Oh, elementary school. If you're a fan of people watching like I am, you know there are three fantastic places in which to do your social grazing: 1) Theme parks 2) Walmart 3) Elementary schools. Already I'm feeling like a mean girl for writing this but I'm actually a really nice person who has a mild obsession with the human condition. Ever since I left my full-time job to be a work-at-home mama, I've resorted to getting my daily sociology fix from the after-school pickup routine. There are certain mom types one encounters at school. I'm sure each type is more lovely than the last, so don't think I'm here to hate on the mommy masses; quite the contrary. I'm simply a reporter of observations. - By Lori Garcia
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...Read More »By GalTime's Organization Guru Lisa Zaslow
Permission slips, soccer schedules, contact forms, fliers, homework, report cards … it can seem easier to prepare your income taxes than to organize your children's paperwork!
Stay organized this school year.
Here are some tips to keep your cool now that the kids are back in school-09.
Use a Master Family Calendar
Whether you use an old-school wall-mounted calendar with spaces for each family member or an electronic version linked to your smart phone, being able to track everyone's schedules at a glance will keep you on top of all your family's activities. Assign a different color for each person to make it easier to see who's where, when. Transfer the information from schedules, initiations and fliers to the calendar and toss the papers.Related: Back-to-School Cool: 6 Great Finds
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Master Family Calendar
Attack the backpacks
Use a family in-box to gather any papers that need your attention from kids' backpacks as soon as they come home from school. Process these papers every dayBy Cheryl Tallman for GalTime.com
Parents and kids often have different ideas about what is a good school lunch and what is not. Here are a few tips and recipes that will help you create a lunch that is healthy, fun and will get noticed by the other kids.
Healthy lunches for back-to-school!
Most schools will not provide a refrigerator to store lunchboxes, so select an insulated one with a re-usable freezer pack. Perhaps instead, freeze a bottle of water and add it to the lunch box. It will keep the lunch cold and fresh during morning classes and by lunchtime, it will have thawed and be ready to drink.
There is no reason a homemade lunch needs to look dull and unappetizing. Buy colorful, reusable containers in different shapes to pack your child's lunch. If your child is drawn to characters, buy some stickers and decorate the containers. It is inevitable that some containers may not make their way home, so you may want to purchase inexpensive or "semi" disposable containers that will not disappoint you if they ac
...Read More »Back-to-school shopping never goes out of fashion. How back-to-school shopping is approached, on the other hand, changes from generation to generation. Books and basic clothes? Never changes. Cigarettes, pervy teachers, and Spam on pizza? Thank God that's changed. Here are 7 vintage back-to-school ads that will make you doubly glad your days of hitting the books have long since passed: - By Meredith Carroll
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...Read More »- Schools have a lot of leeway when they come up with policies. They can regulate the clothes by suggesting dress codes and behavior by making rules against fighting and bad language, but this seems a bit much: Grand Island Public Schools administrators have asked a three-year-old deaf boy to change his signing name.
Teach tolerance.
Read More: The Man Behind the Bullied Bus Monitor's Retirement Fund Has More Good Deeds up his Sleeve
The boy's name is Hunter Spanjer -- and the sign for his first name looks like a gun. The school claims that the way Hunter signs his name violates the policy aganst instruments that look like weapons -- but Hunter's name is straight out of S.E.E., which stands for Signing Exact English, so it's not a symbol his parents made up out of thin air. So why are teachers are no longer concerned with teaching tolerance?
Read More: 7 Things Parents Should Discuss With Their Children And Three They Absolutely Should Not
Hunter is a three-year-old with special needs;
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