musicians come down from the stage to the children and get to see the instruments up close, and the musicians play little songs for them.

This year, there were puppets to tell the story of Peter and the wolf. These were large puppets that played on their own stage. The music was wonderful and the children really seemed to enjoy the whole beauty of classical music.

Each child paid attention to the whole production, and we were very proud of them. They looked quite cute in their school uniforms.

We had a pizza party after. They enjoyed that and ate six pizzas!

This afternoon, Miss Leigh made Mexican treats for snack.

Hope you have a spectacular weekend!

Indiana Companies Celebrate First Annual Start!

Eating Healthy Day on November 4th

Area businesses and individuals encouraged to take steps towards healthier nutrition and a healthy lifestyle

INDIANAPOLIS (October 27, 2009) – The American Heart Association has issued its call for companies and individuals to participate in National Start! Eating Healthy Day on Wed., Nov. 4.

The American Heart Association’s first annual event is aimed at raising awareness for the importance of good nutrition and making the best eating decisions to reduce a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke. Hoosier companies are encouraged to help the fight against heart disease and rally their workforce by hosting a National Start! Eating Healthy Day activity.

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of Americans, but it us also a largely preventable disease.
Companies can take the time to focus on wellness – and help take a giant step towards healthier nutrition and healthy lifestyles. Worksite wellness programs are a proven strategy to prevent the major risk factors for cardiovascular disease, according to a statement published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

“Most company leaders know that creating and encouraging healthy eating in the workplace isn’t always easy and can’t be done alone. This is where the American Heart Association’s Start! campaign can help,” says Jay Gilbert, President and CEO, Physicians Health Plan (PHP). “They are dedicated to helping adults get and stay healthy in the workplace, at home and everywhere in between. This is a core part of our mission as well.”

Companies can participate in National Start! Eating Healthy Day by:

• Serving only healthy foods in the cafeteria
• Turning off the vending machines for the day or filling them with healthy alternatives
• Passing out green apples to all the employees with some healthy eating tips
• Organizing a farmer’s market in the office during the lunch hour
• Replace donuts with fruit and low fat muffins at a breakfast meeting

“National Start! Eating Healthy Day is a creative way to help improve the health of our community,” said Sue Ehinger, chief operating officer, Parkview Hospital. “Parkview is committed to providing excellent heart care, and healthy eating is an important step in promoting wellness and overall health. We are pleased to be a partner with the American Heart Association and Physicians Health Plan.”

Individuals can participate in National Start! Eating Healthy Day by:

• Bringing your lunch to work so you can control what you eat and save money in the process
• Discover a new, healthy recipe and prepare it for your family or friends
• Have a healthy pitch-in lunch at work
• Make a stop at the grocery store on your way home so you can stock up on healthy snacks and food items

Jim England, member of the American Heart Association Indianapolis Board of Directors and President of J.D. Byrider Advertising Group, says “Exercise and diet are integral parts of adopting a healthier lifestyle and heart health. Getting started with either one of those disciplines can be tough…especially at this time of year. We’re hoping that joining in on National Start!

Eating Healthy Day can go a long toward helping people walk and eat healthier through the holidays. That way, they’re better prepared to get started on their New Year’s resolutions of eating right and getting in shape.”

To learn more on how you can participate in National Start! Eating Healthy Day and to download resources for your company, visit www.startwalkingnow.org.

Comment: I get hundreds of offers, information bulletins, notifications of all kinds of things out there that people want me to put on this blog. Out of two hundred, I probably delete one hundred ninety eight. This I liked. This might be helpful to some who are moving nationwide or across the street. It’s from Peter Sadler:

Moving is often an emotional and stressful period for the whole family. For children, it can be nerve racking and just plain confusing. Leaving behind friends, changing schools and having to get used to a new home can be really difficult. Books can be an invaluable resource in helping to explain to kids that just because you move doesn’t mean you forget your old home or friends.

FlateRate Moving, a nationwide leader in moving and storage, suggests these books to help children have a smooth transition during and after a move.

Moving Day by Meg Cabot – This book comes from Cabot’s series for younger girls, Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls. Known for her entrancing stories in The Princess Diaries series, Cabot takes readers through Allie Finkle’s reaction and reality when her family decides to move across town. Filled with worries and concerns, Finkle has to go to a new school as a new kid and find new friends. But what about her old best friend?

The Moving Book: A Kids’ Survival Guide by Gabriel Davis – Turn moving into an adventure for your tween. This fits somewhere between moving scrapbook and guide to moving. It includes advice on packing, discovering the new house and neighborhood and also getting valuable information from the old neighbors so that they aren’t forgotten in the move.

We’re Moving by Heather Maisner – When kids move, they aren’t just leaving behind their house. They are also moving away from the special things they did with their family there – like plant a garden, play tag in the yard or have an Easter egg hunt. This story for young elementary school kids addresses that, and how you can make new memories like those in your new home too.

The Berenstain Bears’ Moving Day by Stan Berenstain – The Berenstain Bears are moving to a new tree house and Brother isn’t sure he’s going to like it — or make friends. This is perfect for talking to your preschooler about a move, since the Bears are very vocal with their relatable concerns.

Who Will Be My Friends? by Syd Hoff – This is a great book to give your child just before or after a move or if a new family has moved into the neighborhood. Freddy teaches us what it is like to be new and discovers that meeting new people and new friends is not as difficult as he first thought.

Just thought you’d want to know.