Blogs for Oct, 2009

New Anonymous Question Sent in

This just in....calling all parents.  If you have any advice for this person or can commiserate, please help if you can!

"Is anyone having issues with the EO Smith Spanish program? I have heard other parents say that they personally have had problems with these teachers for years!  How can this be?  Are these teachers tenured?
My child tells me that the entire class is failing!  This was at progress report time. How is ...

Parents May Be Saying OMG

You may be saying OMG and watching your teens ROFLOL (rolling on the floor laughing out loud) once you read this little ditty.  One of my personal concerns over the years as I have watched my own teens embrace instant messaging and texting, is how quickly they throw spelling out the door.  I have one great speller and one terrible one, so it has always worried me that the one who struggles already with spelling ...

Yikes! New Study Released about Kids Under 5

OMG. Wow. Unbelievable. 

A new study, underwritten by consumer products manufacturer Unilever, conducted experiments with people aged 19 - 83, measuring brand recognition and familiarity with the types of products a brand represents. Brands that were exposed to the participants early, before the age of 5 and certainly no later than the age of 10 scored higher in recognition. Among the older group of people, age 50+, even the now-defunct brands held more resonance with ...

How to make this site really useful to you

I've made an observation....we have almost 300 parents who have signed up as members of iParentnetwork.  That's really great for a new web site. When I review the analytics of the site, they also look really good.  People are coming to the site over and over again....not just once.  And they are spending a decent amount of time on the site -- well over 5 minutes and are reviewing over 8 pages on each visit. ...

Reflections of a Fifth Grade Teacher - Post 3

Parent-Teacher Conferences

            With November fast approaching, can parent-teacher conferences be far behind?  In Ashford, report cards for the first marking period go home on Friday, November 6, and our conferences are held on the following Thursday and Friday afternoon and evening.  You can be sure that both parents and teachers are a little bit nervous.  The what-ifs can be a very powerful force in the mind.

            As a teacher, I find that ...

Full Disclosure and Role Models

Interesting information from the recent Hazelden survey (http://fourgenerations.org): "Nearly half of parents admit today to using alcohol or drugs to get drunk or high when they were teenagers, and one in four teens say they’ve seen their parents high or drunk. Yet more than 90 percent of parents and teens feel that parents should be role models for children on issues of using drugs and nearly two-thirds of teens (63 percent) say hearing their ...

Mashups, Remixes, Downloading and Copyright infringement

There has been a ton of debate in recent years about the music industry. People have downloaded millions of songs illegally and are doing so with the fear that a lawyer will knock on his/her door with a lawsuit.  And that fear is not unfounded.  As recently as a couple of years ago, a dozen UConn students were caught up in a sting and sued for downloading music.  

Parents everywhere began questioning their own ...

Help, My Son Is Smoking Pot!

We received the following anonymous question today: "Help!! When I got home from work I found my tween son smoking pot with one of his friends.  I talked to him about the dangers, and how it inhibits brain growth, the legal ramifications, etc., but I'm wondering if there's anyone else out there who's gone through this and has been successful at stopping it." 

My guess is that many of you parents have dealt with something ...

Fresh Facts: Binge Drinking - One more thing to worry about during flu season!

Binge drinking poses one more health hazard during flu season because it undermines the body's immune system and makes a person more prone to infection for the 24 hours after binge drinking.

With flu season approaching, this is just one more thing to be aware of.  And to further complicate this particular flu season is the onset of the H1N1 virus.

Source:  How Binge Drinking Undermines the Immune System, Medical News Today, September 18, ...

The Silent Intruder

Written by 

                            Vicki P. Daniels RN, BSN

                  School nurse-Southeast Elementary, Mansfield

The Silent Intruder 

Pediculosis or Head Lice, as they are more commonly known, are equal opportunity parasites that insidiously invade families. ...

Underage Drinking In the News

The issue of underage drinking has been in the Connecticut news a lot during the last month with the suspension of football players and cheerleaders (later reduced) in East Haven and the release of 26 names of underage youth arrested at a party in Cheshire.  In both of these cases the thing that struck me was the powerful community opposition that arose to the consequences that were imposed on the violators. 

In East Haven 80 ...

What exactly is an AVATAR???

A question came in using our anonymous question tool asking me to explain what an avatar was and why it is really important that people use them, rather than defaulting to the one provided by the web site.

An avatar is a photograph of yourself or something to represent yourself (like a photo of your dog or if you are in to horses, maybe a horse) -- in short, something unique.

The way the site ...

Dress Code - Good or Bad?

It seems as if the subject of school uniforms keeps coming up as regularly as the seasons.  Just last year or the year before the Hartford Public Schools began requiring students to wear uniforms.

Research seems divided over how much of an difference - if any - dress policies have upon student learning. A 2004 study makes the case that uniforms do not improve school safety or academic discipline. A 2005 study, however, indicated that ...

Answers to recent Anonymous Questions

Two anonymous questions just came in that I would like to address:

The first said that they would like to start an online bible study class for parents and teens and post comments on iParentnetwork.  You may certainly post your thoughts about this within the group "Faith and parents" but iParentnetwork is strictly for parents, not for teens, so posting anything by teens is not allowed.

The second question that came in was a ...