N and I took a weekend off to spend time with my Dad & siblings, plus five additional days at Nehalem Bay State Park. We returned to an Oregon heat wave with (what seemed like) double chores to catch up on. Oi.
My treadmill (I'm happy to share it, but other family members aren't as interested) has been having issues over the past 4 months. First the main board burnt out. Thankfully it was covered by the warranty, even though Livestrong US has been bought out by Horizon. Then it became apparent that the board failure was due to friction issues with the walking belt.
Another walking belt was ordered and arrived during our absence. I was okay with waiting a little longer to get back to my exercise routine, but N dived right into the project. The six hour project. Made more difficult by the limited space to work in, a bolt that needed to be replaced and (of course) the heat. It wasn't as hot as the previous days, but hot enough to require N to pace himself.
I decided he deserved a special meal. One worthy of the effort put into the treadmill. I was so glad (even though I cooked without F's help) everything turned out well.
The recipe below came from theperfectpantry.com. One important note: I assumed the author meant 3 heads of garlic--cloves would turn to charcoal.
Mashed garlic sweet potatoes
From the pantry, you'll need: garlic, powdered ginger, ground coriander, butter, olive oil or canola oil.
Serves 4-6; can be doubled.
Ingredients
2 large sweet potatoes
3 heads garlic, skin on
1/4 tsp powdered ginger
1/4 tsp ground coriander
1/8 tsp kosher salt
1/8 tsp fresh black pepper
2-3 Tbsp heavy cream
1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp olive oil or canola oil
10-12 tiny sage leaves (or 3-4 large ones, cut into pieces)
Directions
Preheat the oven to 425°F.
Prick the sweet potatoes with a fork in a few places, and place on a rimmed baking sheet along with the whole garlic cloves. Bake for 1 hour. Remove from the oven and set aside until the potatoes are just cool enough to handle. Peel the potatoes and garlic, and add them to a mixing bowl.
Mash the potatoes together with the ginger, coriander, salt, pepper, cream and butter, until the potatoes are as smooth as you like them (I like them a little bit chunky).
Transfer the potatoes to a serving bowl; cover the bowl with plastic wrap, pressing the plastic directly on the surface of the potatoes, and set aside.
In a small frying pan, heat the olive (or canola) oil. When the oil is hot, fry the sage leaves until they are crisp but still green, 15-20 seconds. Remove from the pan and garnish the sweet potatoes.
Serve hot.
This next recipe comes from thekitchn.com. I only made a slight change--I didn't flip the cabbage wedges.
Roasted Cabbage with Bacon
Serves 4 to 6
1 head green or Savoy cabbage, outer leaves removed
Olive oil
Coarse kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 slices thick bacon, 6 to 8 ounces
Heat the oven to 450°F. Cut the cabbage into quarters and slice the bottom of each quarter at an angle to partially remove the stem core. Cut each quarter in half again so you have eight wedges. Lay these down on a large roasting pan or baking sheet and drizzle very lightly with olive oil. Sprinkle generously with salt and pepper.
Cut each slice of bacon into small strips and lay on top of the cabbage.
Roast for 30 minutes, flipping the cabbage wedges once halfway through. If the edges aren't browned enough for your taste after 30 minutes, put them back in for five-minute increments until they are.
Serve immediately; the wedges cool down fast.
Recipe Notes
Roasting Rack: Some cooks prefer to roast the cabbage on a rack, which helps the edges crisp up and brown more. But when you roast it flat in a pan more of the bacon and its drippings stay with the cabbage, which I prefer.
Types of Cabbage: You can use any sort of cabbage with this recipe. I've never used red cabbage but I am sure it would work beautifully. I also like roasting Savoy cabbage; it tends to give you smaller, more manageable wedges.
*The final item on the menu was less a recipe than something I've learned from F:
brined chicken breasts:
I added 1/4 c of kosher salt, approximately 1/4 tsp of each of the following--ground pepper, garlic, cumin seed and ground ginger to warmish water. Stir to dissolve. Add chicken breasts and brine--two hours is the optimal amount of time. Though a quick brine 15 minute brine does improve the flavor of the meat.
Monday, June 29, 2015
Friday, June 19, 2015
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Repurposing
Here are a couple of our favorite 2015 re-purposed life helpers:
We heard about the first one via a relative. I have to admit, I don't always drink bottled wine. Sometimes I buy Bota Box. You know that awesome bladder in the box? The one that keeps (most) air from ruining the quality of the wine? If you take the time to thoroughly rinse the bladder, fill it with water and put it in the freezer, you'll always have an ice pack ready for a get away OR ice in the freezer in case the power goes out. An ice pack that won't leak, that can be laid flat, between items or up against the side of a cooler AND you won't feel guilty if you toss it out.
The second one happened after N and I were brainstorming over what to do for a dog tie-out when we're camping. We were frustrated over how the spiral tie-out stakes don't always perform as they should--due to the ground being too hard or too soft. When we tie the dogs up to the picnic table, they usually wind themselves into difficult to unwind situations.
Keep in mind, our two dogs are both under 20 lbs. After just one camping trip, I'm ready to give it a high five. We take an empty Kirkland laundry detergent bottle (170 fluid ounces), fill with water (once we arrive at our camping spot) and use the handle to loop the pup's cables through. The bottle is completely portable, if we discover the current location isn't working well or if we decide to move our lawn chairs.
We heard about the first one via a relative. I have to admit, I don't always drink bottled wine. Sometimes I buy Bota Box. You know that awesome bladder in the box? The one that keeps (most) air from ruining the quality of the wine? If you take the time to thoroughly rinse the bladder, fill it with water and put it in the freezer, you'll always have an ice pack ready for a get away OR ice in the freezer in case the power goes out. An ice pack that won't leak, that can be laid flat, between items or up against the side of a cooler AND you won't feel guilty if you toss it out.
The second one happened after N and I were brainstorming over what to do for a dog tie-out when we're camping. We were frustrated over how the spiral tie-out stakes don't always perform as they should--due to the ground being too hard or too soft. When we tie the dogs up to the picnic table, they usually wind themselves into difficult to unwind situations.
Keep in mind, our two dogs are both under 20 lbs. After just one camping trip, I'm ready to give it a high five. We take an empty Kirkland laundry detergent bottle (170 fluid ounces), fill with water (once we arrive at our camping spot) and use the handle to loop the pup's cables through. The bottle is completely portable, if we discover the current location isn't working well or if we decide to move our lawn chairs.
Sunday, May 17, 2015
Coastal Tree Portal
I'm still sitting here at home waiting. I just know they'll show up.
Saturday, May 2, 2015
KQED: "Does Common Core Ask Too Much of Kindergarten Readers?"
Looking forward to when the U.S. swings back to developmentally appropriate practices.
~K
Does Common Core Ask Too Much of Kindergarten Readers?
Katrina Schwartz
Sandwiched between preschool and first grade, kindergartners often start school at very different stages of development depending on their exposure to preschool, home environments and biology. For states adopting Common Core, the standards apply to kindergarten, laying out what students should be able to do by the end of the grade.* Kindergartners are expected to know basic phonics and word recognition as well as read beginner texts, skills some childhood development experts argue are developmentally inappropriate.
“There’s a wide age range for learning to read,” said Nancy Carlsson-Paige on KQED’s Forum program. Carlsson-Paige is professor emerita of education at Lesley University and co-author of the study “Reading Instruction in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose,” which criticizes the Common Core standards for kindergarten.
“If we make students feel pressure so that they shut down, then that light bulb is not going to be as likely to come on and they aren’t going to develop the confidence that they need to become successful readers later.”
“Most five-year-old children are not really ready to learn to read,” Carlsson-Paige said. “There are many experiences in the classroom that are beneficial for building the foundation for learning to read that will come later.” She favors a play-based classroom that gives students hands-on experiences, helping them to develop the symbolic thinking necessary to later recognize letters and numbers.
“Research shows on a national scale there’s less play and experiential based curriculum happening over all, and much more didactic instruction, even though we have research that shows long term there are greater gains from play-based programs than academically focused ones,” Carlsson-Paige said.
While Common Core aligned assessments don’t kick in until third grade, many teachers feel pressure to make sure kids are meeting the specified standards before they move on to first grade. That pressure can mean more focus on academics, at the sacrifice of play time.
Kindergarten teachers try to interpret the standards and translate them into developmentally appropriate activities. But they struggle when kids still don’t meet Developmental Reading Assessment benchmarks. “Teachers start to question themselves and waiver even though they believe in doing what’s developmentally appropriate,” said Colleen Rau, a reading intervention specialist at Aspire Berkley Maynard Academy. “So I think we really need to think about taking the pressure away and looking at student growth.”
Rau says under Common Core she’s seen positive shifts at her school towards more thematic units and more hands-on learning, but she agrees with Carlsson-Paige that pushing young children into skills they aren’t developmentally ready for can have poor results. Students can develop coping mechanisms that don’t serve them well later when they are confronted with more advanced texts.
“The lightbulb goes on for students at different times,” Rau said, “But if we make students feel pressure so that they shut down, then that light bulb is not going to be as likely to come on and they aren’t going to develop the confidence that they need to become successful readers later.”
There are plenty of children who do learn to read in kindergarten or even before, so for many parents the argument that young children aren’t developmentally ready to read rings false. But not all learners are the same, and what’s true for one child won’t necessarily be true for the child sitting next to her. Young children learn differently from older children, adolescents and adults, Carlsson-Paige said. Early childhood educators have documented the progression of increasingly complex symbolic thinking that leads to understanding letters make sounds and sounds make words.
“If you present children with information that’s too disparate from what they know then they give up or feel confused, or cry, or get turned off,” Carlsson-Paige said. “Part of the art of teaching is to understand where a child is in developing concepts and then be able to present information in ways that are new and interesting, but will cause a little bit of struggle on the part of the child to try to understand them.”
AN IMPLEMENTATION PROBLEM
Advocates for the kindergarten Common Core standards agree that kindergarteners should not be sitting still all day doing reading drills. But they are clear that the standards in no way require that sort of teaching and were written with help and input from early childhood educators around the country. They are meant to offer challenging opportunities to advanced learners while supporting learners who may be coming into kindergarten with very little literacy exposure.
“What we set out in the Common Core are those skills and concepts that will help students learn to read in first and second grade,” said Susan Pimentel, lead writer of the English Language Arts Common Core standards. She says early childhood educators were adamant that the language “with prompting and support” be used throughout the kindergarten standards in recognition that young learners will be new to school and won’t be left to answer dozens of questions on their own.
“So much of the concern is about the implementation,” Pimentel said. And while she agrees that educators need to be vigilant about pointing out poor implementation and working to fix it, the problem is not new. Education standards have always been implemented in a variety of ways. “What we’re talking about is teachers who have maybe not been trained and some attention on that would be important,” she said.
Other advocates of the Common Core standards see them as an important step towards education equity. “The strongest argument in favor of reading by the end of kindergarten and Common Core’s vision for early literacy is simply to ensure that children—especially the disadvantaged among them—don’t get sucked into the vortex of academic distress associated with early reading failure,” writes Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Many children start kindergarten able to identify short words or aware of the difference between lowercase and uppercase letters, two of the kindergarten standards. Pondiscio and others believe it is completely appropriate to begin introducing these ideas in kindergarten, albeit in fun play-based ways.
“If teachers are turning their kindergarten classrooms into joyless grinding mills and claiming they are forced to do so under Common Core (as the report’s authors allege), something has clearly gone wrong,” Pondiscio writes. “Common Core demands no such thing, and research as well as good sense supports exposing children to early reading concepts through games and songs.”
Another literacy researcher says the critique that the standards are developmentally inappropriate may be a misinterpretation of what the standards require. For example, one standard says children should be able to read emergent texts with purpose and understanding.
“The emergent-reader text is first modeled by the teacher for the students, then joyfully read over and over with the students until eventually the easy book is independently read by the students with great joy and confidence,” writes J. Richard Gentry, author of “Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach Your Child to Read and Write — From Baby to Age 7,” and a former professor and elementary school teacher. Gentry says this process emulates “lap reading” which some children get with their parents at home and which helps students gain confidence in their reading.
All of these educators agree that it can be difficult to teach the kindergarten standards in developmentally appropriate ways when teachers are worried about how kids will do on standardized tests. While Carlsson-Paige and others believe the standards are inappropriate and should be thrown out, Pondiscio, Gentry and Pimentel are among those who believe the standards are important to make sure reading gaps don’t start young. They favor the idea that implementation is the real problem and that more energy should be put into helping early childhood educators interpret the standards and integrate them into class in fun, approachable and developmentally appropriate ways.
~K
Does Common Core Ask Too Much of Kindergarten Readers?
Katrina Schwartz
Sandwiched between preschool and first grade, kindergartners often start school at very different stages of development depending on their exposure to preschool, home environments and biology. For states adopting Common Core, the standards apply to kindergarten, laying out what students should be able to do by the end of the grade.* Kindergartners are expected to know basic phonics and word recognition as well as read beginner texts, skills some childhood development experts argue are developmentally inappropriate.
“There’s a wide age range for learning to read,” said Nancy Carlsson-Paige on KQED’s Forum program. Carlsson-Paige is professor emerita of education at Lesley University and co-author of the study “Reading Instruction in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose,” which criticizes the Common Core standards for kindergarten.
“If we make students feel pressure so that they shut down, then that light bulb is not going to be as likely to come on and they aren’t going to develop the confidence that they need to become successful readers later.”
“Most five-year-old children are not really ready to learn to read,” Carlsson-Paige said. “There are many experiences in the classroom that are beneficial for building the foundation for learning to read that will come later.” She favors a play-based classroom that gives students hands-on experiences, helping them to develop the symbolic thinking necessary to later recognize letters and numbers.
“Research shows on a national scale there’s less play and experiential based curriculum happening over all, and much more didactic instruction, even though we have research that shows long term there are greater gains from play-based programs than academically focused ones,” Carlsson-Paige said.
While Common Core aligned assessments don’t kick in until third grade, many teachers feel pressure to make sure kids are meeting the specified standards before they move on to first grade. That pressure can mean more focus on academics, at the sacrifice of play time.
Kindergarten teachers try to interpret the standards and translate them into developmentally appropriate activities. But they struggle when kids still don’t meet Developmental Reading Assessment benchmarks. “Teachers start to question themselves and waiver even though they believe in doing what’s developmentally appropriate,” said Colleen Rau, a reading intervention specialist at Aspire Berkley Maynard Academy. “So I think we really need to think about taking the pressure away and looking at student growth.”
Rau says under Common Core she’s seen positive shifts at her school towards more thematic units and more hands-on learning, but she agrees with Carlsson-Paige that pushing young children into skills they aren’t developmentally ready for can have poor results. Students can develop coping mechanisms that don’t serve them well later when they are confronted with more advanced texts.
“The lightbulb goes on for students at different times,” Rau said, “But if we make students feel pressure so that they shut down, then that light bulb is not going to be as likely to come on and they aren’t going to develop the confidence that they need to become successful readers later.”
There are plenty of children who do learn to read in kindergarten or even before, so for many parents the argument that young children aren’t developmentally ready to read rings false. But not all learners are the same, and what’s true for one child won’t necessarily be true for the child sitting next to her. Young children learn differently from older children, adolescents and adults, Carlsson-Paige said. Early childhood educators have documented the progression of increasingly complex symbolic thinking that leads to understanding letters make sounds and sounds make words.
“If you present children with information that’s too disparate from what they know then they give up or feel confused, or cry, or get turned off,” Carlsson-Paige said. “Part of the art of teaching is to understand where a child is in developing concepts and then be able to present information in ways that are new and interesting, but will cause a little bit of struggle on the part of the child to try to understand them.”
AN IMPLEMENTATION PROBLEM
Advocates for the kindergarten Common Core standards agree that kindergarteners should not be sitting still all day doing reading drills. But they are clear that the standards in no way require that sort of teaching and were written with help and input from early childhood educators around the country. They are meant to offer challenging opportunities to advanced learners while supporting learners who may be coming into kindergarten with very little literacy exposure.
“What we set out in the Common Core are those skills and concepts that will help students learn to read in first and second grade,” said Susan Pimentel, lead writer of the English Language Arts Common Core standards. She says early childhood educators were adamant that the language “with prompting and support” be used throughout the kindergarten standards in recognition that young learners will be new to school and won’t be left to answer dozens of questions on their own.
“So much of the concern is about the implementation,” Pimentel said. And while she agrees that educators need to be vigilant about pointing out poor implementation and working to fix it, the problem is not new. Education standards have always been implemented in a variety of ways. “What we’re talking about is teachers who have maybe not been trained and some attention on that would be important,” she said.
Other advocates of the Common Core standards see them as an important step towards education equity. “The strongest argument in favor of reading by the end of kindergarten and Common Core’s vision for early literacy is simply to ensure that children—especially the disadvantaged among them—don’t get sucked into the vortex of academic distress associated with early reading failure,” writes Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Many children start kindergarten able to identify short words or aware of the difference between lowercase and uppercase letters, two of the kindergarten standards. Pondiscio and others believe it is completely appropriate to begin introducing these ideas in kindergarten, albeit in fun play-based ways.
“If teachers are turning their kindergarten classrooms into joyless grinding mills and claiming they are forced to do so under Common Core (as the report’s authors allege), something has clearly gone wrong,” Pondiscio writes. “Common Core demands no such thing, and research as well as good sense supports exposing children to early reading concepts through games and songs.”
Another literacy researcher says the critique that the standards are developmentally inappropriate may be a misinterpretation of what the standards require. For example, one standard says children should be able to read emergent texts with purpose and understanding.
“The emergent-reader text is first modeled by the teacher for the students, then joyfully read over and over with the students until eventually the easy book is independently read by the students with great joy and confidence,” writes J. Richard Gentry, author of “Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach Your Child to Read and Write — From Baby to Age 7,” and a former professor and elementary school teacher. Gentry says this process emulates “lap reading” which some children get with their parents at home and which helps students gain confidence in their reading.
All of these educators agree that it can be difficult to teach the kindergarten standards in developmentally appropriate ways when teachers are worried about how kids will do on standardized tests. While Carlsson-Paige and others believe the standards are inappropriate and should be thrown out, Pondiscio, Gentry and Pimentel are among those who believe the standards are important to make sure reading gaps don’t start young. They favor the idea that implementation is the real problem and that more energy should be put into helping early childhood educators interpret the standards and integrate them into class in fun, approachable and developmentally appropriate ways.
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