Owatonna

I was honored to be invited to the spring meeting of the Early Childhood Initiative in Owatonna.  ECI is one arm of the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation headed by President Tim Penny.  This, a partial mission statement from their website www.smifoundation.org

As a community, we succeed when:

• Our children are ready to go to kindergarten
• Early success leads to higher achievement, less grade retention & higher graduation rates
• Adult workers have skills that sustain a growing economy

The Foundation strives for these results.

These fine professionals represent twenty communities in the southern cluster of the initiative.  We had a great conversation about the future of parent education, the state of childhood, and the importance of creating an advocacy network as parent education evolves. I left the building with lots of support from the group to organize a summit of professionals interested in parent education, especially in greater Minnesota.  I am all over it and I am taking names! Many thanks to the Initiative for the work they do!

Whenever I find myself in a community where I know a teacher, I love to stop by and read.  I had a great time in Eric Oppegard's fifth grade classroom.  You will remember Eric as one of the finalists for the 2012 Minnesota Teacher of the Year.  I played twenty questions with his class. They had to solve the mystery of who I was and why I was visiting their classroom.  Both classes did it before they hit twenty! Yeah. I had "I Want My Hat Back" in the car and wondered if 10 year olds would like it....they did. We read it twice. I took a picture of me with Mr. O for the blog.....

OK, this isn't us. The picture we took of us is just awful...AWFUL! It was at least 90 degrees in the classroom and nearly 100 degrees outside.  I was sweaty hot and Mr. O looks....well hot, in a temperature kind of way too. It takes an enormous amount of energy to keep a room full of 10 year olds entertained and by the end of the hour, it looked like Mr. O and I had supervised a field trip of Labrador puppies. On a much better day, Mr. O and I looked like this...not that different than how Don and Colleen looked in the 90's.

Thanks Eric! I loved visiting your classroom. The community of Owatonna is lucky to have you.  Thanks for being a teacher.