Teacher gifts: Have a sweet summer!

To show our appreciation to the people who helped Ranger have great first year in Kindergarten, I printed some clip art on card stock so Ranger could make thank you notes.

As with our Thanks-a-latte teacher gifts, we tucked in a small value gift card. This time we chose Sonic (a modern take on the ice-cream drive-in complete with roller-skating car hops) because of its summery menu.

Ranger wanted to give thank yous to his "specials" instructors (art, music, library) as well as his classroom teacher, aide, and bus driver. When I thought about it, those people will probably be a part of his education for years to come and they probably aren't often remembered at holidays or the end of the year. He ended up writing the same simple message over a half dozen times and we ran out of time to color the all the cards.

Next year I will print the line art first, then have him write his message and color the card. Then I'll scan and print the completed card for all the recipients which he can personalize and sign individually.

I also wrote a note in the cover of each card to let the teacher know how much Jim and I appreciated his or her efforts during the year.

I hope they like ice cream.

***Baby Toolkit is a free-flowing dialogue on parenting with a couple of Midwestern geeks. We're Amazon affiliates, so if you make purchases through our Amazon links, you are contributing to our quest to build a giant baking soda volcano (or some other delinquent nonsense).

Teacher Appreciation: Quick & Caffeinated

Growing up in a teacher's household, I know teachers treasure the sentiment behind gifts from students.  The gifts themselves are truly secondary to the feelings of appreciation.

Over the span of a teaching career, sentimental gifts abound and start to swamp most teacher's homes, so I try to give consumable gifts.

This year, after seeing this inspired "Thanks a Latte!" printable project I was all geared up to craft some sweet gift card holders with Ranger.



And then I remembered, I have three very young children- two in diapers- and utterly no spare time to wait for glue to dry.

Enter "Thanks a latte!" v.2. Cup and lid: easily acquired at time of gift card purchase.  Hard candy: quick, cheap, and easy.  Ribbon: around here somewhere.  Cellophane/plastic bag: not in my pantry and a Ziplock would lack panache.


So how do I dress up the cups to keep them from being mistaken for empties? I punched a couple holes in the sides of the adorable little espresso cups and threaded ribbon handles through.

Ranger helped put a handwritten note inside (on flower printables) with a gift card and some peppermints.

With smaller plain paper prints (print file as a 5x7 image) of the flower printable and my sticker maker (though any bit of sticky would suffice), I attached some mini-thanks a latte flowers to the cup lids for labels.

Viola.  Little baskets of sugary, caffeinated gratitude.


***Baby Toolkit is written by some sugary, caffeinated, grateful geek parents.  Thank you for giving us some of your time.  We're not affiliated (or even particularly enamored) with Starbucks and this hack could work just as well with your local coffee shop as long as they have gift cards and to go cups.  We are however Amazon affiliates, so a portion of purchases made through this web site's Amazon links help us stay connected.

Required Reading for Geeks & Parents: Science Fair Season Set Me On Fire

At first blush, Judy Dutton's Science Fair Season: Twelve Kids, A Robot Named Scorch. . . and What It Takes To Win looks like Spellbound recast with science geeks.  Don't be fooled.  While Science Fair Season explores the lives of a handful of contestants in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, it deftly illustrates artful parenting and success in learning as well.

The high school students' projects are sometimes mind-boggling in scale (like building a reactor for nuclear fusion).  I expected the top achieving high school students to be working on an undergraduate level, but these noteworthy projects more clearly resemble post-graduate research.  Because the students approach their inquiries with fresh perspective, they see possibility and challenge where more conventional researchers might not explore.

While no two contestants' stories are remotely identical, patterns do emerge that speak to science education and parenting young children.  So often the students' stories begin with an early spark of interest in something (horses, electricity, cars, astronomy) which parents encouraged with exploration.  Though the kids' interests didn't usually mirror parental interests, the parents went out of their way to feed their child's curiosity and enthusiasm.  Time after time, parents provide opportunities (like a homebrew chem lab, a borrowed Geiger counter, or time with horses) and find mentors with similar interests.  Granted, not every child is going to become a super-competitor in science by the mere magic of parental support, but these stories clearly illuminate a parent's ability to multiply interest into inquiry and fascination.

Yet the book is not populated with Tiger Moms or Stage Fathers, the burgeoning interests are consistently directed by the kids (and I say kids because this explosion of interest seems most common in early childhood).  These biographies are full of freedom and exploration.

The other looming discussion is that of how students come to love science learning.  Halfway through the book I became painfully aware that, although some "outsiders" come to science interest in junior high or high school, most of the kids with scientific fervor (and the resulting knowledge) fully embraced science long before most schools begin to seriously teach it.  We, as a nation, are missing the critical window where kids fall in love with science.  Thanks to budget cuts and lack of advocacy, science is barely taught when young students are making decisions about what they love.  When schools finally start teaching science in junior high, the approach is often dry and makes the very foundation of existence seem irrelevant and esoteric.

During the space race, science charged into unsuspecting homes through popular media.  While the media marveled and quaked at Sputnik, rocket scientists became the heroes of coal mine town boys like Homer Hickam (NASA engineer and author of Rocket Boys).  This book reminds me that not only are science heroes present today, they're still coming of age (though in increasingly shorter supply).  Our tech role models need to be more than wealthy boys with killer apps (Apple's Steve Jobs, Facebook's Mark Zuckerman).  Kids would be better served to know about Pluto Files atrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson and science humanitarian Amy Smith.

In my life as a university academic advisor, the most frustrating academic trajectories were those of students with no real interests. A student sorting through a abundance of passions brimmed with energy, but one without a single definable interest made me want to bang my head against my desk.  I knew then that, should we ever have kids, I wanted them to deeply love some thing that challenged and expanded them.

Science Fair Season left me with a long to-do list.  I want Ranger, Scout, and the Detective to gain exposure to math and science beyond what they'll get in the elementary classroom, and I also want those opportunities to be available for their friends and classmates.  My mom's fifth grade class had this amazing interactive experience put together by an orthopedic surgeon dad; the dad set up hands-on stations where the class could use real orthopedic tools to meet objectives (like screwing a nut on a bolt) through obstacles (inside a bottle) to simulate surgical challenge.  My mom believes that one presentation converted more students to science than any other single event of her long teaching career.  This it the type of early experience I want for my kids and as many other kids as we can involve.

I think the future, not just of our kids' educations, but of the country and the world, may lie in the opportunities we offer our kids in their early years.

Well written and entertaining, Science Fair Season is going to have the broad voyeuristic appeal of subculture documentaries like Word Wars and The Farmer's Wife, but it also has the seeds of one of the most critical educational discourses of our generation.


Hyperion, hardcover $25 MSRP, $15.99 on Amazon.
Read excerpt at author's site.



***Baby Toolkit is a couple geek parents currently so hot about science learning that we might just turn to plasma.  Hyperion supplied us with a free e-book loan of Science Fair Season, but we've now bought three hardcover copies to share with friends and family (the first taste is free...).  As Amazon affiliates, a small portion of purchases made through our Amazon links brings us one step closer to a giant dirigible trip around the planet.

Recommended Reading: NurtureShock Sent Me to Bed Early

After Po Bronson's amazing 2007 article on praise, his new book on parenting research NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children (co-authored with Ashley Merryman) mesmerized me long before I actually saw it in person.

The first chapter on praise (revised from the original New York magazine article) remains strong and fresh after repeat readings. I was poised to devour the book in an all night marathon read.

Enter Chapter 2: The Lost Hour. The research on sleep was so compellingly presented that I whined and shut the book at 1 AM (an hour earlier than my typical bedtime since late adolescence). Mr. Bronson, Ms. Merryman, you accomplished in one evening what my mother, and later, Jim have been trying to do for decades. I'm now in bed at least an hour and a half earlier (often more) each night.

The loss of late-night reading hours slowed my reading down, but the change of pace gave me more time and mental space to absorb the rich content of NurtureShock.

Like the new generation of social science books (Stumbling on Happiness, Outliers, Freakonomics), NurtureShock works to be informative rather than prescriptive. Unlike self-help parenting books which offer specific instructions for a perfect relationship/child/childhood, Bronson and Merryman discuss a huge body of research on child rearing and behavior (the bibliography and notes account for 83 pages).

While I could poorly reiterate the book's contents, I'm sure you'd benefit much more from reading it yourself.

The research on siblings gave me real pause. Things have been pretty rough between Ranger and the Raptor since she started crawling. Her mobility resulted in constant meltdowns and Ranger serving a lot of penal time in his room. NurtureShock summarized research on why siblings fight (or more importantly, get along). It's nothing like the theories I've heard. I called Jim at work after reading the chapter. "This may be what's going on..." Our situation looked rough. The research described our kids far too well as present and perpetual rivals. We talked about why siblings get along and committed to a 180 degree shift in our actions. In two days, Ranger's tantrums (regarding the Raptor) started fading. Two more days and only one tantrum. Things improved greatly as we thought purposefully about Ranger's interactions with the Raptor. We're all happier.

Bronson and Merryman carefully choose research that stands up to repetition and avoid the dangerous one-hit-wonders that grab headlines, but fail under long-term scrutiny. They aren't worrying about genius babies, prodigies, or delinquents nor are they pushing to create a super-achiever culture. They don't weigh on who sleeps where, offer dietary advice, or tell you how to punish your child.

The findings they report question underlying assumptions we have about our children, their character, and their development.

NurtureShock offers complex, but fascinating, perspective. I'm sure the ideas behind each chapter will get ample media coverage for months to come (Newsweek already excerpted the race chapter and NPR profiled the lying research in an interview with Bronson).

I hope it will be read by my family, friends, and community educators.

$14.99 at Amazon. $24.99 recommended price.

Baby Toolkit has no relationship with Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman, or their publishers (12 & Hachette Book Group)- though we'd gladly invite them all over for dinner any time. With two degrees in literature, Adrienne can be considered a professional reader (of fiction), but we have no credentials in child development. We bought the book through Amazon.