Dilly Days with Beth and Joellyn: Authors of The InvestiGator Club™ for Robert-Leslie Publishing

It’s important for administrators to have a Head Check and Lice Prevention Plan, preferably before a case of head lice is reported or discovered at school. Record your plan in writing and share it with families at the beginning of the school year. Keep these questions in mind as you craft a plan:

1. Will you require a “summer’s end” head check before school starts or before entering school—to minimize the number of students entering your building with lice? If so, consider setting up a special “head check” day where you bring in nurses or volunteers to check heads. Conduct the checks at least one week before school starts so families have time to treat heads before coming to school. Set up a policy for how to guide those who are found to have head lice.
2. Who will check heads during the school year? How will you check them? If you don’t have a nurse or healthcare personnel, consider forming a volunteer group who is trained by a local doctor or nurse to check heads.
3. What will be your “return to class” policy? Proof of treatment? Head check by a trained staff member to show there are “no nits”? Letter from home?
4. Will you check heads on a regular basis throughout the school year? Decide the best way to check heads so as not to disrupt class or scare the children. Decide how parents will be informed if a child is diagnosed. Decide what children will do before parents pick them up (if you require it).
5. Will you check heads only when a case is reported or found at school? If so, whom will you check: children in that class, classes with siblings, the whole school? Once reported or detected, be sure to have a trained staff member confirm the diagnosis, and later provide children with clearance to return to class.
   

Okay, so the topic of head lice isn’t fun to write about. It is, however, an increasingly important one for families and schools around the country. If you’ve ever had to get rid of them, you know what a huge pain it is. Wherever children come in contact with heads or hair, or with items that are on or near heads, the passing of head lice is possible.

The Internet is full of information about head lice and how it is detected, passed, and eradicated. Anyone who thinks his or her child might have head lice should visit these sites and do what they can to stop the cycle at home. After all, if children don’t come to school with head lice, it is less likely that head lice be passed during the school day.

While other grades and classes may have standard programs and procedures, preschools often do not have a school nurse or the healthcare staff needed to implement a head lice prevention system.

Over the next few days, we will post more information and suggestions about this ongoing problem. The intent of this blog series is to provide preschool administrators and staff with prevention and management ideas to minimize the spread of head lice and to keep schools free of the yucky little creatures.

Being a preschool teacher is the best job in the world—just ask anyone who does it! To welcome you back, Beth and I have come up with the following list:

1. You spend time with the most caring and honest people in the world.
2. You are never bored—everything is constantly changing (and you do at least ten things at once all day long).
3. You get to sing and dance for an appreciative audience.
4. You are surrounded by toys.
5. The books you read are far more interesting and entertaining than most adult fare.
6. You are immediately informed when your hair looks bad or you have a run in your stocking.
7. You get hugs instead of e-mails.
8. A good night’s sleep is had every night (due to exhaustion!).
9. You get to enjoy the great outdoors every day as you guide walks and supervise the playground.
10. You are making the world a better place, one child at a time.

Feel free to write back and add your own reasons. There are soooo many!

Just check out the fun Beth and I had with the InvestiGator Club team and the Parent/Child Inc. Head Start staff in San Antonio, Texas. Over two weeks in August we trained nearly 600 wonderful, enthusiastic new members of the InvestiGator Club. Welcome to the clubhouse!

Between putting the final touches on our Spanish Instructional Materials Kit and developing our new web-based lesson planner and assessment record, I’m busy planning my keynote speech for “Taking a Closer Look at Concepts,” a regional convention at Tulsa Tech in Tulsa, Oklahoma on September 22. My topic is “bringing joy to the preschool classroom through social and emotional development.” What fun! Please share your ideas for bringing joy into the preschool classroom. We’d love to hear from you.

For more information about professional development offerings in Oklahoma, you can go to The Center for Early Childhood Professional Development.

As I reflect on yesterday’s experience, I take this away as advice for myself and for all those who love and work with young children:

• Provide good quality music. Kids know the difference between
  carefully crafted music and music that has not been well composed.
• Let children experience a variety of genres from many cultures.
• Offer classical music even after children reach school age. Pieces
  such as “Peter and the Wolf” spark imagination and provide knowledge
  of instruments including brass, strings, woodwinds, and percussion.
• Invite children to hear music for pure enjoyment as well as for
  specific purposes such as exercise or for remembering letters,
  numbers, and basic information.

Enjoy the rest of your summer! And be sure to include music when you
can!

It’s summer, and my neighborhood is buzzing with “eight and unders” manning lemonade stands, creating sidewalk chalk masterpieces, and chasing each other through sprinklers. Summer is magic. Yesterday’s magic was especially interesting though. Gathered on my front porch were no fewer than eight preschoolers and kindergarteners sampling music from a variety of CDs. Their CD player had a built-in microphone that was used as a karaoke prop for only the best of songs. And as I listened to the children give commentary, I noticed something quite interesting. These children knew what they liked—and they knew why! In their own way, these little ones articulated ideas about rhythm, beat, lyrical quality, and melody.

Being an author of a preschool curriculum that offers music, I was curious how our music would be perceived by the children on my porch (excluding my son who will be entering first grade and who knows all the songs by heart). Of the 16 tracks, the following songs were voted as the top three: “Gone Investigating,” “Over in the Meadow,” and “Bad Weather Blues.” There was even a tussle for the microphone about halfway through the blues song. Now that’s an endorsement!

Summer is finally here. Now, teachers and parents alike have to contend with the specters of learning regression and readiness for the next grade.

That’s why Beth and I developed a brand new program called Get Ready for Kindergarten. It’s not even in the Robert-Leslie catalog or on The InvestiGator Club’s website yet. We created this program to work in both school and home environments.

The children get to visit “Camp InvestiGator” and have fun learning as they pretend to go camping. The class even meets around an imaginary campfire to open and close every day! Here you see beautiful hand-print sandcastles made with a mixture of tan paint and real sand. Doesn’t Camp InvestiGator look like fun?

Okay, preschool experts, I’d love to hear what you think. Following are two opinions that I recently heard while enjoying some time with two friends who send their children to different preschools. With whom do you agree? Send us your comments—we’d love to know!

Christine, mother of 4, “Pro”
I am a strong believer in having a graduation ceremony for preschoolers who will enter kindergarten. It’s so much fun to see those little ones with caps, gowns and diplomas. These ceremonies help children feel pride in their accomplishments and help them look forward to upcoming school years.

Anne, mother of 2, “Con”
The only occasions for which we should reward children with graduation ceremonies are high school and college, when they’ve reached a major milestone and have worked for years to accomplish something. It seems that today children are rewarded too often for non-accomplishments—tasks that should be expected. Activities like preschool graduation ceremonies mislead children into thinking that they should be rewarded for almost anything.

In general, it seems that children usually have a fun time with it and are undeniably cute. But do the children get as much out of it as the rest of the family do?

One preschool in the Chicagoland area took to heart Beth’s and my suggestion for a family involvement event that we presented during the DuPage AEYC convention last fall—they hosted an art show! Feast your eyes on these amazing works of art, all inspired by some of the greatest artists of all time.

For more information on the importance of teaching the fine arts, see the suggested national standards for arts education developed by the Consortium of National Arts Education Associations (under the guidance of the National Committee for Standards in the Arts).

Here you see one of the fine art prints, Fernand Leger’s The Builder, from The InvestiGator Club program on the right. Then the children’s inspired sculptures and drawings are on the left.

Below are some fine examples of art inspired by the works of Claude Monet and Piet Mondrian. Also, check out this great idea about how to archive your children’s art.