Janet's Blog

It is such a joy to watch children grow.  Every time I see my grandson, Toby, it seems like he can do even more than he could the last time I saw him.  Right now, he is learning to walk, a little ahead of schedule by most people's reckoning.  He practices, over and over, day after day, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, his walking skills are improving.  It won't be long until he takes off--soon, he'll be able to walk anywhere he wants, unassisted. In the almost fourteen years that I've been teaching preschool, and even before that, when I taught kindergarten and elementary school, I've been privileged to watch hundreds of children grow.  Most grow normally, reaching milestones right on schedule.  A few, like Toby, are driven to learn some new skills as quickly as they can.  And, a few more have to work very long and very hard to reach even basic milestones.  Some children, through no fault of their own, are never able to do the things that mos...

It's that time of year again--football season!  And, throughout Nebraska, so many people are wildly, madly passionate about their Huskers--and here in the panhandle, about the Denver Broncos, too.  Football fever spills over into the local venues, as well, with whole communities coming out to support their local high school football teams.  Football draws people together every fall.  As the temperatures finally begin to moderate, and evenings are downright chilly, people gather together for tailgate parties and televised games.  Houses and businesses throughout the state fly their teams' flags proudly. I still remember attending my first high school football game when I was a freshman.  That may have been the year that Husker fever exploded throughout our state; until then, no one paid much attention to Nebraska football games, which were never televised, anyway.  Until then, I hadn't really watched any football games on TV, so I knew very little a...

At school this week, I've been reading stories about apples and apple picking time.  In the cooking center, our preschoolers have made apple animals and squirmy, wormy apples.  We've talked about the life cycle of an apple, from bud to blossom, blossom to apple, apple seed to tree and back to buds again.  The children have been fascinated to learn that apples aren't always red, and that they don't really appear magically in the grocery store's produce aisles. An apple animal--a preschooler's creation Twenty-five years ago, Bill and I lived in a small house, not too far from our current home, with a large, old apple tree in the yard.  Most years, it didn't produce a single apple, but one year, when Erin was a preschooler and Meagan was just a baby, we had so many apples that we invited our friends over to help pick them.  We gave away baskets of sweet-smelling apples.  They weren't red; I remember them as being rather small, misshapen, yellow apples....