oo, kcab, that's brilliant! thank you! I'll go follow that up, and I'm hoping to get them to look at the davidson site, since they seem to offer help setting things up to schools free. and you've reminded me that I did talk to someone from CAG about giving a talk to the school but she was on vacation and we never followed up. And I found what looks like a really good set of free teaching training materials, too. And the books gifted kids in the regular classroom, or some such, had so many REALLY good ideas...I think it could make a real difference to get these out to all the classrooms with some sort of school support behind it. Our school has no program, no coordinator, nothing, and no money for one. They'd like us to agitate for money, which I'm more than happy to do, but I also want to show them ways to reorganize just a little bit to make things better for kids. I feel like I've really found so many free resources, I'd like to help! And, I feel like if there was some sort of plan getting put together it might make the boards actually consider some extra money for at LEAST new books, you know?
I met this terribly bored 3rd grader this weekend and felt so depressed. He was clearly just so unhappy about school and didn't think it ever COULD be interesting. He called it a waste of his time. And I'm thinking, all these kids shouldn't have to have parents going through more than a year of agitating to get just a bin of interesting books in the classroom!! It's dumb to have everyone reinventing the wheel in every classroom every year. My son is so much happier just having the higher level books in the classroom available to him, you know? I want, while I'm in baby land and not working, to kind of help them codify this kind of thing so I don't keep running into really miserable kids who think that the nature of school is to be a waste of time.
thanks for the baby wishes, too...he's fallen asleep!! which he really hasn't done not on me in weeks...I think he's got a tummy bug and it kind of wore him out this morning, poor kid.
