Sand Buckets for All

On Saturday we celebrated Speed’s 4th birthday. 

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that preparing for the party consumed every free moment of my life for the weeks leading up to the party. 

It didn’t start out that way - we were just planning to have a few friends meet at the playground.  But as the date got closer I kind of whipped myself into a frenzy.  For example, I decided that since we were having the party at a playground that has a fantastic sand and water area, we should give each kid a sand bucket and sand toys to play with during the party.  Apparently, sand buckets are “out of season” now (despite the fact that it’s still consistently 85 degrees and sunny here) so I drove to eleven stores until I found them.   Once I had the buckets I decided they should be personalized to make each guest feel special and to avoid ”that’s MY bucket” squabbles at the party - so I stayed up for most of a night with a pile of paint-pens and 22 sand buckets.   (more…)

A few months ago we announced the launch of our newly redesigned home-page, and today marks the launch of our newly designed topic portals, grade-based portals and article pages. Those of you who were familiar with the previous version may wonder: why the change? In short, we wanted to do three things: make the pages simpler, make related articles and resources readily accessible and make the pages more interactive to our users.

Education.com provides parents of school-aged children with free access to information and resources to give them the answers they need. Parents have free access to thousands of articles, which can be browsed either by a topic such as Kindergarten Readiness or Bullying, by an age group from The Early Years to The Teen Years(13-19), or by grade from Preschool to High School. Our main goal with the new design is to make sure that you can find the information which you are looking for, easily and quickly.

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Hi everyone!

Congratulations to this weeks Comment Giveaway Winners!  Sue will receive Two water babies dolls (by wild planet).  One is Caucasian, one is African American – you fill the dolls with warm water to become “the most realistic babies ever”.   And Megan will receive a basket of Toddler books including 6 board books, a couple of 2+ Kumon work books, 2 Tilly and Friends hardbacks and a Teddy Bears Picnic pop up book.

Congrats to all and keep commenting.  We’ll have new winners every week!

Also, I read a really sweet blog post today that I thought I’d share.  It’s by a mom who writes letters to her daughters for their birthdays.  I’ve been doing that for Speed and Whiz since they were babies and it has become one of my very favorite traditions (I love that it’s something that happens outside of the holiday tradition craze).  I can’t wait to give them to them on the day they head off to college…a brief record of all their brilliant, frustrating, funny, inspiring moments.

Yesterday was a pretty normal day at our house.  I went to work.  The boys went to school.  Speed had a play date for the afternoon.  Whiz went to soccer practice.  We made a trip to WholeFoods on our way home…  Through it all, everyone seemed happy and healthy.  That is, until we sat down for dinner.

At dinner Speed was sitting at the table in front of his favorite meal in the world but wouldn’t eat a bite.  He kept saying “I’m too sleepy to eat”.  “I’m too sleepy to eat”.  I’ve been at this a few years now and I know that there’s no such thing as “too sleepy to eat”.  For once I’m a step ahead of him and I see through his ploy to leave the dinner table early and play.  I calmly said “Listen Speed.  You can stay at the table and eat dinner with our family or you can go up to bed.  Those are your only choices”.  Without a word he left the table and headed up to his room.  Deep inside I knew it had all been too easy, but still I began congratulating myself on my brilliant mothering. 

About 20 minutes later it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard anything from the littlest monster (unheard of).  (more…)

It was with great pleasure that we publicly announced the availability of our local schools data tools yesterday. The SchoolFinder Tools give media outlets, websites, and bloggers access to comprehensive local school information about the Nation’s 125k K-12 schools.

While SchoolFinder is a great resource for parents, educators, and students to find a school and get comprehensive school data information, we realized early on that there is a broader opportunity here to disseminate local school information to an even larger audience than the million or so parents who visit our site each month. The SchoolFinder Tools are the first of their kind and enable websites to provide access to accurate and up-to-date school information to their users without paying hefty licensing fees or driving users directly away to another site.

There are currently two different ways to access the school information. Our Local School Widget allows developers and bloggers to create a customized widget in a matter of minutes and display information about local schools on their site. The enterprise-class school information web service gives developers access to the complete local schools database via an API key. We’ve been working with a few partners already and are excited to have Zillow and RealSeekr live with our school information on their site.

Local school information provides home buyers with key neighborhood insights and makes it easier for those buyers to evaluate which neighborhoods are right for them. Zillow is using our data on local schools to add value to their local homes listings and includes our resources in their free data resources directory. Check out the example for homes for sale in San Mateo, CA and Hillsdale High School. Realseekr has similarly added detailed school information to all their listings. Check out this house for sale in Grayslake, IL.

We are also very excited to see that our local school information resources being well received by the blogging community. Geek Estate, MyTechOpinion, and What’s your website done for you lately? have posted great reviews on the school information resources and the feedback we are generating from the exposure is invaluable to planning future local schools data enhancements. Many thanks to the bloggers that have begun to deploy the school information widget and web service on their own sites. The implementations on OC Real Estate Voice and The White Oaks Blog are great examples.

Please let us know what you think of these new local schools information tools. We’re really proud of what we’ve developed here but are looking forward to making improvements as folks like you road test them. You can send any comments to api-support@education.com.

Thanks so much to all who have commented to our new blog so far.  As promised we’re cleaning out our ‘treasure chest’ and active readers reap the rewards!

Congrats to this weeks winners!  Kim F. will be receiving Playmobil’s new Circus Ring - a really cool toy big top complete with trapeze artists, a ticket booth, and a lit stage.  Playmobil sets the stage and your kid’s imagination brings it to life!  Pam S. will be receiving Lego’s Technic Cherry Picker.  With a working motor and battery box, these are not your daddy’s Legos!

 Also, I saw a cute blog post about another mom’s first day of kindergarten experience that I thought you all might enjoy.  Click here to read it.  (And she also seems to be a fan of Education.com which is always nice!)

Keep leaving comments….more winners will be announced next week.

Hope you’re all settling into the new school year!

Back to school season is upon us, and with it comes a flurry of activity - and healthy dose of worry, too. Is my child going to make friends? Will he like his teacher? Are his backpack, his clothes, or his haircut going to signal “nerd” or normal?

For all the overstressed moms and worried dads out there, I have a cure. And it involves taking a minute to stop thinking about your child’s lunchbox, desk partner, and hairdo.

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and picture this: kids around the world with no Jonas Brothers backpacks, no Miley Cyrus erasers, and no MP3 players. No pens or pencils. No teacher. No school. (more…)

I love Education.com’s back to school gear guide but I was feeling a little jealous that all the gear was for the kids!  Don’t we moms deserve a little treat for keeping the little darlings in one piece all summer and getting them back to the class room clean and healthy with all their supplies purchased and their lunch boxes packed?

One of my best girlfriends just sent me the perfect back-to-school mom gift and suddenly I’m not feeling quite as left out.   It’s a Busy Body Family Organizer.  Yes, I realize it’s sad - ok pathetic - that I’m this juiced about a calendar but …that’s my life right now!  The thing that makes the “BB Book” (as we now call it) is the way the weekly calendar pages are organized - kind of a chart with a column for each family member and a row for each day of the week.  So every morning I can look across a row to see what we have to accomplish as a fearsome foursome.  I can also take periodic looks down each column to make sure neither of my kids is too overbooked for the week.  It’s also pretty stylish and has some fun features like space to write your favorite take out places (not that I’VE ever had a last minute “there’s nothing for dinner” emergency). 

If you’re in the market for a new calendar, check this one out!