The Buffalo State College Child Care Center is offering a school-age program December 26 through 30. The center's hours are 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The cost of the program is $160 for the week or $35 per day. Space is limited. Call the center at ext. 5335 for more information.

November is another busy month at the Burchfield Penney! Read the museum's November e-newsletter and keep up to date by joining the e-mail list (we promise never to share your e-mail address with anyone!).

Or like the Burchfield Penney on Facebook and follow the museum on Twitter.

Reservations for all space in the Campbell Student Union for the spring 2012 semester will open on Monday, November 14. Due to construction in the facility that will begin in January, six advertising tables will be available for reservation instead of the usual 12. Third-floor spaces (Social Hall, Assembly Hall, and Fireside Lounge) will be available for reservation through the end of March. The entire third floor will be offline starting in April 2012 and will reopen in spring 2013. Reservations can be made online.

For its first concert of the 2011–2012 season, A Musical Feast has invited LehrerDance, Buffalo’s premier professional dance company, directed by choreographer Jon Lehrer, to join the performance on Sunday, November 20, at 2:00 p.m. at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Dancers Theodore Krzykowski and Rachael Humphrey will perform “Morphic Slip,” and Immanuel Naylor and Colleen Walsh are featured in Lehrer’s choreographed interpretation of Czech composer Leoš Janá?ek’s “Pohádka,” or “Fairy Tale,” performed by cellist Jonathan Golove and pianist Eric Huebner. Huebner is also the soloist in Igor Stravinsky’s extremely challenging “Trois mouvements de Petrouchka.” André Previn’s light-hearted virtuosic “Tango Song and Dance” (2001) will be performed by violinist Charles Castleman and pianist Claudia Hoca. Buffalo-based composer Moshe Shulman dedicated his “Argentine Tango” to “Argentine-German composer Mauricio Kagel and all tango musicians in the world.” Shulman himself will play the accordion, along with Castleman (violin), Julia Shulman (double bass), and Huebner (piano).

Tickets are $5 for Burchfield Penney members and $10 for “not yet” members and are available online at www.ticketguys.com or by phone at ext. 6011 during gallery hours.

Visit www.AMusicalFeast.com for more information.

Best Buddies and the Council for Exceptional Children invite you to join "Team Buffalo State" to help us raise money for the New York Special Olympics. This year's Polar Plunge will be held at Woodlawn Beach in Hamburg, New York, on Saturday, December 3.

For more information, to register, or to donate to "Team Buffalo State," visit the Polar Plunge website.

Free busing is available for those who plan to attend the event. The buses will leave the parking area in front of Cleveland Hall at 11:00 a.m. and return after the plunge. (Reservations and travel forms are required if you plan to ride on the bus. Contact bestbuddiesbsc@yahoo.com for the required forms.)

We look forward to "Freezin' for a Reason" with you!

Students, faculty, and staff are invited to participate in a gathering to discuss the recent campus presentation by Victor Villanueva, author of "Colonial Memory and the Crime of Rhetoric: Pedro Albizu Campos," the inaugural Buffalo State Common Reading article. The discussion will take place on Thursday, November 17, from 12:15 to 1:30 p.m. in Bacon Hall 225. All are welcome. Reservations are not required. For more information, call Michele Ninacs, director of the College Writing Program, at ext. 5451.

This webinar will cover advanced features within the Elluminate interface. Participants will learn about the application-sharing feature, be able to give control of shared applications to other participants, exhibit the use of the web-tour tool, and gain the ability to publish URLs. The SUNY Learning Network (SLN) has designed this session to be hands-on. It is best experienced while logged in on your own computer so that you can respond to prompts, ask questions, and participate in other ways. You can view the webinar from any location that provides Internet access. The webinar is scheduled for Friday, November 18, from 11:00 a.m. to noon.

Registration information is available at www.buffalostate.edu/professionaldevelopment/x1316.xml.

Please take a moment to complete a survey about donating blood, created by service-learning students in assistant professor of communication Ann Liao's SPC 307 course. The American Red Cross touches millions of lives each year. American Red Cross employees and volunteers help keep the public prepared to respond to disasters and personal emergencies. They are responsible for the collection and distribution of almost half of the world's blood supply. Our goal for this survey is to get a better understanding of how we can improve the number of blood donors at the blood drives held on the Buffalo State campus by the American Red Cross. Your answers in this survey will be completely anonymous and would be a great help to the organization. The students thank you for your time.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGRJaGM5Y3h4ZVVIbC1oRlpqX0N3b3c6MQ

Representatives from Community Blue, Independent Health, and the Empire Plan will be on campus from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Thursday, December 8, in E. H. Butler Library 210 to answer questions about current health insurance plans and anticipated changes in coverage for 2012.

Employee benefits staff members also will be present to assist employees in making changes to health insurance coverage. Attendees may have their blood pressure checked; learn about the benefits of and sample massage therapy; learn how to maximize dental and vision care benefits from representatives of the CSEA and UUP Benefit Trust Funds and GHI Preferred Dental; get ideas on how to balance work, home, and life from NYS Balance; and obtain information about the Employee Assistance Program and meet EAP coordinators. Students from the Health and Wellness Department will be conducting various other health screenings. Call Human Resource Management at ext. 4821 if you have any questions.

What do your assessments say about your strengths and weaknesses? What do they tell you about your goals and the effectiveness of your curriculum and pedagogy? Learn to identify the purpose of a particular assessment; clarify the decisions that assessment results may inform; share results in useful, meaningful ways; and identify factors leading to disappointing assessment results. Join your colleagues for discussion and portions of a webinar presented by national assessment expert Linda Suskie on Thursday, November 17, from 12:15 to 1:30 p.m. in the Professional Development Center (E. H. Butler Library 181B). Facilitated by Sue McMillen.

Register at http://bscintra.buffalostate.edu/registration/classdetails.asp?class=2599.