Get hopping to a pre-school co-op

If you’re considering nursery school for your pre-schooler, now’s the time to shop around if you want a range
of options. Two years ago, we found ourselves behind the proverbial eight ball.
It’s a common first-child mistake: who would have thought you have to plan for
nursery school so far in advance? But you do, and fortunately, it’s not too
late.

In our hurried search process, we discovered that a
parent-run cooperative nursery school was best for us. We landed at the EllwangerBarryNursery School (461-4250,
www.ebns.org) near Strong/UR. A co-op encourages learning at every turn,
requires parent involvement in the classroom, and is run by a board of
parents/directors. EBNS has just one teacher, so the parents essentially run
the school. It sounds more daunting than it actually is; once the school is
established, maintaining it isn’t that hard when everyone does their part. But
the value that accrues from your child witnessing your active involvement in her
life is worth the effort. We’ve also forged relationships that might last a
lifetime.

Lori Minnehan of the Community
Nursery School of Irondequoit (266-2108), also a
co-op, agrees. She says that parental involvement is crucial to the success of
CNSI. “It makes the transition to the classroom easier for the children and
also offers you the chance to observe and help cultivate your child’s budding
intellect.”

Both schools are accepting applications for the school year
starting in September. You can learn about other area nursery schools on the
web at www.kidsoutandabout.com and through the free
magazine Genesee Valley Parent.

— Michael J. Peter

Easy as pi

It’s not hard to understand why kids are fascinated by the
number pi. When I was a kid I liked it even before I knew what its function
was. The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter?Whatever. The cool thing about pi was what happened
after the number got off to its inauspicious start: 3.1415. It was rumored that
after the decimal point the digits went on forever. That meant infinity. As many digits as I could count and then double that. Triple
that. Plus one.Plus one more.Forever.

Now a nifty website called the Pi Searcher (www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi) helps make infinity come alive
for people who, like me, never got beyond the foreverness
of it. It had never occurred to me that, being infinite, any string of numbers
could occur in pi in many different places. Maybe even an infinite number of places.

Key a series of numbers into Pi Searcher — your birthday,
lucky number, etc. — and it will calculate where in pi your string occurs.
For example, the date September 11,
2001, written as 091101, appears at the 8,267th place after the
decimal point. It also appears again at the 375,742th place, the 1,215,935th
place, and so on. Currently the site calculates up to the first 200 million
digits of pi — not quite infinity, but enough to get a good sense of things.

If you really get into it, the Pi Searcher site, now
celebrating its 10th anniversary, has lots of other information that is
nifty-slash-useless, depending on your point of view.

— Jennifer Loviglio

This article appears in May 3-9, 2006.