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Capital Region BOCES
Archive for 2017
During the recent Thanksgiving holiday break from school, my two sons and I decided to do a game night and dusted off Monopoly. I realized shortly after we started to play that Monopoly is a goldmine for practicing math and reading skills. Adding the dice to figure out how many spaces to move, counting out […]
One day last spring, as I picked my daughter up after school, she rushed to the car in breathless distress. Swinging open a rear door in a flurry of backpack straps, folders and loose homework, she pushed a slip of paper into my hands. “We have to help the animals!” I remember looking around, expecting […]
Senior year of high school can feel like a whirlwind. For me, it was about eight years ago now, and I still remember the feelings well. Friends start to get their college acceptance letters and make other post-graduation plans. Deadlines for final essays and projects are approaching way too quickly. Emotions roller-coaster from excitement for […]
You just worked a full day, rushed home to make dinner, sit down to eat with your family and open with this showstopper: “How was school today?” A popular answer to this question is, “K,” or perhaps you’re familiar with: “It was fine,” or “Good.” Or even worse, an answer doesn’t come. Just your child, […]
There’s been a great deal of discussion in social, educational, and professional circles about the benefits and challenges of children (of all ages) using technology. I began paying more attention to the different points of view when I took a look at my children’s holiday wish lists. Written at the top were smartphones, laptops, and […]
Sometimes teens get a bad rap when they want to sleep the day away after staying up all night. But it turns out, according to science, your “lazy” teen might just be tired. “When we’re newborns, we need a lot of sleep, as much as 17 hours, in chunks spread throughout the day. But as […]
Pick the apples off the ground. Put them in the basket. Pick the apples off the ground. Put them in the basket. This was my first job. All…day…long. As a 13-year-old, a friend and I worked in a Saratoga County, N.Y. orchard picking “drops” in the fall. The farm for which I worked used the […]
Our local community center’s winter activities catalog arrived the other day in the mail. By the look of it, you would think it was the much-coveted holiday toy catalog because of the way my children have earmarked it, tagged pages, and circled activities. They even color-coded and put their initials next to what they circled […]
It was late morning and the students in Anne Killian-Russo’s fifth-grade class were in good spirits. You could feel the energy in the air as the mid-day breaks for lunch and recess approached. But it was not quite time for that yet. Killian-Russo reached for a Tibetan singing bowl, sent out a soothing tone and […]
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” Perhaps the most famous quote from everyone’s favorite neighbor, Fred Rogers, came from a lesson from his mother, detailing empathy in action. Our […]