conuly

Uh-oh.

2010-05-16T00:40:36Z

So, Ana's in-class birthday party is MONDAY.

When I was a kid, my mother used to make little activity books for our classes on our birthdays - things like mazes or word searches.

I want to do something similar for Ana this year. I have 24 rainbow crayons I need to unload on somebody.

WHAT DO I INCLUDE? Mazes? Connect-the-dots? A mad-libs type thing? A coloring page?

Also, where can I find online resources to help me make (or steal-with-permission) this shit?

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I need help....

2009-12-29T16:03:27Z

Ana is reading at somewhere above a "J" level. J seems to mean "A Porcupine Named Fluffy", which I just outright bought her for Christmas because she kept taking it out for school and I thought she should be fair to the other children.

Last year she was among the best readers in her class, reading at a "G" level. Children reading above an "F" level were to write five sentences in their reading log over the summer.

The teachers judge what level a book is and write the letter with a sharpie on the cover. It's not just this school, I've bought used books that clearly come from other schools that have the same system.

How do I know what level a book is? What's a reasonable range of level for first grade when they started teaching reading in kindergarten? I want to get (more) books for the classroom as a gift, but I want to get books that are most useful, not ones that will be too hard or too easy for most children most of the year. How is this determined?

Help? Please?

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Walking school bus....

2009-06-18T18:34:02Z

A walking school bus is basically like a carpool without the cars. Except that sometimes you can get help from school staff as well.

Jenn and I have periodically mentioned to each other a desire for a WSB at Ana's school. (And Evangeline's!)

Only thing... the school doesn't have many students yet (as it only goes up to the second grade, and only has one class there as well) and, worse yet, many of the students live much too far away to reasonably expect them to walk. (Or even unreasonably, given how young they all still are!)

But it occurs to me that due to a quirk of history, our school is less than five minutes (walking!) from the next-nearest public school! (And it's only 5 minutes from the nearest non-public elementary school as well, smack dab in the middle of the two schools in what's basically a straight line.)

THIS school might not have enough students to really make a walking school bus work (although it'll ultimately have 440 students), but this school plus PS 16 plus (if we could work with a non-public school) Trinity Lutheran certainly does.

How does one go about suggesting this sort of multiple-school arrangement to the PTA? The logical thing to do, just working in the one school, would be to send letters home asking people who are interested to sign up and then use their addresses to plot "bus stops", just like we do for the real school bus. And to do this in more than one school and insist that there be a parent volunteer per route per school. But how do I say that in a polite and convincing way? I don't always exactly have the gift of the gab, you know.

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