As a school teacher, fighting germs is constantly on my mind.  My first year teaching, I used ten sick days in a little over eight months!  If I want to stay healthy, I must be vigilant about keeping my classroom a clean and healthy learning environment. I encourage my students to use the Purell Instant Hand Sanitizer I keep on my desk.  If I feel like I've come into con...

The Diary of a Young Girl is Anne Frank's account of her life in hiding in Nazi-occupied Amserdam in the 1940s.  The dvd The Diary of Anne Frank uses a screen play based on the play written about the contents of the diary.  This is a good dvd, and the film was a 1959 Academy Award Winner, but the black and white film seems really old-fashioned to children of today.However, the con...

The movie Holes is an adaptation of the book by the same name, written by Louis Sachar.The movie protagonist is a young boy named Stanley Yelnats. (Get it, Yelnats is Stanley spelled backwards?)  Anyway, he feels there is a curse on the men of his family because of his dirty rotten no good pig stealing great great grandfather. The whole movie is zany and fun, and Sachar's story is...

My daughter is fourteen and wants to wear name-brand clothing so she can be "cool" at school.  Well, her favorite stores are Abercrombie and Fitch and American Eagle, both of which have cute clothes, but both of which are rather expensive.A great alternative for us are the jeans from Aeropostale.  If you don't look at the lable, they look like jeans from the more expensi...

My daughter is a small fourteen year old that wants to wear cool clothes.  She loves clothes from Abercrombie and Fitch, especially their jeans, because that seems to be what all her friends are wearing.The clothing at Abercrombie and Fitch is very expensive, with jeans sometimes costing over one hundred dollars.  A good solution for my daugther is to get jeans from abercrombie. ...

Now that my daughter is fourteen, she has gotten really particular about her jeans.  She just wants to wear jeans from the cool stores---and American Eagle is one of the stores that she wants to shop from.  I think these jeans are actually really cute on her, and she likes them because the other kids are wearing them at school.  The jeans are kind of pricey, but definitely not as...

I love the Walt Disney film The Little Mermaid.  The film is about a young mermaid named Ariel, who is tired of her life under the sea and wants to experience the human world, much to her father's dismay.  The animation and music found in this film are sublime, and watching the film is really a pleasurable experience.  My three year old daugther loves this movie, and unlike m...