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CATCH UP/READ UP:
New York City’s Fearless Girl statue honors RBG.
In a tribute to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, someone put a white lace collar on the iconic Wall Street statue Fearless Girl over the weekend. Ginsburg was only the second female justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court; she did so for nearly three decades.
CDC warns against traditional trick-or-treating this year.
The CDC has issued guidelines for Halloween 2020, saying the safest way to trick-or-treat is for homes to leave individually wrapped bags of candy at the end of a driveway or yard. They suggest scrapping haunted houses, hay rides, parties and door-to-door trick-or-treating this year. NPR
SHARING YOUR STORIES:
We’ve been featuring your pandemic-related stories on our Facebook page, and on our site. Below is one such post.
We Were Failing
Our suburban lifestyle revolved around kids’ schedules of school and travel sports. March 2020, life abruptly halted. The quarantine quickly shed light on where we were failing. Our children were accomplished athletes and diligent students, but their life skills were lagging. We quickly went to work. Lunch time, we learned the basics in the kitchen—tablespoon vs. teaspoon, lighting the stove and loading the dishwasher. Laundry basics—fabric softener isn’t detergent, folding is tedious. Cleaning—scrubbing toilets, mopping floors, ugh. We had been so busy managing our kids’ lives, we had forgotten how to teach them to live.—By Katie Ojala.
WHAT’S FOR DINNER?
(Tasty recipes for families)
Vegetarian Quiche. Easy-to-make and vegetarian-friendly, this delicious works for every season of the year. Click here for full recipe.
BOOK PICK:
I Dissent, by Debbie Levy and illustrated by Elizabeth Baddeley. A biographical picture book for ages 4-8 about the late, great Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Covering her early experiences in childhood and how they shaped her life story, the book is told through the lens of the Supreme Court Justice’s most famous dissents.
YOU ASKED/WE ANSWERED:
(Advice & tips from parenting experts)
Q: How can adults best to communicate with kids when wearing a mask?
A: Kids rely on seeing the way other people’s mouths forms words, for social interactions as well as for their language development. Now that mask-wearing has become the new reality, spoken words are unfortunately often muffled and hard to understand.So what can adults do—especially teachers and day care providers—to best communicate with children when wearing a mask?
1. Talk like a kindergartener teacher. For starters, speak slowly and deliberately. Add a playful and expressive tone to capture the attentiveness of your little listeners.
2. Name emotions more frequently. With mask-wearing, kids can focus more on the expression in your eyes, but adults can also consider naming feelings more often, which might encourage kids to do the same.
3. Use more social cues. Gesture, clap, and point more. Ramp up your body language to be more animated and expressive.
Most of all, remember that kids are able to recognize emotions as well as facial expressions, even while everyone is wearing masks. These valuable visual cues that come from all over the body are not lost on them.—Lifehacker
LIVE/LEARN:
(& other interesting facts)
- 51% of college students say it was the wrong choice for their college to allow students on campus.
- We’ve already run through the list of names for hurricanes this year; the new storms are now named after the Greek alphabet (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc.).
- The National Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New Year has announced its 12 finalists for inclusion. Among them: Jenga, Lite-Brite, My Little Pony, Risk, sidewalk chalk, Sorry!, and Yahtzee.
Here’s Sesame Street’s Grover with some important and helpful reminders to staying healthy.