Today is a day many of us wait anxiously for all winter long. The opening of a new Major League Baseball season, and the unofficial beginning of summer. For some diehard fans like...cough, cough, me,cough cough...it is really the annual beginning of all sports, since for some of us baseball is the only sport that counts. As the character played by James Earl Jones in the movie Field of Dreams observed:

Today is the anniversary of the birth of the world wide Boy Scouting movement back in 1908 in England by Sir Robert Baden-Powell. In honor of the day, here is a reprint of a piece we wrote several years ago about scouting....

One of the biggest challenges for parents, teachers and principals looking for high quality school assemblies and enrichment programs is the chore of locating them. How do you find them? How do you know they are good? Well, there are many ways to do just that, ranging from word of mouth, the internet, what the school has done before, and whatever brochures arrive in the mail. But by far the best way is to actually get a chance to meet a large variety of performers in person and see many of them actually performing segments of their shows, in person and all in one place.

Ask any good teacher how kids learn the best, and they will give you the same answer. Given a choice between learning through listening to a lecture or learning through hands on experience, the latter will always provide better results. There is an old saying sometimes attributed to Confucius and sometimes to Ben Franklin. Regardless of who said it, it holds a lot of wisdom.

In our continuing series, a Mobile Ed Guide to School Assemblies, we offer assistance to you, the parent, who has been given the unsung task of selecting and arranging shows for the children at your school. And, in this series, we attempt to answer all the questions you may have or may not have even considered yet as you approach this job.

When it comes to picking school assembly programs some people know exactly what they would like to schedule. Some don’t have a clue! (There is a lot of that mentality about, actually!) When you set out to determine what shows to schedule you will find that you may have some staff who saw, say, a guy doing a Martin Luther King program at another neighboring school and thought it was great. They would really like you to get it for your school. You may also find that the principal really wants something on character issues or "character counts”. You may have a librarian who really wants to get in a particular author. The art teacher may want a residency by a particular artist. And so on.