After Amanda Peet made quite a stir in this month's Cookie magazine with her comparison of parent's who don't vaccinate their kids to "parasites" she offered an apology.

"I believe in my heart that my use of the word 'parasites' was mean and divisive," Peet writes. "I completely understand why it offended some parents, and in particular, parents of children with autism who feel that vaccines caused their illness. For this I am truly sorry. Since my mom has Parkinson's Disease, I know what it feels like to want a concrete cause, and a concrete cure, as soon as possible."

But she then proceeds to reiterate her stance: that the only way to go, is pro vaccine, and that anyone who thinks there is a link between autism and vaccines are misinformed.

Of course, she has a point, and some hard facts to back her up. But... a fear of an increased risk of autism isn't the only reason parents who don't vaccinate their kids, don't. And many parents who get lumped into the category of 'anti-vaccination' are actually just altering their child's vaccination schedule so as to avoid over-taxing of the immune system that occurs when multiple vaccinations are given at the same time. Yet Peet claims these parents are believers in a "fringe" theory--likening their beliefs to those who still claim that HIV is a government conspiracy.

What do you think of Amanda Peet's apology? Is it sincere or just damage control?

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Right about now back to school supply lists are cropping up everywhere. Staples usually has brightly colored fliers available with supply lists for each grade level, and almost every office supply store advertises having just exactly what you're child will need to get the new school year started. This advertising unfortunately happens well before teachers actually send out supply lists from the classrooms, and every year kids come to school with heaps of supplies they really don't need-and often, are missing a few that they could really use.

Here's the thing. Most public schools, including the one I teach at, are not actually allowed to require parents to provide any supplies at all for their children. The thing about public education is that it's supposed to be free-including materials. But because of the advertising pressure that starts mid summer and builds with a frenzy towards those last weeks in August when schools start, parents often get pushed into buying items their kids don't really need and will likely not use-or even be allowed to use at school.

Private schools of course, are allowed to request that parents buy supplies, but it's still a frugal idea to wait until the required supply list arrives in the mail, than to forge ahead using an in store checklist. But if your kid is already itching to buy new stuff, here are some basic dos and don'ts to help you decide what's necessary and what maybe isn't't.

DOS:

A sturdy backpack. Something that your child can zip and unzip himself with enough pockets to store homework, lunch, and an extra piece of clothing (or several.) Many kids like the rolling backpacks-but they often are hard to store in the classrooms, as they're typically too big for cubbies.

#2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencils. These are unanimously teacher's favorite pencils for writing-because they don't break in the sharpener! Don't skimp on the cheaper brands-but remember, if your child attends a public school, pencils should be provided. Still, a couple extra (sharpened) pencils that stay in your child's backpack will make it convenient for her to do homework while waiting for the bus.

Big eraser. The small erasers on the back of pencils inevitably get used much faster than the pencils. The big pink erasers are the best option. Some of the jelly-like erasers with designs and patterns on them don't actually erase very well.

A sturdy folder for homework. A system at home for checking backpacks, doing and returning homework-is a great idea. Having a consistent place to store homework will make it easier for your child to remember to do it! Kids love the two-pocket folders with fun graphics on the covers. Keep in mind, many teachers will use a particular homework folder for every child in the class-so check with your child's teacher if you're not completely sure you want to make the purchase.

A small, durable pencil case. Again, your child's teacher will likely provide the class with necessary supply containers. However, it's a great thing for your child to keep in her backpack with a few sharpened pencils and a good eraser-to take advantage of long waits for the school bus, or for you to pick her up, and get some homework done.

A notebook/journal. Kids love to doodle, write, and draw-and having a special notebook gives them a constructive and fun place to do so. Again, certainly not a must-have, but if you're going to splurge on an item your kid really wants, this one should be at the top of the list.

DON'TS:

Pencil sharpeners. Unless your teacher specifically asks you to provide one, skip it. They inevitably make a huge mess-everywhere.

Multiple-subject notebooks. For the early grades these are completely unnecessary. For the older grades, wait and see exactly what your child's teacher asks you to supply. Many times little kids end up hauling these around in their backpacks for weeks-without using them for anything!

Glue sticks & tape. Again, unless your teacher specifically asks you to provide these items, don't. Unless you send them in for the whole class---which is often a boon for teachers working with tight budgets. Independent kids with glue sticks however, can make a mess and get into trouble by using them when they aren't't supposed to be.

Rulers. Elementary age kids will not need rulers for school. Every classroom should have an adequate supply. Middle school kids doing geometry might, but again, your child's teacher will be very clear if you need to make that purchase.

Stapler. See above. And oy, have you ever noticed how much young children LOVE to staple EVERYTHING?

Post-it Notes. These are tempting-especially in all the cute styles and designs that are available. But they immediately become a distraction among peers, and are generally not a good idea.

Binders. Most elementary students (K-3) won't need a binder for any reason. Older students who are learning how to keep notes, or do homework from multiple classes might, but your child's teacher will let you know if this is a must have.

Scissors. Again-all elementary classrooms should have an adequate supply.

Crayons. Ditto. Every elementary classroom will have plenty of these!

Hopefully this list will help you navigate the lively process of buying back-to-school supplies with your child. These are tips of course, from my experience. I'm curious to hear what you have found are some back-to-school supply must-haves?

Summer is almost over. It happens so fast, really, though I say this from the standpoint of a teacher--and not as a parent (although I have a three year old who does his share of crawling up my legs in boredom.) I know that for most of you, the end of July starts feeling like the final stage in a marathon: you're counting the days until you can send your kids back to school and enjoy your morning cup of coffee in peace.

Still, there are a couple weeks of summer left, and it is the perfect time to help your child review and practice number concepts that may have gotten left on the back burner for most of vacation. Strong math skills are critical for young learners to excel, and all too often the focus in the early grades is unduly put on reading.

Without a solid understanding of numbers, children in first and second grade can really struggle as new and more complex mathematical concepts are introduced. But a good foundation in math depends on a whole lot more than algorithms and repetition. While the workbooks that many kids do over the summer can build confidence, what they rarely do is build comprehension. Children need to understand the concepts behind number operations in order problem solve with flexibility.

So, while a grade-level appropriate workbook might have been a great way to practice and review some concepts at the beginning of the summer, now is the time to set it aside, and start playing with numbers.

Following are a few activities that you can integrate into your daily routine at home that will give your child practice with the most fundamental concepts in math: comparing, quantifying, counting on, counting back, etc. Mastery of these apparently simple skills is actually what allows young learners to problem solve with flexiblility and apply multiple strategies when encountering new math problems--rather than relying only on a memorized algorithm.

· While cooking dinner: take a handful of dried pasta, beans, etc and have your child count the pile. Notice how she counts. Is it by ones? Twos? Challenge her to count it in at least three different ways.

· While driving to and from anywhere: count by twos, fives, tens, and ones. Once your child has mastered counting forward (to 100) practice counting backwards. Then shake things up by starting at random numbers (i.e. "count by twos starting at 46" or for an even greater challenge ask your child to count by twos starting at an odd number like 37.)

· While eating breakfast: ask your child to estimate how many pieces of cereal might fit into a measuring cup. Talk about what it means to make an estimate (in school I tell kids it's a "good guess") and what might be a reasonable or an unreasonable estimate.

· Anytime: ask your child to compare amounts of objects. Buttons, beads, marbles, stickers, etc are all fun objects to count and compare: which has most? Which has the fewest? How do they know?

· Before dinner: tell your child you need his help finding out what the family wants for dinner. Give him two menu options and have him take a survey of what each family member prefers. Surveys are a great way for children to practice collecting and organizing data. Other survey ideas: let your child use the phone to poll relatives on their favorite color, food, sport, etc. Or take a clipboard and a pencil to the park for some informal tallying.

· If you only have 3 minutes: Ask your child a bunch of quickie questions to get them thinking about the number system. "What comes before 21?" "What comes after 56?" What is one more than 18?" etc.

· If you have 5 minutes: Grab a ball to toss in the yard. Every time you toss your child the ball ask a question relating to a number pattern (such as any number plus one, any number plus two, doubles facts, any number plus 10.) This activity is especially great for hands-on learners. If your kiddo stumbles on a particular fact, keep coming back to it until it becomes familiar.

· If you have 10 minutes, ask your child to solve a problem using pictures, numbers and words. Using multiple approaches helps children become flexible with their problems solving, and encourages them to double check and support their thinking. Problems can be as simple as: how many legs are in our family? To something more complex-such as how many fingers and toes (knees, elbows, and tongues!) are in our family all together?

Almost anytime and anyplace presents itself as an opportunity for playing with numbers, once you're in the mindset. So have fun, and give your child a head start on the school year by using numbers daily in various settings.

At the end of the school year parents often ask me is how much should their child be reading independently over the summer? I could answer this several ways. As a mom, I get that summer time is meant for lounging, for late mornings, summer camp, and unstructured afternoons. And certainly I get how it might not be a kid's number one favorite thing to do to sit down with a good book... But as a teacher this makes my heart ache.

Okay, maybe I'm being a twinge dramatic. Still, I don't know a single teacher who doesn't wish her students were spending the summer sprawled out on the lawn reading one good book after the next, instead of say, playing with his new Nintendo Wii, or watching episodes of High School Musical. But the truth is, there is time during the summer for both: for extra screen time, and for time spent engaged in a good book-every day.

Here is why this is important: any school age child will make progress over the summer if he or she continues to practice read. It's like any thing else in life really. Becoming a confident and fluent reader, like getting in shape or learning a new sport, requires daily practice. Without the daily practice, kids can regress by a month or more, which can result in them starting the new school year scrambling to catch up.

A good rule of thumb for summer reading: you child should read at a minimum ten minutes per day for each grade they've completed (10 minute for First, 20 for Second, etc.) Ideally, your child should be spending this time independently with a book. This builds stamina, and focus, which are two crucial aspects of being an independent reader. If your child is not yet an independent reader, spend this time every day reading with your child.

Some things you can do to make summer reading into a fun and rewarding habit for your kids:

· Make a special "reading nook" or place in the house that your child can go to read quietly. Ideally, you should be able to see and hear your child reading, but your child should be out of the way of central activities taking place in the household.

· Buy your child a bunch of fun stickers-and keep track of the time he reads by putting stickers on a book mark. 1 sticker for every 10 minutes.

· Get a fun kitchen timer and set it-or get a digital timer-so that your child can see the time ticking down. This especially helps highly distracted kiddos who want to dash off to other things!

· Reward your child for every 50 minutes read with something fun and reading related: a trip to the library, or bookstore for a new book of their choice. Or they could be rewarded by spending some time on a fun interactive reading website. (More to come on this! Keep an eye out.)

· Switch things up every few days: send your child on a word hunt around the house-finding as many words as she can that fit a particular spelling patter or rule (such as words that rhyme with CAT or are spelled with the same 'silent e' rule as CAKE and SAFE.)

· Set a goal for the whole summer-take out the calendar and count by tens together-all the days they can possibly read (skipping days set aside for camp, family trips, weekend adventures, etc.) Then decide on a reward for achieving the goal.

A few other things that are really important to keep in mind: almost every child does best with highly focused activities like reading first thing in the morning. Don't save independent reading time for just before bed. Carve out some quite time right after breakfast. Send littler siblings out into the back yard, or get them busy with a drawing project. Reward everyone by reading for a few minutes from a picture book or chapter book on the couch.

As an elementary teacher, I get lots of the same kinds of questions from parents every year, and all of them fall into ghe general category of "How can I help my child to do his or her best in school." With Smart Start I'll be adressing a frequently asked issue realting to education. Feel free to respond in the comments with other questions you may have. My goal is to provide you with answers, tips, and insights to help you support your child as a learner at every stage.

Where I live, the air is fragrant with flowers and newly cut hay right now. It is July, and officially summer. Summer in a child's mind is a time of adventure and family, of lazy mornings and lazier afternoons.

But summer also marks the beginning of an important time in your child's academic career: a time of maintaining skills and progress. Children who do not spend time reading over the summer often show significant losses in their reading skills at the start of the new school year, and boys, specifically find it challenging to sink into a good book over the summer months.

Young boys who have just started reading chapter books often struggle with finding books that engage them. Many tend to prefer nonfiction texts or comics: stuff with a wow-factor and humor rather than character development and plot. Boys are often inclined to put the book down mid-way through and zip off to something more engaging if the book hasn't fully drawn them in, and nonfiction reading or comics caters to this style of reading.

But strong comprehension strategies are built and sustained by reading fictional chapter books that require readers to keep track of characters, monitor plot changes, make predictions, and build on prior knowledge. And it's a worthy summer cause to try and find at least one or two chapter books that belong to a series that your son likes, so that he can practice and build on some of these important reaching comprehension skills.

Recently a friend of a friend admitted that his daughter was overweight and that he didn't know what to do about it. "I feel bad," he confided. "All I do is tell her that she's too heavy, but I don't know what else to do."

His daughter is a chubby 8 year old... And already the most important man in her life is telling her she's not good enough the way she is. Ouch.

Girls, and particularly overweight girls, get so many negative messages about their bodies in our culture. I have multiple friends who remember their mothers or father's saying things like, "Men don't like fat girls," and "If you lost a little weight, you'd be prettier." And I remember my own dad making rude comments about strangers--particularly women--who were overweight when we were out together running errands or at a restaurant.

Prejudice towards overweight children and adults is deeply ingrained in our culture. And many parents don't seem to realize that they are their child's first line of defense with regards to how they'll see themselves in the world.

While it seems obvious that reminding your child that they're heavy will not fix the problem, and modeling a healthy lifestyle will, the issue is far more complex---or there would be far fewer overweight kids.

So what should a dad say to his daughter when he realizes she's becoming overweight? How can he help?

I usually love to play with my 3 year old. I love taking walks that slow to the pace of a snail so that he collect a pocket full of pebbles or jump in puddles. I love listening to his stories and hearing him giggle when he catches a ball.

But there are also days when I don't love it quite so much. Days where I've worked long hours and come home exhausted. Days where all I want are twenty uninterrupted minutes to check my email and get caught up on my favorite blogs. Days where the minute he sees me settling down with my lap top he starts to whine. "Play with me mommy! When are you going to play with me?"

"In a minute," I say, trying desperately to stretch that minute to five. "Go see how tall you can build a tower with your blocks."

But the guilt that creeps up then is made only worse by the fact that like so many others, I am a full time working mom, and my time with my son (who spends his days with my in laws) is curtailed during the week to an hour in the morning and a few at night. Because I work, feel like when I'm home I should always be engaged, involved, hands-on, actively seeking out learning with my little boy.

And the expectation for parents to spend more quality time with their kids is pervasive. According Elizabeth Cooksy, a sociology professor at Ohio State University, "Parents are feeling peer pressure to spend more time with their kids, and guilt when they do not,"

"We've really moved into this cultural expectation that this is what good parents do," Cooksey said. "It's more a cultural consensus, that if we are going to be parents, we are going to have to put time into it."

And 2006 study found that both single and married parents are spending more time with their kids. Which means that in spite of the fact that there aren't miraculously more hours in the day, working moms are spending at least as much quality time with their kids now as mothers did forty years ago. (Incidentally, this also means working moms are insanely busy. All the time.)

But really is all that hands-on playtime a good thing? Maybe at the end of the day everyone is better off when mom (or dad) insists on some downtime and kids are left to their own devices for a while. Perhaps I'm actually encouraging creativity and self-reliance when I tell him to bug-off and go build with blocks? One thing I know for sure: when I've had some downtime, I'm that much more likely to fully engage him in his request to "pretend we're baby sharks!"

One of my favorite things about children is that they are unabashedly quirky. They take on the world with a kind gusto and wide-eyed wonder, and they bring unbridled passion to their interests: be it collecting rocks, or eating bread only with the crusts removed.

Toddlers and preschoolers in particular seem to develop habits and behaviors that at any other time in their lives would be considered totally strange, but at the age of 2 or 3 are par for the course.

Wondertime's "The Oddball Chronicles" are full of the obsessions, collections, and passions that make young kids wildly original and unique. One child has an obsession with the kitchen rolling pin. Another a love for cotton balls taken to the extreme.

It's a reassuring to read about the weird fascinations and fixations of other people's kids--because they make me make me feel, as the parent of a little one, just a tad more normal.

My son is currently obsessed with the idea that foxes live upstairs in our hallway. He won't go up the stairs alone, unless he pretends he's a shark--because clearly, everyone knows sharks eat foxes, right?

Do your kids have odd obsessions or quirks?

When you have a baby you are automatically inducted into the cult of people-who-will-sleep-anywhere-at-all. Welcome. It's a lovely place, really. Especially if you're Daddy, and you're on night duty. Or maybe you're not on night duty, and you're in the way and snoring.

Before having a baby, I had no idea how frequently spouses spent their nights on the guest bedroom pull-out, on the couch downstairs, or in their child's princess bed.

It's the Murphy's law of parenting the young child. Where you end up, and how you end up there, might be different, but the fact remains the same: you will end up sleeping somewhere else not once, but many times, in the span of your child's young life.

In our household, co-sleeping was something we were into when our son was small, so when we realized our three-year old was still waking up in the middle of the night (night terrors) seeking consolation, we bought a king-sized bed and told him to come crawl into our bed in the middle of the night, instead of trekking to his room, where one of us would invariably end up sleeping.

But co-sleeping, like anything else in the realm of parenting, is something that some parents are totally for, and others are totally against. And many of my friends who say they are totally against co-sleeping because of what it might do to their marital relationship, end up booting their husbands out of bed. So that hubby can get better sleep. So that there is more room in bed. So that no one will have to listen to hubs snoring. So that maybe, just maybe he'll forget all about sex. Or whatever.

And apparently this is not as unusual as one might guess. According to some sources, by 2015 60% of custom homes will be built with dual master bedrooms. Does your spouse end up sleeping somewhere else?

I recently attended a party for one of my son's friends, and found myself slipping into teacher mode as I watched a particular little boy interact with the other kiddos there.

In my opinion, this child was likely on the autism spectrum, exhibiting numerous spectrum behaviors from extreme noise sensitivity, and rigidity about everything, to throwing numerous and extreme tantrums over things most kids don't even notice ("She is making a beeping noise, so I just can't play by her.")

The child's parents seemed to be unaware that he may not have been behaving typically for his age. In fact, both parents were regularly justifying his behavior, suggesting that "all kids are OCD" and that his bursting into tears when everyone was singing happy birthday (too loud) was something any kid might do.

And I get it. If he was my kid, I'd probably be doing the exact same thing. No parent is really ever ready to learn that their child might not be typical.

Nearly one in a hundred children are diagnosed with autism, and the disorder affects boys far more than it does girls. The causes are still unknown, although some believe that it may be linked to vaccinations and even to things like an early exposure to television. The disorder can affect everything from the way a child is able to interact socially, to how he or she is able to learn and grow and later become an independent adult.

With that said, there is so much that can be done with early intervention for children who are on the spectrum. And I I felt torn about saying nothing (which is what I did.)

Would you (or should you) ever tell a friend that you think their child might be _____? Fill in the blank: be on the spectrum, have a reading disorder, have ADD, or even be gifted for that matter. Is it ever right to step across this unspoken boundary, especially if it might be in the long-term best interests of the child?