Boys may benefit from aggressive play

Bring it: Boys may benefit from aggressive play - Health - Kids and parenting - msnbc.com

"In her 30 years as a kindergarten teacher in Illinois and Massachusetts, Jane Katch has watched graham crackers, a pretzel, celery, tree bark and fingers all become transformed into imaginary guns and other weapons. And she has learned to work with, rather than against, the violent boyhood fantasies that accompany these transformations.

'When you try to ignore it, it doesn't go away. And when you try to oppress it, it comes out in sneaky ways,' Katch said.

Not every teacher agrees. Schools have become battlegrounds between the adults who are repelled by the play violence they see and the children — primarily boys — who are obsessed with pretending to fight, capture, rescue and kill.

While some educators prohibit this behavior, other educators and researchers claim that banishing violent play from classrooms can be harmful to boys. It's a debate entangled in gender issues, since nearly all early-childhood educators are women, and they may be less comfortable than their male counterparts with boys' impulses.

While this behavior has been around far longer than toy guns and superhero movies — boys appear to be hard-wired for more active and aggressive pursuits than girls — many adults see this aggressive play being fueled by the violence portrayed or reported in the media.

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Homeschooling Quickly Becoming a Growing Trend

Homeschooling Quickly Becoming a Growing Trend | ThirdAge

"Homeschooling is a growing trend as more students will be “attending” school without actually having to leave their homes. The Times-Georgian reported that close to 900 students in the county alone were homeschooled last year. Across the country that number increases to 1.5 million students. According to a PR Newswire release, the growth rate is between 7 and 15 percent each year, and at least 1 million K-12 students now take all or part of their education online.

According to the Department of Education, the number of homeschoolers has more than doubled in the last decade. The benefits to homeschooling? A more flexible schedule, a closer student-teacher relationship, and less subjective to bullying. Just like public schools, homeschoolers must be in “class” 180 days a year.

For celebrities like Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, homeschooling is the more ideal option. “We homeschool Suri,” said Holmes. “She has a teacher who is with her every day. We like the one-on-one education.”

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Meet The Masters: Interactive Multimedia Art Education

Meet The Masters is an Interactive Multi-Media Art Education Based on the Lives and Works of the Master Artists. Your Homeschool students learn Art by studying the greats: Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Degas, Rembrandt, and MANY, MANY MORE!



Meet The Masters uses a 3-step learning approach:

* Art History - This interactive step contains audio clips of the master artist's themselves, period music, and fun review games with Pierre (our friendly French companion), all designed to capture the attention and imagination of home schooled children.

* Art Technique - Your students will learn to implement the art principles that correspond with the artist they have just been introduced to with the downloadable Art technique packets. These are available within the program in .pdf format for you to print, as needed.

* Art Activity - Your students will then move on to use the techniques and styles of the Masters to create their very own masterpieces using our step-by-step instructions. As they progress through the program, the children develop their own unique artist style and art portfolio! This Group Buy offers something for every artist at every age level -- ALL at Group Buy savings!

Homeschooling: German Family Gets Political Asylum in U.S.

READ Yahoo! News: "The Romeikes are not your typical asylum seekers. They did not come to the U.S. to flee war or despotism in their native land. No, these music teachers left Germany because they didn't like what their children were learning in public school - and because homeschooling is illegal there. (See pictures of a Tennessee family homeschooling its children.)

'It's our fundamental right to decide how we want to teach our children,' says Uwe Romeike, an Evangelical Christian and a concert pianist who sold his treasured Steinway to help pay for the move.

Romeike decided to uproot his family in 2008 after he and his wife had accrued about $10,000 in fines for homeschooling their three oldest children and police had turned up at their doorstep and escorted them to school. 'My kids were crying, but nobody seemed to care,' Romeike says of the incident. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)

So why did he seek asylum in the U.S. rather than relocate to nearby Austria or another European country that allows homeschooling? Romeike's wife Hannelore tells TIME the family was contacted by the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which suggested they go to the U.S. and settle in Morristown, Tenn. The nonprofit organization, which defends the rights of the U.S. homeschooling community - with its estimated 2 million children, or about 4% of the total school-age population - is expanding its overseas outreach. And on Jan. 26, the HSLDA helped the Romeikes become the first people granted asylum in the U.S. because they were persecuted for homeschooling. (See pictures of East Germany making light of its past.)

The ruling is tricky politically for Washington and its allies in Europe, where several countries - including Spain and the Netherlands - allow homeschooling only under exceptional circumstances, such as when a child is extremely ill. That helps explain why in late February, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement formally appealed the Romeike ruling, which was issued by an immigration judge in Memphis, Tenn. His unprecedented decision has raised concerns that the already heavily backlogged immigration courts will be flooded with asylum petitions from homeschoolers in countries typically regarded as having nonrepressive governments. (Comment on this story.)"

13 Careers for the Next Decade

13-careers-for-the-next-decade: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance: "We offer a baker's dozen of professions that promise income growth, work-life balance and social impact.

Few decisions are more important than choosing a career. And especially in these uncertain and changing times, no decision may be more difficult.

U.S. companies, saddled with increasingly onerous costs of employing people, are downsizing, cutting employees' hours, hiring temps, automating jobs and sending work offshore. Meanwhile, technology is redefining existing jobs and demanding new skills from an aging workforce, and new competition for jobs looms in the form of 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants likely to get legalized in the years ahead. Perhaps most potent, the U.S. is experiencing the largest transfer of gross domestic product from the private sector to the government sector in history -- and shifting jobs along with it.

In these roiling times, what are smart career choices? Of course, the best career for one person can be the worst for another, but I believe these 13 are particularly worthy of attention. From among thousands of occupations, I selected the 13 that rank best overall based on these criteria:

• Likelihood of Sustaining at Least a Middle-Class Income. This subsumes three factors: likely job growth, income potential and being under the radar (so there's less competition for jobs).

• Socially Redeeming. There may be jobs, for example, as casino managers and tobacco executives, but such occupations were immediately excluded from consideration.

• Quality of Life. Reasonable work hours, freedom from toxic or noisy work environments, and so on.

• Status. Most Kiplinger readers will not, for example, be attracted to owning gas stations, even though some gas-station owners make a great deal of money."