The problem was he had three boys. The youngest, well to be honest, I am not sure what he ate. I think it was whatever we put in front of him, since he was 8 years younger, during the early years he probably had very little choice and when my brother and I left the house, he had nearly a decade of being the sole decision influencer. The middle child who was definitely his father's culinary son. He, anguished over the meal, and by 8 or 9, he was in charge of the major food prep in the house. He was an early developing gourmet cook long before culinary expertise was a value. He remains the "gifted and talented" chef. Finally, there was me. I was in charge of salad.
In our house, there really wasn't time to cook every night. With swim practices, religious school, Hebrew School, and other activities, someone was always coming and going. We would make a couple of stock meals for the week, a soup or a large thing of spaghetti sauce, that we would have two or three times in the week, and scatter in some other meals when we could make them. If you didn't like what was being cooked, you had a couple of choices hit the stock meal or scrounge the kitchen for another dinner.
A generation later, our house doesn't feel much different now. I am a little more experimental of a chef than 10 year-old me, my wife is an exquisite experimental baker. We have one child who is willing to try to eat most anything and one child who eats about 4 foods at any particular time of the year. We make certain staple foods, grilled items during the spring and summary with food prepped the night before. Chili during the Fall. Soups on and off during the winter. And some of us eat certain meals. Cameron's up for chili most any time, Logan has yet to ever try it. As such, each meal feels like and individualized eating plan. Who eats this, what's the alternative, can we give him a couple of yogurts and still call it dinner?
When preparing lessons for guided math or guided reading, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking I have 25 individualized learning plans, this will never work. However, just like cooking at our house, each plan is often a small variant from the staple dinner. Sometimes each group has different levels of problems, but the staple idea is linear expressions. Sometimes each group gets the same teacher-led session like adding negative numbers yet the supporting centers vary based on concepts they need to practice. The trick is to get certain learning experiences that our staples, the ones which we consistently build off of, and add the variety based on the needs of the group.
My bride is an amazing baker. Her "banana bread" is something that people will give up season tickets for. It's a creation of bananas, chocolate, toffee, and other sensations that excite a household. It comes from scratch and when it is created all of the house becomes a happier place. She doesn't cook it every time, but just enough that the world is a better place. She also has a book, semi-homemade baking. In this set of recipes, desserts are built of a cake-box base. She adds a little of this or a little of that to take a Betty Crocker dessert in a box and turn it into something special. At times she also gets the breakable cookie dough from the aisle in the store. Every once in a while when the kids have friends over she turns on the oven, throws them in, and ten minutes later fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. And, every once in a while the kids eat the cookie dough before its been cooked.
Planning for instruction is like cooking at our house or my wife's baking. Sometimes we have time to create the most magnificent dishes, often we build off of a base by adding a little of this or a little of that, and every once in a while we just take a serving of something straight from the store and say "here you go." It's the combination of each of these techniques that allows us to make an Individualized Education (Eating) Plan for all of our students (children).
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