Indian Headdress Template

A quick easy craft for kids over Thanksgiving is the Indian Headdress. To make one similar to the Indian Headress in the picture, use the following template.

It's Turkey Week

The beginning of a turkey-filled week. I saw this on Pinterest and made one for the family this morning. Ours was made with pears, apples and mandarin oranges.





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Texarkana Parent - Leapster Giveaway!

Kayla Reeves was the winner of our Leapster Explorer this past month! We appreciate her support as a subscriber of Texarkana Parent magazine.

Our next giveaway will be an Air Hog Hyper Active remote controlled car. It is super fast and fun to drive. Valued at over $75, we are happy to give it away to one subscriber between now and January 15th.

When you subscribe to Texarkana Parent magazine, you become part of our Parent Panel Survey. The parent panel survey will be going out again on December 1st. Answers to those questions will be used in our JAN/FEB issue.

Over a hundred people participated in our Parent Panel survey for the NOV/DEC issue. Many of their answers will appear in the NOV/DEC issue being mailed out this week (Nov 3rd)!

To subscribe log onto our website to pay with paypal, http://www.texarkanaparent.com/Subscribe.html or send $15 with your address, phone number and email to:

Texarkana Parent

PO Box 884

Nash, TX 75569

Witch Sandwich - Trick or Treat?

It's a week until Halloween and the perfect time to make our Witch Sandwich!

Auntie LaLa's Meatball Recipe

Auntie LaLa stopped in not long ago and helped entertain the kids and make dinner! What a treat for me :) I asked her if she would mind sharing the recipe because it turned out to be such a fun activity for the kids! They also were so proud of their cooking, they gobbled up their dinner without any fuss. As she mentions below, they also freeze well - so make extra.

Ideas for Serving Meatballs:

For the classic dish, add cooked meatballs to a heaping pile of spaghetti with your favorite sauce.
For the leftovers, put meatballs on french bread with marinara sauce and shredded mozzarella cheese.
For a New York style pizza, use mini meatballs as a topping.
Or, for a low-carb option, use a large meatball as your entree with sauteed spinach!

Ingredients:
1lb of ground beef, turkey, or chicken
1 package of Italian sausage
pepper (to taste)
one egg
1 cup of bread crumbs (Italian or plain flavor)
1 Tablespoon Italian seasoning
1 teaspoon garlic salt, or more to taste.

Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. If using low fat meats, spray the parchment paper with non-stick cooking spray.
2. In a large bowl, mix both all ingredients together with your clean hands - remove all jewelry first!
3. Once ingredients are mixed together well, begin shaping meatballs to your desired size. The size will only impact the cooking time. Ensure that the entire tray is of similar-sized meatballs for even cooking.
4. Cook the meatballs for approximately 15 minutes, then turn them over with tongs before cooking them another 15 minutes (*time is estimated for golf ball size meatballs).


*Freezing: cover the meatballs on the cookie sheet with Saran wrap and put the entire sheet in the freezer for several hours, or overnight. Once the meatballs are thoroughly frozen, place them in a freezer bag. By freezing them individually, you will be able to take one or two, or ten, meatballs from the bag to cook, rather than the entire bag.

Hot Off The Press!

Yesterday I watched the first pages of Texarkana Parent run on the press. Here are a few pictures from the run, it is an amazing process!

And more exciting...it won't be long now before the Premier Issue of Texarkana Parent arrives!

Get Out of the Heat with the Tiger Bookmobile

Texarkana's Independent School District launched a new program this summer to help encourage reading and learning while students are out of school during the summer. The program brings reading material into numerous neighborhoods around town by traveling on a 48' mobile unit.

We stopped in today while the Bookmobile was at Hands on Texarkana on Olive Street. Much to our delight it was nice to get out of the intense heat and climb into the technology-filled unit.

The Tiger Bookmobile started traveling around town last month and will continue to different locations through mid-August. It is stocked with thousands of books, ipads, flat screen televisions, a Wii gaming system, seats and reading benches. And you can't miss it with the brightly painted mural along the outside.

My son went straight for the ipads, moved onto the Wii gaming system and then browsed the bookshelves and decided to check out two books to bring home. The ipads were loaded with learning applications and read-along books.

Typically, the Tiger Bookmobile holds a reading hour at 10am each day, but check the schedule on our home page for specific locations, times, and dates (www.texarkanaparent.com).

Kuddos to TISD for starting a great program that will hopefully continue to grow as it travels through town!

Indiana Schools No Longer Required To Teach Cursive

Indiana Schools No Longer Required To Teach Cursive

I ran across this article in Time - Summer Camp

Saturday, Jul. 02, 2011

To the Time Machine!

By NANCY GIBBS

The travel experts predict that this will be a staycation summer, with gas prices over $4 and the economy melting like an Eskimo pie. It's always been a luxury to be able to hop a plane to Paris, to Venice, to the Grand Canyon. But as I read the welcome letter sent to my daughter from her camp director, I decided that she is luckier still. The real luxury travel of the modern age is not through space; it's through time.

Just the fact of the letter startled me: seven leisurely pages, single-spaced — sentences that meandered from subject to object through a forest of rustling asides. It bore no resemblance to the tweets, texts, e-mails and alerts that race across my screens all day. The director, the aptly named Mr. Woodman, writes of health insurance and head lice, permission slips and spending money. As I read on I came to feel that the letter had arrived not from New Hampshire but from the 19th century. (See 10 high-end summer camps for kids.)

The language is stern: there will be no tolerance of behavior that is "abusive, aggressive, offensive or otherwise ill-mannered." It is playful: no blow-dryers, "as the use of them is still prohibited under the terms of an exclusive contract we have for that service with Sun & Wind, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the highly reputable Mother Earth Inc." It is philosophical: contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as perfect safety, and being around horses, water, farm animals and, for that matter, humans involves some risk, which must be accepted and embraced, and please sign here to indicate that you understand this simple premise about a life worth living.

And it is elegiac. According to modern risk managers, camp staff should only hug a camper or pat her shoulder if they have the girl's and her parents' explicit permission. "'Tis a sad day," Mr. Woodman writes, "when the spontaneity of expression of encouragement or concern for a child with a timely hug or touch is lost to worries about the possible adverse consequences ... " But such are our litigious, suspicious, ambivalent times.

By the time I finished reading, I realized that while my daughter just wanted two weeks around horses, I was pleased she'd have two weeks around 1880. Two weeks in a place where the kitchen smells of fresh sweet things, floorboards are wide, hopes are high, hands are callused. Before To Catch a Predator. (See photos of summer camp for autistic kids.)

A lot of camps and summer programs for kids seem to have discovered that among the most valuable things they offer is what they don't offer. No wi-fi. No grades. No hovering parents or risk managers or parents who parent like risk managers. The world as it was, or maybe just as we imagined it was, 100 years B.S. (before screens).

But it's not only kids who thrive on time travel. Time dissolves in summer anyway: days are long, weekends longer. Hours get all thin and watery when you are lost in the book you'd never otherwise have time to read. Senses are sharper — something about the moist air and bright light and fruit in season — and so memories stir and startle. Go on vacation with your siblings; you will be back in the treehouse of code words and competitions and all the rough rivalries of those we love but do not choose as family. I am more likely to read trashy books, eat sloppy food, go barefoot, listen to the Allman Brothers, nap and generally act like I'm 16 than I'd ever be in the dark days of February. Return to a childhood haunt, the campground, the carnival, and let the season serve as a measuring stick, like notches on the kitchen doorway: the last time you walked this path, swam this lake, you were in love for the first time or picking a major or looking for work and wondering what comes next. The past was plump with questions whose answers you now know, and summer is when we get to review the exam and make corrections. (See photos of a massive treehouse that is soon to be named the world's largest.)

And then having gone back, touched base, found our firm foundations, we flip the hourglass and travel forward. Summer is also the season of the college visit — and on the way to Mr. Woodman's idyll, my daughter and I did our first, the 16-year-old with the learner's permit driving through winding country roads to arrive at campuses that invite her to imagine herself in new dimensions: the philosophy major, the actress, the astronomer. As I watched her, in wonder and envy at what lay ahead, I remembered that any of us can ask the same questions about what comes next: What do we want to learn? Who shall we be when we grow up? Because it's summer now, and it's never too late to change majors.

This article originally appeared in the July 11, 2011 issue of TIME.

See the top 10 summer anthems.

See TIME's Summer Entertainment Preview 2011.

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• Find this article at:
• http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2080752,00.html

There Is Gak For That!

When it was too hot to be outside, we took an almost 2 hour break to make a little Gak...my kids all time favorite craft. And yes, I left my kids without shirts...it was just easier that way!

The simple recipe:

1 part Elmer's Glue (we used 1/4 cup)

1 part liquid starch (we used 1/4 cup)

food coloring

Bowl to stir it in

Zip Lock bag to keep it in

Mix and stir!

For a four and two-year-old you can't imagine something more fun to them. Their Gak became airplanes, triangles, snakes and trees. They smashed it, rolled it up and bounced it on the table. I do warn though, don't let them put in their hair or try to stick it to their clothes...boy will it stick!

A Pile of Magazines!

I have always seemed to collect magazines. I was chosen to be on my high school newspaper (The Dragon Spirit) staff which led me to interview for a writing position on my college newspaper (The Reflector) staff.

My junior year in college I served as Entertainment Editor for the newspaper. That summer I did an independent study on Online Magazine Publishing. Ironically, I am now starting a print publication, yet, in my study never could have predicted how Facebook, Twitter and my web site would play a very integral part in my business plan.

A brief career in corporate communications with International Paper, Associate Publisher of MidSouthLiving, and a much enjoyed Account Executive position with inferno Advertising Company also all gave me the varied knowledge building up to this....the launch of my own magazine.

This picture shows the stack of magazines I have to browse this week. Soon, I can add my own publication to the list -and I hope everyone enjoys reading it, as much as I have enjoyed the journey getting here!