By Kathryn Corazzelli

Summit Daily News

Comment: For those of you who have followed our Flat Stanley Project, our Flat Stanleys have made the news! In the picture, three of the children are holding our class’s Flat Stanleys!

While many are busy polishing off leftover Halloween candy and planning how to brine the Thanksgiving turkey, folks at the Dillon Community Church are busy wrapping Christmas presents.

The gifts come in the form of empty shoe boxes filled with school supplies, stuffed animals, toys, hygiene items and notes of encouragement for needy kids overseas. The effort, dubbed Operation Christmas Child, is a year-round project of Samaritan’s Purse, a religious-based organization that provides emergency relief around the world. Through Operation Christmas Child, 86 million gifts have been hand-delivered using whatever means necessary — including sea containers, boats, camels and dog sleds — to kids worldwide since 1993.

“This may be the only gift they get, not only this year, but possibly for their lifetime,” Kathryn Jo Pfeifer, collection effort coordinator in Dillon said. “It’s an amazing opportunity to be able to know you’re touching children’s lives so far away.”

This is the fourth year the project has been coordinated at the church. They collected 294 boxes in 2009 and 405 in 2010. Last year, 117,466 boxes were collected statewide. “Each box made really counts,” Pfeifer said. “We are hoping we will continue the trend of increasing these numbers each year. We are encouraging people to do neighborhood parties, pizza parties and get together with friend and have some fun with this project while they put together boxes.”

Groups like the local cub scouts and girl scouts, classrooms and individual families like to get together to contribute, Pfeifer said. Just last week, about 90 people met at the church to decorate and stuff 66 boxes — Bass shoe outlet “has been wonderful with collecting shoe boxes” — with presents and supplies, and personal notes and pictures. Each gift is labeled for a boy or girl, and suitable age range.

Countries the gifts are sent to can be tracked online, by making a donation and printing out a tracking bar-code from the organization’s website.

That’s great for our kids,” Pfeifer said. “It’s been fun for them to know where these boxes end up.” And while the individual child the present goes to can’t be tracked, contributors do sometimes hear stories from volunteers who make the long trips to deliver the presents.

“They said the kids love the presents, love everything, but a lot of times what they dig through the box looking for is the picture and maybe the letter they get from the individual who made the box,” Pfeifer said.

Many times, volunteers report it’s “the kid without shoes that gets the box that has the shoes in it.”

Volunteer Anneke Crowe wraps presents along with her children, who are 8, 6, 5 and 3. Her older two, who have been participating for the last few years, always get excited. “They say ‘it’s time to go buy presents for other people, isn’t this great?’” Crowe said. “It’s rewarding to see that they understand why they’re giving.”

While Crowe hasn’t heard back personally from any of the children — along with a personal note, volunteers can include mailing addresses — her sister witnessed the impacts the gifts have last year on a trip to Mongolia.

“They were staying in a yurt. The children there were so excited to show my sister their things. When she went back to the little corner where they were sleeping, they pulled out their Operation Christmas Child boxes to show her,” Crowe said. “We wrap shoeboxes, and they save the wrapped shoeboxes. Their special treasures are in those.”

In Summit County, the due date for boxes is Nov. 20 so they can be delivered on time for a pre-holiday arrival. “So that is why we’re celebrating Christmas early,” Pfeifer said.

The truth is, the play is one of the most important things we do at the Garden School. First, it fulfills many of the kindergarten standards, secondly, it allows children to step outside themselves and become someone else in public…and that’s fun, but it’s also a kind of creativity that begins on the inside of a person and continues all the way out and into an audience.

My theory on Kindergarten is that is most kindergarten curricula should be a project for four year olds because that’s when they want it. By five, a child is into his first formative imagination where he directs his mind to explore, experience and dream about what ifs. If a child has the reading and writing skills AT five, he is more likely to be more creative and therefore brighter and therefore more aware…and that train follows right into old age.

Plays encourage the arts, social skills, imagination skills, and group activity. It’s not MY play, it’s not YOUR play, it’s OUR play, and my line is important in the story to get to your line which moves to other lines until we have told our story, made people laugh and had a splendid good learning experience.

Plays are not things one will generally find in most schools because they are hard to do. Enterprising teacher, who think things through, will know that when you produce a play, it generally fulfills a lot of state standards.

But where do you get plays? I write mine, but that’s something children can do, many parents would love to do, and even the Internet has plays.

A good play needs to be the length the children can handle. Our first play is about fifteen minutes long. Our Spring play has been a half hour. This is long enough. A play needs to tell a story and have enough dialogue that every child has at least one line. Some children will not deliver a line in public. One year, my grandson held up a sign that said his line because he was terrified. He didn’t mind standing on stage, he just didn’t want to say anything. By the time he was graduated from the GS, he was a top star.

Don’t be afraid of changing lines mid practice. It’s good for the kids and it’s good for the play. Children should always be comfortable reciting their lines, and they should not fear getting a chuckle from the audience.

We invite parents and grandparents to our plays. It’s always a grand time. Children always grow so big during play practice and especially on the performance day.

Plays also bring children together and make the group bonded as no other thing can bond them.

This year, Miss Amy is directing our play. She is doing a fantastic job and the kids are loving it. Can’t wait for the end product… November 18 at 2:00!

My mother died at ninety-one, and I would say she spent very few days affectionate towards me. She simply did not like me, nor did she wish me well. She was unkind most of the time, humiliating and punishing and rarely approving. She was golden girl of the Alphie Kohn method of parenting, and it did NOT work.

People sometimes talk about spending time – just one more day, hour, lunch, or evening – with someone who has died. I see it on Facebook all the time…”If I could just spend one more day…” Not me. I wouldn’t want to spend thirty seconds with either my mother or my father simply because I don’t want to spend time with anyone who is constantly unkind to me. It’s that simple.

It’s the same with friends, husbands, and other relatives and even work environments. Do you really want to spend the time you have been given with people who make fun of you; cut your dialogue off; make you wait in line for any recognition; take phone calls on your time; forget you in all kinds of situations; lose your things? It’s really no ones duty to sustain constant insults, belittling, lies, and even taking seconds over and over again for the sake of “family” or the “work environment” or for the sake of an “old friend” simply because you’ve known them forever? Or even a husband who is rude, unkind or simplistically male?

Over the last year, I’ve lost three old friends who I’ve had for at least twenty years…no they didn’t die…they simply became so unkind, I decided that the cost was too great to continue the friendships. Do I miss them? Not in the slightest. I can’t seem to miss people in my life who are unkind who use me, abuse me and then ignore me.

When I look at the children at the Garden School, I sometimes watch them play, and occasionally I will hear, “If you don’t, I won’t…” I would love to hear the response, “So what?” or “Go ahead because nobody cares.” Children need to have their friendships monitored by loving parents. They need to know when they have taken the friendship on a wrong turn. Children need to learn from the beginning that there are rules about how we treat one another, how to say a “no” if their friend does something un-friendly.

Friendships are meant to be cherished, to be cultivated, to be loved and not to be a stepping stone to another one, or a time waster, or a crutch, or a pathology looking for a place crash. A friendship is companionship; it’s a give and take; it’s a soft spot in the road of life.

Encouraging real friendships is not only a parent’s duty, it’s a responsibility. Ask your children who their best friend is and why. Talk about your child’s friend at home, and encourage your child to always be kind.

With our travels over until the Nutcracker in December, it’s time to really focus on the play. Play lines have been sent home and it’s time for the children to learn to say these lines in the order in which they must be delivered. Memorizing just the line is not going to help. Parents should review the whole scene with their children so that the children know when they are supposed to come in.

It’s a process, like anything else.

The play will be at 2:00 (and not 3:00 p.m.) this year on November 18. We have changed the time for the sake of the children. 3:00 p.m. is just too late on a Friday to expect them to do a good job. Fridays are tough enough, but there has always been a “holding tank” between 1:00 and 2:00 when the kids just ran and exhausted themselves and then had to put on their costumes and half of them just wanted to go to sleep. So this year the play is at 2:00 p.m.

Costumes will be provided for every child. Parents are welcome to help with refreshments.

This is going to be one of those warm, then cold, bright, then breezy, dry then wet weeks. long sleeves and jeans work well. Please remember that as the weather gets colder, short sleeves in a heavy coat just doesn’t cut the chill. Children need long sleeves to play outside.

Have a brilliant week!

Soak small white beans over night.

Boil beans until cooked – about an hour.

Reserve 3 cups of bean water. (I forgot to do this the second time I made them. Will let you know how they turned out without this.)

In a crock with a lid that is ovenproof, place beans

7 slices of uncooked bacon cut up into pieces ( use a scissors)

1 very large raw chopped onion

1 cup maple syrup – can be made by boiling 1/3 cup water and 2/3 cup sugar + maple flavoring

1 cup ketchup

1/2 cup yellow mustard

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup black pepper

1/4 teaspoon ground allspice

Mix in the crock, cover and cook two hours at 350.

These are truly yum.

Lots of fun. Returning to the school at 11:30 for lunch.

Field trips are wonderful for kids and we try to do as many as we can in a safe and exciting way. There have been a lot of field trips lately, and this one on Friday to the Lollipop Concert is no exception to the exciting. We do this every year, and the children love it. We are learning a song from Cinderella, “Bippity Boppity Boo” to sing at the concert.

Field trips are not cheap for either parents or the school. We charge a uniform rate for all field trips regardless of admission or bus fare. This makes it easier for parents and for collectors.

It costs between $150.00 and $1000.00 to take the bus out. Miss Sandy cuts a fabulous deal and is the ONLY driver in EVV who would do what we have asked her to do. She takes us on long fantastic trips anywhere we want to go. I am sure if we said we were going to Disney, she’d be there to drive. She has driven for us for sixteen years.

Every trip is a different expense, and when you add up the costs overall, they work out to about $10.00 per child per trip, so that’s why we charge a uniform fee. Also, we never know how many children until we are pulling out of the driveway, so it’s really hard to plan otherwise.

All our field trips are teaching. That’s why you will never see a trip to put put or Holiday Village or any amusement parks. We go on our field trips to learn, and the children really benefit from these trips. I wish there were a trip every Friday, and there could be…but the kids get so tired. There is, of course, during the summer. We put a protractor on two points: Evansville and St. Louis, and we draw a circle and anything within that circle is fair game, so if you know of something in that circle you think the kids should see, please let us know.

So Friday, the kids should wear their new Garden School field trip shirts or old green shirts, and their red sweatshirts. Those without red sweatshirts will have them tomorrow.

Have a great rainy day!