Connecting Voices Communicating

As a grandmother, I want to help make good connections with my grandchildren.  Parents struggle with healthy foods for their children.  They can put it at the table, but will they eat it?  Sesame Street can help! Grandchildren lived in three different worlds, home, school, and the community where they do their activities such as swimming,  playing sports, going to church.  The two most important are home and school because they are the two in which they spend most of their time.  Sesame street can help them understand that both are their safe places to learn and grow. To be ready for school takes more than social interaction.  They have to interact with numbers and letters before entering kindergarten.  Some children take this as their personal passion and are wanting to spell and recognize letters as a game.  Others, are not so willing and the regret comes when they face the first day of kindergarten and they cannot write or read their names.  Sesame Street and grandparents can help.

Full connections to Sesame Street in Spanish and Latinx, Hispanic Heritage Month here

Make Peace Day efforts of non-anger, non-fear, and non-violence an everyday challenge. International Day of Peace Pledges Park School's, in Newton, Massachusetts, 4th graders wrote their pledges on 9/21/2021 and placed them on their Instagram Account.  I love to see that teachers are making this day "visible and relevant" in the educational process of young minds.  A peaceful heart is a creative, productive, compassionate, and loving heart.  The school is also opening opportunities for parents and guardians to join the Model UN Club.  What a clever idea to keep generations connected in global issues discussions and policies.  I am going to ask my family if I can join as an online volunteer for now. Googolplex number of ways to make the world a better place for all of us, what is your pledge for 2021?   Mine is to keep the monster in me in check and do my daily best to be the best me I can be and try to connect to the needs around me with compassion, kindness, and loving w

  Last year, I participated with Thomas and Caroline in the Climate Action Project 2020 Virtually.  I created a set of Google Climate Change Challenge 2020 slides  as we connected when their scheduled permitted.  We discussed what was climate, seasons, and started to develop a Climate Action Bilingual  Alphabet. The new virtual Climate Action Project 2021 is about to begin.   The Climate Action Project is a free 6 weeks allowing teachers and students aged 3-21 to collaborate on global scale on climate change topics over the course of six exciting weeks: they will study causes and effects, will try to solve issues and take action.  Coco, Thomas, and I will  join teachers and students across 145 countries learning in authentic ways with the main goal being to change students’ behavior and societies’ mindset. This project is supported by HH Dalai Lama, Queen Elizabeth II, Dr. Jane Goodall, world leaders and Ministries of Education across 16 countries. During the past years the project wa

  Candle Breath

  How does one approach Disarmament to toddlers?  How does one teach what we should not have created for ourselves?  Why is fear so profitable and goodness somewhat equivalent to weakness?  Why did we inherit these attitudes from our ancestors?  How can we stop this from being part of our grandchildren's lives?  They will inherit a globe less stable, more populated, and with greater challenges than we did.  Weapons of mass destruction add to the concept that hell is part of our lives now, not after we are dead.

 Freedom from fear Rewire your brain with Positivity-  Enhance your immune system.  Create the joyful happiness of freedom

 

 Day 6 to Peace One Day: Children and Youth   Teach Resilience and Heritage Children in 2021 are a puzzle to me.  They have everything they need.  They are provided everything they want, but if the word NO appears, there seem to be more meltdowns than I remember in my years growing up.  How to be a good ancestor and keep a balance between the love you feel and the desire to bring all ways to help kids cope with challenges, especially with the word NO or when they find difficulties learning something at the speed the internet is making them expect to do it.   I do not have the answer.  It is a parental struggle which I hope the new ideologies on how to raise self-reliant, resilient, loving, caring and kind children are effectively addressing.  The process seems a lot more complicated, but if one looks at the results in the kinds of people our ancestors raised and the divisions and negativity prevailing in the world, our ancestors and their ways will be getting a failing grade.  Best of

 Day 5:  Health https://vanessaloder.com/15-day-meditation-challenge-2/ My grandson has a way of connecting to the 11 themes to Peace Day (9/21) in the most indirect, yet direct ways.  During bath time we were talking about playing and friends during the third day of his first week in kindergarten.  He mentioned being hard to deal with children who were bigger than him and who were talking about not-so-nice things like guns, shooting, and killing. I was so shocked that I do not remember exactly what he said because my whole body got filled with fear and worry that at such a young age, he was already facing the ugly side of humanity.  He said he did not want her mommy to know.  I said he needed to get away from those kids, tell them that those were not nice things to say, and talk to the teacher.  He said, "It is hard."  Then, he changed the subject.  Later on, he asked Alexa to play, "Brave."  He looked at me as he is only able to look and he said, "I know th

 Theme 4: Economic justice This is a difficult concept to relate to toddlers.  I have looked for years for a good video or visual, not religiously or politically associated and I am still going to my old one in my former school blog, Casady Peace Week This theme will be hard to connect to toddlers, especially because Thomas is at after-school care today, and his parents and sister, and are going out to dinner.  We will see Coco, but we will not see Thomas. What is economic justice?  Reducing poverty or eliminating it. What is poverty?   Maybe we can be connected to something everyone should have.  WATER

 DAY 3:  ENVIRONMENT The only connection we did with Thomas and Caroline this day was flying kites.  It was a beautiful day outside and mom created a beautiful environment inside the home.  She is trying to get them back into a school routine and increase their morning "family contributions" as they grow older.  In the morning, they need to make their bed.  Then get dressed, brush teeth, go potty. and instead of arts and craft time, they need to put their clothes from laundry piles in their closets.  Then, come down to eat breakfast.  Mommy or Daddy will make dinner, but they are responsible for setting up the table and taking their plates to be washed when finished.  We were called to dinner time routine by a cowbell.   The meal was great, the kids were responsible and proud of what they have done to contribute to the good family time environment.  It was a natural way to start understanding our own environment to then go further into the community and global environments. W

 DAY TWO:  INTERDEPENDENCE Thomas and I had a brief talk about What Interdependence meant.  Coco was listening but she did not participate.  I use the example of a tree hosting birds, giving them a place to live, and the trees getting some stuff from them, which help them live better.  We also talked about bees getting pollen from the flowers, which help the bees work and live.  In turn, the bees help the flowers to continue living as they drop the pollen were needed to bring more flowers.  Finally, we talked about crayons.  Each color is independent of the other and can make many beautiful things.  Red can make beautiful hearts, green turn into wonderful forests, blue paint beautiful skies, and oceans.  But they need to connect to each other to make one of the most beautiful things we see in the sky: A rainbow. I mentioned the Cactus Hotel, but life went on and we did not have time to watch it. Thomas and Caroline's connection to Peace Day today was of playing with the Pinwheels a

 9/11/2021:  Day One UNITY    Global Changers Super Heroes Respectful Remembrance    Hope for Unity Thomas and I had a casual conversation about 9/11 based on what I saw on 9/11 Global Changers Super Heroes.  Terrorists harmed and killed a lot of people because they were mad.  What are terrorists? Terrible, mad people.  It was a really sad day when we saw the worst of people, but also the best of people as the police, firefighters, doctors, nurses and even ordinary people like us did everything they could to help people who were suffering. No more was said.  I will come back to this as I introduce to him the concept of Global Super Heroe.  I subscribed to learn this free program.  We will be ready for a more profound remembrance when he is six years old.  I hope we will be serving somewhere together too, after school or in conjunction with his school.  My plan for next year is to bring pinwheels for peace to the Labyrinth 9/11 Memorial at Boston College.  This year there was too much c

  9/29/2021 This first video was a disaster.  It took for ever to load.  It had too much adult talking.  The children waited patiently, but lost interest and my husband contributed to the negativity by stating the obvious.  It was boring.  We went to the pool and had a good time playing with the noodles.   The lifeguard at the pool surprised us when he got in the pool and gave a 5 minute lesson to each one of my grandchildren.  His style of teaching was a little too harsh for me.  My husband thought it was fine as the lifeguard was not as protective as we are of the kids.  He expected the children to swim or sink with the noodles and both of the children swam. The problems with the blog were: a. Searching for the post b. Uploading the video took for ever c. Quality of the video was not what was needed for the short attention span I was given Solutions for next Wednesday.   Before they arrive 1. Have clothing, snacks, and dinner ready.  There will not be time in between, if we want peac

At the beginning of this meditative video, I pledged to write my gratefulness once a month, but instead of focusing on what went wrong during the day and ruminate in negativity, I will focus on what during the day made me feel thankful.  I will be happier because my spirit, my soul's GPS will be making uplifting connections. Isn't that what happiness and peace are all about?

What is Gagas' Camp is the name my daughter-in-law and I created for the time my grandchildren spend with my husband and me at our apartment.  Days with grandparents before school starts while parents are working.   Why Gagas? When my grandson was a baby, he called his paternal grandparents, the Gagas. I was Gaga and my husband was nice Gaga.  As my grandson's vocabulary expanded, he qualified everything he found strong, and big, "heavy."  My work allowed me to travel for periods of time to help my son and his wife with my grandson in Boston. My husband could not leave his OKC-based work as often as I did and without any influences, I became "Nice Gaga" and my husband became "Heavy Gaga."  My granddaughter did not give us a name of her own that stuck like Gagas.  Now, our grandchildren are 5 and 3 years old.  Our grown-up names are Grandma and Viejo. Viejo is a name my son and my husband influenced my grandson to call my husband. Why Camp?  My d

      WE, THE WORLD             We, a world of 8 billion people, What about if we were a village of 100?                                           

September is the month when school starts in Massachussettes.  For over a decade, I have observed and celebrated  IDP,   the United Nations I nternational D ay of P eace .  A day to be intentional on being kind, ceasing fire, stopping violence.  Jeremy Gilley started the non-profit organization, Peace One Day to institutionalized, Peace Day in 1999.  100 people were aware of this out-of-the-box idea then.  Jeremy's goal for 2025 is to reach 3 billion people with his message of peace one day.   As I have done for more than a decade, I will join Jeremy's effort.  I will take three steps. 1.  I will raise awareness in my family and my immediate community through simple pinwheels for peace made and decorated with thoughts of peace by my grandchildren and me.  The children are learning how to write letters and ride bikes.  We will be delivering our homemade "riding peace pinwheels" during the 11 days of global unity, starting on 9/11 UNITY DAY and ending on 9/21 PEACE D