Sometimes the best times are ordinary times when there are no pressing holidays, birthdays or festivities of any kind in any way that add or detract from what we ordinarily do.

Ordinary uncluttered, undemeanding time is a good time to take measure of how we live, to make changes, to reorganize, to stop, look, and listen to the life we have created around us. It’s a time when the children in our care should take precedence.

Ordering ordinary takes time. It’s like spring housecleaning everything but the house because what we are really doing is cleaning up our regular routine and that’s no easy thing to do.

Beginning with our relationship with the children in our lives, parents and providers should re-examine what enables the philosophy of our child care to develop. What makes it good and not so good. What are our expectations and goals and then the ultimate question: Am I living up to my own expectations.

Sitting while watching children play is a good way to bring one’s thoughts to mind about the children in care or our own children. It’s an excellent time to ask questions:

Joshua will be going to kindergarten in the fall. How do I think he will do? Will his social maturity let him make friends easily? Will his interest in numbers and letters be as strong as his interest in stories and play? Will kindergarten be an academic success? Is he regularly happy? What does Joshua like? What makes him unhappy and what is my part in his happiness and his general success?

These are important questions to draw attention to as often as parents and providers have time. The answers need to be shared. Parents enjoy providers’ insights as well — providers need insights to the children in their care.

Last year, Steven’s teacher said he was attention deficit with hyperactivity. What can I do to help Steven focus at play? What toys can I buy that will help him desire to sit and do?

Examining homes where children play is another productive activity of ordinary time. Parents and providers who consistently find better ways to keep playrooms and play stations will find any kind of child care easier.

Ask: where and how are the toys kept in my house? Are they up and out of site or available and orderly and inviting to the children? Do I use a toy box so kids have to dig and find all the pieces, or shelving with bins so everything is always available?

What are the favorite toys? Is TV on because the toys are few, unexciting with pieces everywhere? Whose fault is that?

Personal child care goals are always a thing to think about in ordinary time. The number one question is: am I just making it through another day, or am I meeting my goals and thriving on my child care successes?

Thinking about ordinary things in ordinary times gives a kind of polish to our lives. Stopping to ask ourselves questions about self and those others we love helps make ordinary time the best time of the year.

I have not been able to add much to the blog; please bear with me. I’m working a double shift these days, so I’m home about three hours a day. I’ve been spending a lot of time at school and really loving it. The kids have been a bit squirrelly this week because of the weather fronts coming in, but all in all it’s been a great week.

Because I don’t teach a morning class, I don’t have individual contact with each child. One of the things I’ve noticed is how many of the little ones don’t listen. Listening is the most important thing that we can teach a child, and children who don’t listen are children who are very far behind both in development and broader knowledge of the world.

Getting children to listen is not that hard, but it has to begin at home. It begins with parents who read to children and who eat dinner with them with the TV and radio off.

“He won’t let us…” is often the common complaint. Reading takes time. It’s a time that needs to come into every child’s life once or twice a day at least. Even if the few minutes you choose to read to your child is spent talking to him and having him listen to YOU is the only thing you accomplish at first it’s time well spent.

Find a book with pictures and point out certain things, and have your child point out other things. This is an excellent beginning. Then when he or she is comfortable sitting with you, begin to read. It might not last more than a couple of pages, but within a few weeks, he or she will look forward to this special time and begin to listen, which means trust, and enjoy it.

Children hear all day long a myriad of things, but listening means taking it in and learning from it. Listening is a learned skill, and it means the difference between understanding and not.

This week is a stay at home week. We will be doing our Knowledge Bee and Golden Bead club today. It’s a questionable day, because we have so many out from illness. This has been a pernicious flu and grabs whole families. If your child talks of a stomach ache, please take him seriously!

We will try to make papiermache pumpkins on Monday and study Columbus on Tuesday. We are inching into a whole week of Native Americans next week.

The weather is still quite warm, so shorts and t shirts are the best choice for school.

We will be having easy on the stomach foods this week.

We are delighted with candy sales and appreciate all that you parents do for us. It is an honor to have your children at school.

If you have any questions, please speak with a teacher.

Here’s an old family favorite that I haven’t made for years. When we were out at the farm on Friday, Mr. Mayse gave me a cabbage, and I brought it home thinking I would make glumki, a Polish dish, out of it, and on Sunday I did.

The dish is stuffed cabbage leaves, and here is what you do:

You peal as many leaves off the cabbage as you want to make rolls. I made eight – two each per person per night. We will eat this two days running.

Set the cabbage leaves aside.

Make a cup of dry brown rice per instructions on the box.

Brown a pound of ground beef, ground lamb, ground pork or sausage, or a pound of bacon.

With the meat, also brown half an onion.

When the rice is done, mix rice, meat and onion and set aside.

In a small pot, make a nice tomato sauce with your regular spaghetti spices.

Divide the rice-meat mix into each cabbage leaf and close. You can use a toothpick or just turn the closure down so the weight of the roll keeps the roll closed.

Pour your sauce over the rolls and bake for about 35 minutes.

Serve with sour cream.

It was a great and dirty week. That playground is making us all crazy. It is so dry and dusty out there, we all need safety masks!

It was an interesting week. Lots in the hopper. The great event is Miss Nita’s Middles are beginning to read. This is being helped along by Miss Amy’s writing class. We are soooooooooo proud of these children who are coming along so fast. It is sooooooooooooo exciting to see and hear them read for the very first time. When a five year old can read the word vocabulary, it’s just tear making!

We had a nice visit on Thursday from the Knight Fire Department. The children who kept their medals were able to spray the hose.

We did not do a golden bead this past week or a Knowledge Bee because we went to Mayse farm for a wonderful hay ride, a walk through two mazes, a lesson in the green house, and a cookie and juice. Such fun! With our heads filled with farm information, we went out to Newburgh Fortress of Fun. It was a splendid day. We had a nice picnic lunch and a romp on the playground and then we came home for Popsicles and play. We were all exhausted.

There was a time when using the wrong fork was considered a child’s bad manner. Now, grabbing his neighbor’s fork and hurling it across the room is supposed to be tolerated.

I remember as a child trying to be inconspicuous by walking quietly down the right side of the hallways in school trying to compensate for squeaky shoes especially past open classroom doors that I wouldn’t have dared look into.

Now, children clamor down hallways knocking into one another, pushing and screaming no matter what is going on in the next room. They will disturb anything and anyone in their attempt to grab as much attention as they can. Two weeks ago, a fifth grader came up to me at a public playground, pointed her finger at me and said, “You. Yeah you. I think one of your children is hurt.”

I wasn’t surprised when I read a press release that said more parents favor academic success than social success in the classroom. It shows. The headline read:

Although Americans Grapple with Right Balance, Academic Concerns Trump Character Development in New Nationwide Poll

Is it really more important for a very young child to succeed academically than socially especially in today’s bad manners world?

According to the article, men gave more importance to academics than character development (40 percent to 28 percent), while women were evenly divided between the two at 34 percent.

Those with post-graduate degrees were the biggest proponents of character development over academics (45 percent to 33 percent).

On a regional basis, only respondents in the Midwest viewed the academic/character tradeoff with equal interest. Academics were clearly more important in the Northeast, Southeast and West.

Are the awful character problems now an acceptable cost of failed parenting? Are children who disrupt, destroy and antagonize an entire group OK provided they get good grades?

Strong academic pressure seems to be all parents can muster. Parents fear academic demands are all a child can bear. Parents are afraid adding moral responsibility will cause a child to implode, so they cower at the point of punishing behavior because grades count. In grade inflated, teacher bullied classrooms, the child has license to do as he pleases.

Few adults are really comfortable enforcing rules and that begins early, so many let poor behaviors stand like cheating and lying and aggression towards other children. Most parents will not issue a real punishment corporal or otherwise because it’s simply too dangerous, too emotionally hard. So many have turned this vice into a virtue touting any punishment somehow damages the well-being of the child.

But isn’t that the point of punishment? It’s supposed to damage the well being of the child. If a child is contented with atrocious behavior, a good parent should want to damage that contentment with great swiftness.

The real question is: how can parents stand a poorly behaved child? The work it takes to undo early formation is tantamount to reprogramming a computer with color crayons and scrap paper.

Besides, ignoring nightmare behaviors often leads to emotional problems. According to the Parents Survey on Discipline, reported in the Chicago Sun-Times in January, 93 percent of schools say kindergartners today have more emotional and behavioral problems than were seen just five years ago.

While we place enormous academic pressure on children at the expense of character development, emotional intelligence is undervalued. Think of what doors that opens for the future, and the beat goes on.

Head Start Proposal Aims to Turn Up Heat on Lagging Programs

Niahla Johnson peeks out from her class line after recess at Skelly Early Childhood Education Center in Tulsa, Okla. Proposed federal rules would impose tighter accountability standards for Head Start programs.

—Shane Bevel for Education Week

Low-Performing Centers Would Have to Compete

In one of the biggest changes to Head Start in its 45-year history, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has announced proposed rules that would force low-performing programs to compete for their federal funding.

About 1,600 Head Start grantees around the country run programs for low-income preschool children, at a cost of about $7.2 billion annually. At least a quarter of the grantees being evaluated in any given year—those falling below a certain performance threshold—would be required under the new rule to “recompete” for their grants against other interested entities in the community.

The 25 percent requirement would go beyond a recommendation from a federal advisory committee that 15 to 20 percent of grantees be required to recompete in any given year. But government officials said that the 25 percent number sends a message that Head Start will only support high-quality programs. The recompetition requirement would also apply to Early Head Start, which serves pregnant women, infants, and toddlers.

‘Tough, But Fair’

“For the Office of Head Start and the department, we are really trying to get the message out to grantees that it’s about increasing quality and holding grantees accountable,” said Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, the director of the federal Office of Head Start, in an interview.

Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a member of the Head Start advisory committee, said he was “floored” that the federal agency accepted the recommendations and made them even more stringent.

“This is great, and it should have happened a long time ago,” he said.

And Joel Ryan, executive director of a Head Start advocacy group for programs based in Washington state, called the proposed rules “tough, but fair.”

Nancy Scales works on an art project with Key’Shon Holmes, left, and Sacira Polley during class at Skelly Early Childhood Education Center, a Head Start program in Tulsa, Okla.

—Shane Bevel for Education Week

He added:”Those programs that aren’t doing a good job are holding everyone back.”

Head Start programs are evaluated on a rotating basis, and not every one is reviewed each year. The proposed rules say those up for evaluation in a particular year would be reviewed under seven performance conditions that fall into the categories of program quality, licensing and operation, and fiscal and internal controls.

Programs that are above a certain threshold will be federally funded on a five-year cycle. Programs that fall below the threshold would recompete. And even if serious deficiencies noted during a review are corrected, the grantee would still be required to recompete for federal funds.

If examining the seven conditions do not result in at least a quarter of the grantees evaluated in any given year recompeting for federal money, monitoring officials propose to look at additional factors in order to meet the 25 percent requirement.

Program Struggles

The proposed rule does not change existing regulations for when a grant can be terminated. Funding can still be terminated immediately if a program has a serious violation related to child care or financial integrity. Terminated grantees will not be permitted to compete for funding for five years.

Comments on the proposal will be accepted until Dec. 21.

The proposed changes come in the midst of difficult times for the preschool program. The intent of Head Start is to meet the social, educational, and physical needs of poor young children, preparing them to achieve in school at the same levels as their more-affluent peers.

However, studies have found mixed results for children in Head Start. The latest large-scale study, which was released in January, evaluated nearly 5,000 children. The Head Start children showed marked early gains in language and literacy. But by the end of the 1st grade, most of those advantages seem to have disappeared.

In 2007, the Congress made major changes to Head Start. Programs were no longer able to keep their federal grants indefinitely, absent major issues of mismanagement or regulatory noncompliance. Instead, grantees were to be given awards every five years. The Congress also authorized the health and human services department to create the recompetition process.

‘Ambitious’ Proposal

Mr. Haskins, a former White House and congressional advisor on welfare issues and the co-director of the Washington-based Brookings Center on Children and Families, said that “potentially, it’s the most serious reform in the history of Head Start. It’s a signal that we’re really serious. We intend to close bad programs.”

W. Steven Barnett, the co-director for the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., had similar praise for the proposed regulations, calling them “the most ambitious change in Head Start possibly in 40 years.”

The proposed regulations mark a necessary change, he added. “We have a long way to go to excellence. Just ‘good’ isn’t good enough,” he said.

The new rules may prompt Head Start programs to use performance data to see how well their preschoolers are prepared for school, as is now done in the Head Start program run by the Community Action Project, or CAP, in Tulsa, Okla.

Oklahoma has a pre-kindergarten program, and CAP has a collaborative partnership with the 41,500-student Tulsa school district to also provide pre-K services. While the district educates about 2,200 4-year-olds, the CAP Head Start program serves about 600 additional 4-year-olds, plus 600 3-year-olds. Cecilia J. Robinson, the senior director of early childhood programs for CAP, said the program uses data to improve its education practice, for example, providing professional development to teachers after determining that children in the program were weak in cognitive and language skills. “We really see ourselves as a small, early-childhood school district,” she said.

The new rules “are not something we’re worried about as a grantee,” Ms. Robinson said. In a reform-driven age, the rules “are not targeted at agencies, so much as focused on improvement.”

A great big Oops for Miss Judy. This week at the Garden School we will be studying Apples including Johnny Appleseed, apples in art, and doing apple painting. It’s a great year for apples and we will be going to the farm on Friday.

Our trip to the farm will leave at 9:00 and return at 1:00. Your children MUST wear their green school shirt. If you do not have one yet, we will supply it.

Your children MUST wear shoes that tie and are meant for walking. Please do not send children in dress shoes and dresses that day. Shorts or jeans are a must.

We will take a usual school picnic with us that offers children, tuna, egg, cheese, and peanut butter, and a variety of apples, carrots, chips, and other goodies.

The cost of this trip is $10.00

Please remember in these changing days that the morning temp is not the temp all day. Putting winter clothes on a child so that his trip from the car to the school won’t be cold and letting him sweat the rest of the day doesn’t make sense. Please check your weather report and remember that your child is running outside.

Have a great week!

Friday was a great week. We had lots and lots of kids get gold beads for not losing their medals all week. I was so glad to see a majority of the children line up for these little beads.

We had Sherri Reffi in to visit from the library. She was outstanding, and we applaud her.

We had our weekly Knowledge Bee on Friday Morning, and Phoenix, Jack Ha, Jill and Makenzie won. They each got a star. Then Miss Jill got a special award for handwriting from Miss Amy.

We played a lot outside on Friday. In the PM, we painted trees.

Report cards went home on Friday. If you have any questions, please see the teacher who gave your child the grade you have questions about.

We have started our Holiday Season. We will be studying Autumn, holidays, and how we fit into the holidays. Children should be encouraged to talk about what their favorite holiday is, and how they celebrate that day at home.

Holidays are important for children. Children should be allowed to fully participate in these events. Remember, Halloween is for children, Thanksgiving is more for older family members, and Christmas is for everyone. This thinking allows children to see how we all benefit from holidays.