I live in a poor, rural area. There is a definite need. Some is parents who want to take care of their children but are struggling, and frankly some of the need is crappy parents who spend all their money on heroin. Either way the kids don't deserve to go hungry. I don't want kids to be hungry. I still can't help but feel like I'm being punished when my son's behavior is completely out of control on the days the school gives him food we don't want him to have.

I can say without exaggeration that 3/4 of the discussions I have had with my son's preschool teacher have involved the elementary school's meal policies. A young kid with poor impulse control, drinking strawberry or chocolate milk 3x a day, being given the sugary carby food the school supplies because he wants what a lot of the other kids are eating even though we pack meals...disaster. Now, some of our problems are specifically the way this teacher and school have handled things. The setup of the program encourages it though. It isn't life or death for us but it is a giant freaking pain in the rear.

Can I follow along? I've been trying to figure out whether or not talent searches will still be offering it or what alternative they will be using. The EXPLORE had been part of our plan but now I don't know what we will do.

I haven't tried it but I have at least a dozen friends on Facebook who are using it with their kids. They have been posting that they are seeing the kids doing new things, but also losing their own minds listening to the repetition. :)

Haha, yep, I told him I wanted to see which level would be a good fit, and then I was going to spend another month debating whether or not to buy it. He "solved" the problem by telling me he just bought everything. Of course now that he has done that I will feel like I NEED to use it all so it doesn't get wasted. Rational is probably not the best word to describe my curriculum habits!

Phone call from my husband at the convention: "They only had those guides you wanted me to look at packaged with sets, so I ordered one for each level and they will be shipped to the house." His way sounds a lot less stressful, but we might need a new budget meeting for next year's expenses!

Oh my goodness. I have children around that age and reading level. They are coming from a background of profound neglect; they are still learning English; they are extremely delayed developmentally. The idea of a child in a family environment with a concerned parent being at that same level and people saying that is okay....it blows my mind.

Thank you so much for suggesting this! I was able to check it out through ILL and I will likely be buying a copy for our family. It has been so helpful for what we are doing, and it has been great to see on paper how many skills we have already mastered.

I was considering a drone delivery of peanut butter eggs this morning, so I'm probably not one to talk...

I want to doublecheck levels for some of my kids for my own use. I've purchased the online CAT in the past to send in results with notification papers, but I don't want to spend the money on this when it isn't really a need and there are a few kids I'd like to evaluate. I know of a few places to find previously released state tests for 3rd grade, 5th grade, etc. I don't know if there is something like that for K or 1st.

I've noticed a lot of people around here use the word ornery. It is a great word! I love it! I use it all the time. But they use it incorrectly. As an example, at a PT eval one of my kids was cracking up over a whoopee cushion. He had never seen one and thought it was the funniest thing ever. The PT kept talking about how ornery he was and how he was going to be a handful because he is just the orneriest kid and so on. She meant boisterous or enthusiastic. It was making me twitchy.

If he actually tried to enforce consequences that don't exist, that would be illegal and you could do something about it. Being a jerk, probably not so much.

Is the question whether it is legal for a principal to not know or incorrectly state the law? You said you know the law for your area and know that he was wrong.

I think it's supposed to read with a pause between the "making Gotham" and "happy." They are helping develop the city and making it a happier place at the same time? I think I'd prefer the same words without the comma but with the happy in a different color than the first two words, assuming that is their intent. (Now I'm looking at every comma and wondering if it belongs there. I'm a recovering comma-scatterer myself.)

I'm trying to decide why I disagree with this so strongly. Maybe because there isn't a value judgment to someone being "smarter," it is just a statement of fact? Some of my children are much "smarter" than their siblings, but that doesn't mean they are better or more valuable or more loved. If it *is* true that this effect is occurring (which is up for debate), stating that fact wouldn't be any more disrespectful to me than stating the change in average lifespan in the last X years. It isn't disrespectful to say that the average lifespan of my parents' generation is significantly longer than that of their great great-grandparents, is it?

It sounded like the problem with wasted coffee was on the growing end. A lot of water etc is used to produce coffee that people brew but don't end up drinking.

We usually serve it with pork or sometimes with black eyed peas and bacon.

I have this checked out from the library right now to look over after I saw you mention it in a different thread. :)

I have a feeling when she says they use gestures, they are miming to get an idea across to her? I know we have done and still do that a lot with our kids who came to use with a combination of no English and very limited vocabulary in their first language. It isn't exactly the same situation, but I know how frustrating it is to try to explain something and more words just don't help. Once my kids understand a word they can usually recognize it in the future and use it with practice, but getting to that point is tough. In our case we don't continue communication with those gestures. We use them to explain a word and then our kids use the word.

I know I did as a teenager...

I'm not sure there is a way to save or import them? The last few books I've borrowed have been loaded into a specific app and I'm not sure that I can access them any other way.

This was one of my favorite movies as a kid. Charlie is the one who returns from the dead, and Carface is the one who killed him.

Almost everyone was better by yesterday afternoon. Other than the one who is sick, only one was still cranky by the end of the day. His attitude will be fixed by an afternoon of hard work outside with his father this afternoon, which was overdue anyway. ;)

That's what I was afraid of. It looks like I will need to leave some space in the budget to buy a few through the year if they don't come in when we need them.

This morning was so terrible I decided to cancel all of our morning schoolwork after breakfast and send everyone back to their beds to nap or look at books. I expected one to be tired and cranky because he has an ear infection on the mend, but everyone else should have gotten plenty of sleep last night. I have a sneaking suspicion that they are coming down with something. We have had the flu, a respiratory virus, and two different stomach bugs so far this year, each lasting a couple weeks from the time the first to the last passed them around. I'm so tired of disinfecting...