This is for food nuts…

1. Cucumbers contain most of the vitamins you need every day, just one cucumber contains Vitamin B1, Vitamin B2, Vitamin B3, Vitamin B5, Vitamin B6, Folic Acid, Vitamin C, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Potassium and Zinc.

2. Feeling tired in the afternoon, put down the caffeinated soda and pick up a cucumber. Cucumbers are a good source of B Vitamins and Carbohydrates that can provide that quick pick-me-up that can last for hours.

3. Tired of your bathroom mirror fogging up after a shower? Try rubbing a cucumber slice along the mirror, it will eliminate the fog and provide a soothing, spa-like fragrance.

4.
5 Looking for a fast and easy way to remove cellulite before going out or to the pool? Try rubbing a slice or two of cucumbers along your problem area for a few minutes, the phytochemicals in the cucumber cause the collagen in your skin to tighten, firming up the outer layer and reducing the visibility of cellulite. Works great on wrinkles too!!!

6.. Want to avoid a hangover or terrible headache? Eat a few cucumber slices before going to bed and wake up refreshed and headache free. Cucumbers contain enough sugar, B vitamins and electrolytes to replenish essential nutrients the body lost, keeping everything in equilibrium, avoiding both a hangover and headache!!

7.

9. Out of WD 40 and need to fix a squeaky hinge? Take a cucumber slice and rub it along the problematic hinge, and voila, the squeak is gone!

10. Stressed out and don’t have time for massage, facial or visit to the spa? Cut up an entire cucumber and place it in a boiling pot of water, the chemicals and nutrients from the cucumber with react with the boiling water and be released in the steam, creating a soothing, relaxing aroma that has been shown the reduce stress in new mothers and college students during final exams.

11. Just finish a business lunch and realize you don’t have gum or mints? Take a slice of cucumber and press it to the roof of your mouth with your tongue for 30 seconds to eliminate bad breath, the phytochemcials will kill the bacteria in your mouth responsible for causing bad breath.

12. Looking for a ‘green’ way to clean your faucets, sinks or stainless steel? Take a slice of cucumber and rub it on the surface you want to clean, not only will it remove years of tarnish and bring back the shine, but is won’t leave streaks and won’t harm you fingers or fingernails while you clean.

13. Using a pen and made a mistake? Take the outside of the cucumber and slowly use it to erase the pen writing, also works great on crayons and markers that the kids have used to decorate the walls!!

Pass this along to everybody you know who is looking for better and safer ways to solve life’s everyday problems..

Good Morning on what proposes to be another beautiful day. Can’t tell yet, it’s still dark outside!

Here’s what you should know: Since the weather has turned warmer, short sleeves are a go. Children can still manage with light weight longer pants, but the heavy jean is just too hot for our playground. Please be kind and leave these clothes at home in the closet or drawer!

This week is a blessed Ordinary Week! Yeah! We have regular classes all week. Mr. Matt will be coming in regularly on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to help with Fine Arts and Science. All the kids love Mr. Matt who has been a family friend for fifteen years and is Miss Leigh’s special friend.

We are working on Time with both the Kindergarten and the Middles. Please help your child with the “whole hours.” We will not do the “thirties” yet.

We will be talking about St. Paul this week in Bible Stories. He was a great friend…

Miss Amy is still working on her word book with the older kids. The Middles are writing sentences, and the Littles are writing their names. How exciting.

Please don’t forget about the Spring Sing and Book Fair this month. When it comes in we will advertise it and encourage you to shop for books. This is an excellent time to buy your summer books. Everyone is invited.

Blessings!

Having grown up on Asian- particularly Polynesian- food, for years I lamented the fact the only Asian restaurant in Evansville used to be so expensive, a once in ten years dinner was all I could expect. So I bought a book on Asian cooking way back when such things were hard to find, and I started to make one dish after another until it was second nature.

One of my favorite foods is egg rolls. They are amazingly easy to make, quick, and the clean up is nominal. Here’s what you do:

First, decide what you like in the way of veggies, fruit, combos, and extras, because the egg roll is just a wrap. What goes inside it can be as nominal as collard greens and bologna. They can be as personalized as bean sprouts and walnuts.

Next step is to divide your veggies and other ingredients into fast and slow cook. If you intend to use chicken or other meat, cook meat first. The meat should be cut fine or ground or cooked all the way through before you add other things.

Any meat can be used in egg rolls. Ground sausage, hamburger, pork bits, chicken, beef, turkey, and even cold cuts.

And don’t forget fish! Shrimp is marvelous in egg rolls, but you don’t cook the fish first, only the meat. For fish, cut it up in small bits – shrimp need to be cut into three or four pieces and set this aside.

Make sure your meat is cooked first. Then cut your veggies into small bits but don’t shred or grind. Your harder veggies like onions, celery, carrots, broccoli etc should be placed first into a fry pan with a little olive oil and some soy sauce and sauteed. When these are half cooked, add the quicker cook veggies like summer squash, mushrooms and zucchini. These veggies should be pre-cut into small bits, but not ground. Add some ground ginger and black pepper and some curry powder if you like it. You don’t need salt because of the soy sauce. Don’t over cook. At this point add your fish. It will take less than a minute to cook fish bits.

When the meat and veggies are sauteed but not cooked to death take the whole pan off the heat and add your lettuces. Any lettuce will do. This needs to be shredded. You can use kale, iceberg, collards, mustard greens, bokchoy, Chinese cabbage, parsley – anything that strikes your fancy. Don’t cook the greens, just toss them lightly with the other cooked meat, fish and veggies.

Next step: Leave your wrappers in a stack. Pour a little water into a small bowl.

The wrappers will be thin and two might want to stick together.

Turn one of the points toward you so that the shape of the stack of wrappers looks like a diamond. Add a heaping teaspoon of your veggie meat mix to the front center of your stack of wrappers, fold the point of the first wrapper – nearest you – over the mix of veggies and meat. Fold the right side over and then the left like an unsealed envelope. Then paint the last corner with water from the bowl with fingers just like you would lick the sticky part of an envelope. Roll into a roll and place on paper towels.

You will probably need between four and six egg rolls per person depending on appetites.

Last step: heat about two cups of vegetable oil, canola is the best, in a wok or pan deep enough to engage deep frying safely! When the oil is very hot but not smoking, carefully drop the rolls into the oil until the wrapper is crisp -about 20 seconds. Turn for twenty more seconds, and then lift roll onto fresh paper towels.

These are ready to eat right away. Serve with mustard, horseradish or different kinds of jelly like apricot or cranberry.

Delicious!

What a beautiful day to share with my pal Ayden! We shared a birthday, and Ayden’s wonderful cookie cake was scrumptious and Leigh’s spice cake was delicious. We had a super day, and the weather only added to our moods.

In the morning, we jumped for Easter Seals. Two girls led the pack. Emily jumped over 600 times and Alyssa jumped nearly that much. We were so proud of them.

This week we made crystals. They are growing and looking quite beautiful.

We have advanced in our math skills. The kindergarten are starting to understand double digit addition, and number patterns and we are heading towards time. The younger children are also curious about time.

We began our study of the United States this week.

In Fine Arts, we drew a partner, and sent the drawings home. They were quite good.

Miss Leigh and Mr. Matt have been working hard on getting the play gound cleaned up and re-arranged. It looks absolutely beautiful.

Miss Dayna has started to work on the garden. All our fruit trees are in bloom, and it looks like a bumper crop of peaches, cherries, and cherries.

We are working on rules. It’s spring, and it’s very easy to just throw over the rules, but rules matter. They help us get easily from one point to another. Please help your child be a gentle person at home. Good manners are always an attribute.

From Food Navigator

High-fat breakfasts could be healthy option, scientists claim

By Caroline Scott-Thomas, 02-Apr-2010

Related topics: Science & Nutrition, Fats & oils

Typical high-carbohydrate, low-fat breakfasts, such as cereal or toast, may not be as healthy as previously thought, if results from a new mouse study are shown to apply to humans, researchers say.

Both Value and Harm Seen in K-3 Common Standards

Comment: A good article to invoke thought. As a small school owner, I know that working with small groups allows us to go a great distance with most children. It takes time, but the result is always amazing. The fear should not be about pushing, the fear should be about endless boredom most children experience when they are not learning.

From Education Week

By Catherine Gewertz

The common academic standards proposed for state adoption outline what students must master by graduation in order to flourish in college or good jobs. Defining how they reach those goals, however, means spelling out what they must learn at each step of the way, starting in kindergarten. And those expectations are getting a mixed reception among early-childhood experts.

In some quarters, the standards are being greeted as valuable guidance for teachers of children in K-3, or as a tool that can improve preschool programs. In others, educators are concerned that the standards ask more of many youngsters than their developmental progress allows. Some fear they could drive play-based learning from children’s classrooms or serve as a basis for high-stakes decisions such as denying kindergartners promotion to 1st grade if they cannot show they have learned required skills.

The swirl of discussion among early-childhood educators about the K-12 common standards is taking on new dimensions, also, as the possibility emerges that they could be expanded to include children from birth to age 5. Leaders of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, which organized the drafting of the K-12 standards, told early-childhood experts in meetings and conference calls late last month that they hope to begin working on zero-to-5 standards within a couple of months, according to some of those who participated in the sessions.

Dane Linn, who is leading the work on the Common Core State Standards Initiative for the NGA, told Education Week that the NGA and the CCSSO are exploring ways to work with states and the early-childhood community to ensure that all children have the skills necessary for kindergarten. “We’d be naive to think standards are not a part of that,” he said.

The two groups do not envision “any sort of standardized process in the early years,” said the CCSSO’s executive director, Gene Wilhoit, but rather a “preparedness standard” that would describe the ways

young children’s growth should be supported in all their developmental domains so they enter kindergarten on sound footing.

“That there might be an imposition of hard academic skills pushed down from grade 1 to K to preschool, that’s not what we’re talking about at all,” he said. “There are appropriate kinds of activities kids should be engaged in in order to be successful.”

With zero-to-5 standards in only the idea stage, early-childhood educators have been analyzing how the common K-12 standards could affect students and teachers in kindergarten through 3rd grade, and how well they dovetail with the early-learning guidelines or standards that most states already have for their preschool programs.

“This will cause us all to take a look at our early-learning standards for pre-K and check for alignment to see that we can transition children into the standards for kindergarten,” said Penny Milburn, the president of the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education, which represents those who shape state preschool programs.

Forty-eight states support the project to establish common K-12 “college and career readiness” standards, which were developed by panels of experts assembled by the NGA and the CCSSO and circulated among state officials and education groups for input and revision. During a three-week public comment period that ended April 2, the draft drew more than 5,000 comments. A final version is expected later this spring. (“Proposed Standards Go Public,” March 17, 2010.)

Too Narrow?

One area of concern among early-childhood advocates is that the draft K-12 standards cover only math and literacy, leaving out subjects such as science and the arts; expectations for social and emotional growth and motor development; skills such as problem-solving; and such qualities as curiosity and persistence—all considered pivotal to young children’s healthy growing-up.

“Whatever gets raised up takes over for a while, and that’s scary,” said Jerlean E. Daniel, the executive director-designate of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, or NAEYC. “When you narrow down to a couple areas, you miss something.”

Much of the early-childhood community has long been wary of any formal standards for young children, fearing they could result in drilling of rote information. Some studies have found, too, that programs for young children have cut back on play-based learning to prepare pupils for the tested subjects that lie ahead.“Having standards in early-childhood education in general is not a good idea,” said Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of early-childhood education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., and one of more than 400 prominent early-childhood educators who signed a statement by the advocacy group Alliance for Childhood opposing the draft common standards.

“They focus on outcomes: ‘You have to have this skill and this skill by this time,’ when what you should be doing is focusing on inputs, training educators to develop a range of capacities that allow them to be shaping learning, in the moment, for every individual child.”

The children with the weakest skills approaching kindergarten are the ones most likely to attend schools that are short on money and experienced teachers, increasing the chances that creative approaches to early learning will be replaced by drill-based instruction and creating “more school failure for the very children we’re trying to shore up,” Ms. Carlsson-Paige said.

Mr. Wilhoit, a former commissioner of education in Kentucky, said he recognizes the concerns about misuse of the standards and understands that it is “hard for people to back away from those perspectives, having had some inappropriate examples of misuse.” But he urged those considering the standards to “separate” them from those poor examples, noting that there are also many implementations of high-quality standards.

Age Appropriate

Even some of those who support early-learning standards question whether some items in the common-core draft are appropriate for all children.

Sue Bredekamp, a Cheverly, Md.-based consultant who has helped design early-learning standards for states and for the federal Head Start program, cited as an example a requirement in the document that by the end of kindergarten, children should be able to “read emergent-reader literature texts with purpose and understanding.”

“A lot of kids will be able to do this, and quite a few won’t,” she said. “Some will still need extra support and shouldn’t fail if they can’t read fluently.”

She suggested broader phrasing, such as adding “with scaffolding as necessary,” as the standards do at the 2nd grade level, to allow for kindergartners’ varying developmental abilities. The idea, she said, isn’t to water down what should be expected of the youngest children, but to accommodate differing rates of development so that all children learn what they need to know by 3rd grade, but at differing speeds, in differing ways.

Likewise, Ms. Bredekamp said, a requirement that kindergarten students be able to “ask questions about unknown words in a text” raises the question of whether they must be able to read that text independently, rather than reading with a teacher’s assistance or having it read aloud to them.

Feedback such as that, Mr. Wilhoit said, has produced “a healthy and thoughtful exchange that has literally changed the document we’re working on. That’s exactly what we want.”

Samuel J. Meisels, the president of the Erikson Institute, a graduate school of child development in Chicago, and the author of learning standards for birth through 6th grade, said that a major problem with the draft K-12 common standards is that they started from the end point of college and career readiness and worked backward, rather than figuring out how and what the youngest children need to learn, and building upward from there.

“They read like they started from the top, went down from there, and just ran out of room,” he said. “They’ll have to make standards for prenatal now.”

Literacy expert Susan B. Neuman, a professor of educational studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said the common standards give too little attention to the development of oral-language vocabulary and comprehension, which for young children must precede written language development. She also criticized them for only suggesting—not requiring—the inclusion of specific texts, such as Three Billy Goats Gruff. Both the content and structure of such time-tested literature are important, she said.

“It’s like these children are supposed to develop skills with no content knowledge,” said Ms. Neuman, who was the U.S. Department of Education’s assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education during President George W. Bush’s first term. “We know that it’s not just important to retell any story, it’s important to retell classic stories like The Three Little Pigs. Their simplistic, episodic structure, and their classical elements, help children understand other stories. And teachers will expect them to know that later.”

‘Limited Precedent’

Many leading voices in the early-childhood field recognize the risk of misusing early-learning standards, but still believe that, with care, they can be done right.

“I am strongly pro-standards,” said Sharon Lynn Kagan, a former NAEYC president who is a professor of early-childhood education affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Child Study Center at Yale University. “The criticism that they could be misused is valid. We have limited precedent for how to use standards well. But well constructed and well used, they can advance the quality of early-childhood education and the capacities of our teachers.”

Good early-childhood standards cover all the domains crucial to young children’s development, and the proposed common K-12 standards do not do that, she added.

Barbara T. Bowman, who has helped shape training for early-childhood educators for four decades at the Erikson Institute, said that taking charge of the Chicago public schools’ early-childhood programs five years ago has helped her see the value of a common set of expectations, especially for the most disadvantaged children.

“I see children are not getting the kind of education they need to be school-successful,” she said. “We have to have high, clear standards, not to make high-stakes decisions with, but for teachers to use so they know what we expect. Unless we make that very clear, often it’s not happening.”

Ms. Bowman added that she believes those skills can be imparted in developmentally appropriate ways. “We see it done well by good teachers,” she said. “We have to make sure all teachers are doing it.”

One of the most important things any early teacher can teach a child is how to manage himself in a public situation. We always begin with a little something called a line. Now granted, many adults would view a child’s line up as almost sad. Putting little kids into a formation that seems to take their personalities away seems brutal. So let’s look at the child and his needs and his desires to better understand why the line is so important.

In his first group, a little child is not going to understand why he can’t be the first and the only. After all, he is the first and many times the only at home, and that is what he is accustomed to. When there are thirty first and onlys there are often collisions – heads get bumped, and children are pushed down. There are tears, hurt feelings and a sense of loss of the parent that all emerge at the same time. Chaos raises its pernicious head, and nobody is happy.

Establishing the order of a line is not an easy process. It’s about like herding cats. We often put marks on the floor and have the children each find a mark to stand on. If the marks or stickers are different, most of the children find a great satisfaction with a particular sticker. Getting a child to remain on the sticker while the other children find stickers is the hard part. That sense that “I don’t really have to” is rampant in today’s child care.

Over the months, children begin to understand that somehow when the line is ready and everyone is in it, and that includes them, the line will magically take them outside. It’s still a fractured line – a noisy, broken line with children facing in all directions. But none the less, it’s somewhat functional as it does somehow get the children from the school to the playground.

Understanding that formation begins with listening and following directions is not always easy especially when there is little back up at home. But stopping, listening, and then doing are the steps to being socially attuned to what is going on in public, and this one ability – to stop self, to listen to another, and to do what is required will make the difference between a success and a failure in big school.

So this is our job. Lately we’ve been working on being quiet at the table. The idea it’s OK to scream at the table and wave arms and kick under the table are bad habits to be broken in order that a child can go off to big school and manage his lunch in a reasonable time with reasonable success.

We have also been working on washing our hands properly and looking at them to see for ourselves that our hands are clean. Self management is a tough thing to teach. From the first scramble to be first and only, a child will not desire to be the cleanest or have the best scrubbed hands. It doesn’t work that way. Instead, he will dash to the bathroom, stick his hands under running water and then make a wet bee line to the classroom in order to be first where upon he will tumble and roll and toss around until he is sent back to the bathroom to start all over again.

There is a maturity peak of about late five or six when suddenly a child begins to understand that getting quiet, standing properly in line, washing well the first time, and being quiet at the table makes everything that “must” be done go faster. When they begin to grasp the concept, it’s spring and then summer and then it’s back to herding cats.

Helping a child at home is really just a two step little dance. The parent makes a request and then asks the child to repeat verbally what has been asked. Then the parent waits for the child to comply. Works.

Good Morning, and for those not my friends on Facebook, Happy Easter.

This week is getting back to ordinary time – my favorite. By the Church Calendar, we have another forty days of Easter, but as far as holidays go, we’re done for a while.

This week we will be digging into learning and trying to keep spring fever away! I know in arithmetic class we will be Streeeeeeeeeeeeeetching into a fast paced “I can do this all by myself” kind of thing. We will focus on number patterns with the hope of becoming very knowledgeable about base ten which is what our number system is all about. We will be testing on number facts of twos and advance to the threes this week.

We are going to start working on the “Friends of Jesus” in our Bible Story class. The question is “Who were and are his friends” with a focus of why that’s so.

In Fine Arts, we will be looking at what we see and trying to draw that. Children will be invited to find something in the school house they would like to draw.

In Geography class, we will be really searching out the United States and doing a little history about how it all got together and then we will begin to look at each state.

In Word Power class, Miss Amy is having the children choose a word and create a definition and learn the part of speech and then write write a sentence using the word. All excellent prep for big school.

In our Kindergarten for Fours, Miss Amy has taught the children enough so that they are writing sentences and really enjoying the power of the written word!

In Reading, Miss Leigh is having the children read, read, read. Practice is sooooo important.

I am so proud of our little guys this year. There has been so much growth and development, and so much joy, it’s very hard to explain. Let’s say what began a little like herding cats in August has become a group of short teens on an everyday trip to Orderville. Love them!

Lasagna today; new dish tomorrow – gnocchi with snausage ;-} and then on Wednesday, there is breakfast for lunch, chicken cheese pockets on Thursday, and Fish on Friday.

Blessings always and have a great week.

Governor approves new teacher licensing regulations

INDIANAPOLIS (March 30, 2010) – Governor Mitch Daniels today signed new teacher licensing rules that are aimed at improving student achievement, ensuring that all new teachers will be experts in the subjects they teach, and helping adults in other careers move more easily into teaching.

The Indiana Department of Education’s Rules for Educator Preparation and Accountability (REPA) require that those who teach grades 5 through 12 earn baccalaureate degrees in the subjects they teach. A degree in education by itself for these grades will no longer qualify an applicant for an Indiana teaching license.

“From now on, we’ll know for certain that math teachers know math, science teachers know science, history teachers know history, and so on. ‘How to’ courses have their place, but they are secondary in value to mastery of the content we need our children to learn,” said Daniels.
Members of the Advisory Board of the Division of Professional Standards, including Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Tony Bennett, have worked with education stakeholders on the revisions since July 2009.

“These new regulations are a win for Indiana’s students and educators, and they are a great example of the good things that can happen when adults come together to improve instructional quality for students and put the needs of Indiana children first,” Bennett said.

“The Commission for Higher Education looks forward to working with our colleges and universities to align Indiana’s teacher preparation programs to these new licensing standards for the benefit of both students and teachers,” said Teresa Lubbers, higher education commissioner. “Every student who enters an Indiana school of education should do so with the understanding that our state is placing a priority on content knowledge and effective instruction.”

The rules will also:

• Assist successful adults in other careers such as math, science and engineering to become teachers in Indiana schools.
• Provide more flexibility for current and future teachers to renew and update licenses without having to spend thousands of dollars in college tuition.
• Make it easier for current teachers to teach different courses by passing subject matter examinations. This will make teachers more marketable and help schools to offer a wider variety of courses, especially in math and science.
• Increase student achievement. Incoming teachers will work with school leaders to create personalized professional development plans aimed at improving instruction.

Empower school boards to hire superintendents from outside the traditional educational system.
The new teacher licensing rules go into effect July 31, 2010. For more information on the Rules for Educator Preparation and Accountability, go to www.doe.in.gov/news/2009/07-July/REPA.html.