The International Medical Corps. is in the running to receive funding for $1.5 million to feed malnourished children. The agency has been chosen from a group of 1,190 participating projects, and all they need to win the grant that they plan to use to feed hungry children in the developing world, is your vote!

Just click here, and you can cast your vote in favor of the IMC to help bump them up to the top of the list, and win their funding. $1.5 million could feed a LOT of hungy children, and all it takes is a click on the VOTE button at the top of the page.

Voting ends on September 29, so please hurry. And if you have your own blog, please consider spreading the word. We don’t all have the time or the energy to feed hungry kids ourselves, but what we can do is vote for someone who will!

Preschoolers have a natural inclination to be silly. They like to rhyme words meaninglessly, make up new words, and come up with new words for every day objects.

Kids this age may be too young to appreciate any “real”jokes or riddles, the kind that make older children laugh. What you can do at this age is to encourage their natural silliness. Here are some ways you can encourage a preschoolers sense of fun and laugh with her.

1. Play “silence” games. Everybody sits in a room, not saying anything. The one who laughs first is out of the game. The laughter is even more contagious when there is more than one child in the room.
2. Share funny things that happened during the day with your kids. Tripped on a step at the supermarket? Your preschooler will find it hilarious!
3. Share comic strips in the newspaper that are about hilarious kids his age, like Calvin and Hobbes.
4. Play what if? games. Create outlandish scenarios. What if she was in charge of the house for a day? What if your pet was a dinosaur?
5. Tag any day of the week as “special.” Have a Roller Skating Day when you wheel yourselves around the house. Or a “Blender Day” when you whip up juices together. Let her come up with her own ideas for the Day.
6. Laugh at her jokes, even if it takes her 20 minutes to get to the punch line. It’s important for her to know that she has the power to make others smile.
7. Place an empty carton at the door way, and insist that she has to crawl through the carton and into the house every time she wants to come in that day. Encourage her natural playfulness.

Above all, have fun!

Here are some more preschool problem solving activities you can do to get that little mind ticking.

1. Give your child a coffee can, and let her roll it on the floor. Now, give her some objects like a coin, a marble, a block, a small metal toy car, a crayon, and let her place each object one by one in the coffee can, and then try rolling them on the floor. Does the can roll any differently when there are objects inside them? Do heavier objects slow down the cans? What can she do to get the can to roll faster or slower? Discuss.
2. Use world issues to teach about problem solving. For instance, global warming. Explain how traveling by car less, and walking or cycling around more, is one of the ways she can solve the problem of melting glaciers.
3. Use real life situations to tackle problems. For instance, if she’ s having a tough time getting ready for preschool in the morning, talk about things she can do to get dressed, fed and ready on time. She could wake up a few minutes earlier, she could time all her daily morning activities so she gets them done quicker, she could just go to preschool in her night clothes… Talk about the feasibility of the solutions.
4. Most kids’ movies have the theme of problem solving. When you’re done watching a cartoon show or a movie together, discuss the problem, and how the characters solved it.

Have fun!

On a more somber note, I received a request to let my readers know about Russia and Georgia’s use of cluster bombs in their recent conflict. I must admit I haven’t been following the conflict much, but the thought of tens of thousands of tiny bomblets falling over an entire area, being buried as de facto land mines, and then exploding later when kids chance upon these is appalling. My American friends can visit this site for details on how they can voice their support for a ban on these deadly weapons.

The concept of the cycle of days and months can be a difficult one for kids to grasp, especially if you tell them that December is the last month of the year, and Saturday/Sunday is the end of the week.

To make them understand that days and months end to begin all over again, write the names of different months on paper plates, and arrange them in a circle on the floor. When you’re teaching her the names of months, let her jump or skip from one plate to the next, instead of memorizing the names of the months verbatim. Do the same for days of the week too. This helps her understand that Monday follows every Sunday, and there is a January waiting after every December.

Have fun!