That's Fit

With a kindergartner in the family, we officially entered the realm of elementary school this fall. Though I couldn't be happier with the school we chose for our daughter, I couldn't help be feel disappointed when the first school lunch menu came home. It read like the school lunch menus I used to bring home, all those years ago: hot dog, pizza, meat gravy, chicken nuggets, repeat. I was really hoping for something more nutritious.

My kids will carry their lunches, so problem solved for us. But for far too many school children who depend on free and reduced lunch, these kinds of meals are their only option. My daughter's school is currently running a survey to improve their school lunch menu, and I'm hoping for a positive change. Maybe we can look to some of America's healthiest schools for inspiration.

Take the winner, West Babylon Senior High in New York. They've completely revamped their cafeteria to include a lighter lunch menu, lost their fryers and replaced them with high-tech ovens, and open their cafeteria back up after school for kids who are participating in extra-curricular activities. There's a school-wide commitment to fitness, and P.E. classes focus on making exercise fun and accessible. Even school fundraisers include healthy foods ... no candy! There are several other schools highlighted by CNN, so if you're looking for ways to make your own child's school healthier, look no farther than these inspiring schools.

This weekend my son and I are going on a vacation. While we're staying in a cabin, we'll be spending most of our time outdoors -- at the beach, sand dunes, nature trails, and hiking paths. Both my son and I love to explore and check out what nature has to offer. A new web portal, Andy Camper, is all about outdoor adventures for kids.

The site offers dozens of how-to videos for kids; from geocaching to watching the stars. The site aims to get kids excited about the outdoors and to reconnect them with nature through fun, engaging ideas and activities.

My son is really into bugs right now (except spiders... they freak him out). Tonight, we're going to make this cool water viewer to help us look for bugs and other critters in the lake this weekend. Check it out! You're sure to find fun activities for you and your kids whether you're heading out on a special outdoor adventure, or just want to do some exploring in your own backyard.

Boys need gym class. But girls need it more, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

It's clear following a survey of 5,000 students ranging from kindergarten to fifth grade that girls who got 70 to 300 minutes of physical education per week scored higher on standardized tests. Funny because gym classes are being increasingly scaled back to make room for academics and testing when if the exercise was instead more frequent, girls would do even better. They'd concentrate better too. And participate more in class. Not so true for the boys, though.

The CDC study found no correlation between gym class and test scores for boys, maybe because they play more actively and physically during recess and outside school.

Researchers have found a link between education and life expectancy. Life expectancy in the US has been on the rise in recent decades, but the numbers are disproportionate. On average, those who continued education beyond high school have a life expectancy of 82. Those with 12 or less years of schooling have an average life expectancy of 75.

So what do books have to do with life span? Nothing really. Researchers attribute the difference to lifestyle. People with less education are more likely to have a lower income which can lead to subsequent health-related issues such as poor housing, crime, or lack of medical insurance. In addition, researchers feel tobacco usage may account for the discrepancy in life expectancy.

Nearly all public elementary schools schedule physical education for their students, says the newsletter sent home from school with my first-grader the other day. Yet only 17 to 22 percent -- depending on grade level -- provide physical education on a daily basis. That's how it works at my kid's school. Every Thursday, Joey reports for PE class. It lasts for 40 minutes, I think. Forty minutes for the whole week. He spends 29 hours per week at school.

This is interesting stuff, this lack of fitness in the course of an average day, because studies show that children whose exercise needs are met are more able to learn and achieve. Exercise can lead not only to healthy bodies but improved test scores -- especially in math -- and better attendance, and more positive attitudes about school in general.

Children who send less time focusing on other subjects in order to commit more to physical education pursuits actually do equally well or better in academic classes. So it wouldn't be so bad if Joey's school worked in some more exercise at the expense of classroom time. Will his school, which sent home this enlightening newsletter, make any changes? I'm not sure. But it sure would be nice.

Christina Cherif of Oakland Based Urban Gardens (OBUGS), a nonprofit that provides garden-based education programs at four Oakland schools, conducts weekly gardening lessons for first-graders. And when the students see her coming, they cry, "Yeah, the garden lady!"

Dropping seeds into little hands, asking questions about roots and stems, and marveling at the wide eyes and wonder she sees on the faces of her pupils, Cherif is just one person representing the growing trend of incorporating instructional gardening into the school curriculum.

For children in urban environments, especially in low-income areas where access to fresh produce is limited or non-existent, kids don't know much about the origin of food. Bringing gardens to them opens up a whole new world.

"A lot of the kids we work with don't know where food comes from," said Michelle Lieberman, executive director of OBUGS. "A benefit of school gardens is that they see the life cycle."

Interested in helping young minds grow through gardening? Check out kidsgardening.com to get started.

School cafeterias are getting healthier and healthier. They may not be perfect just yet, but progress is certainly apparent.

According to a blurb in the November 5, 2007 issue of TIME magazine, about 19 percent of schools noted in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report offered French fries in 2006, compared with 40 percent in 2000. Vegetable sales increased from 51 percent in 2000 to 71 percent in 2006. And junk food in vending machines was prohibited by four percent of school districts in 2000. In 2006, 30 percent nixed the junk.

Fitness pursuits are also on the rise. The percentage of districts requiring elementary schools to teach physical eduction increased from 83 percent in 2000 to 93 percent in 2006. And fewer schools are allowed to punish kids with push-ups, which associates exercise with pain. How about recess? There's improvement here too. In 2000, 46 percent of elementary schools required recess, compared with 57 percent in 2006. Sadly, though, the percentage offering intramural sports has not changed since 2000.

A lot has happened in six years. But is it enough?

It's not so hard to talk to kids about nutrition, fitness, and overall health. But when it comes to informing them about sexual health, not-so-hard can become oh-so-scary.

Before you draw a blank about what to say to your kids about sex education, head to the bookstore for a little advance preparation on how to tackle the "where do babies come from" questions. Experts recommend parents pick up a few books, read them, and then begin discussing the "birds and bees." Here are the books they suggest:

It's NOT the Stork by Robie H. Harris
What's the Big Secret? by Laurie Krasny Brown and Marc Brown
What's Happening to My Body by Lynda Madaras
The Boy's Body Book by Kelli Dunham

A group of Canadian audiologists and speech pathologists are concerned that noisy classrooms are making it tougher for kids to properly hear lessons and therefore learn material. A study comissioned by the Canadian Language and Literacy Reseach Network showed that first grade students tend to miss at least 1 of every 6 words spoken by their teachers because of the amount of ambient noise, including other classes and audio equipment, in classrooms.

As this article points out, while adults have the language skills to determine words that they've missed in sentences, children aren't able to put the pieces of a sentence together and end up experiencing a number of detrimental effects including poor understanding, reading problems and decreased attention. Apparently the problem is worse in Canada than in the United States, where there is a national standard that keeps classrooms less noisy.

Are you worried about the amount of noise in your child's classroom?

School-age children tend to row like weeds, but in Taiwan, they're generally getting shorter. Why, you ask? Well, studies are pointing the finger at education. More specifically, it's thought that school pressure, a poor diet and a lack of sleep are to blame. Most students in Taiwan are not only expected to do well in their traditional studies, but they're also encouraged to take many extra-circular activities, including English as a second language.

Academic excellence is important, but at what cost? Certainly children shouldn't have to sacrifice their health to do well in in their studies. Education should facilitate growth, both of the physical and intellectual kind. Don't you agree?

A recent study found something which I would consider to be obvious -- the more a person is educated, the less chance he or she has of dying from cancer. In the study, co-author Elizabeth Ward stated "Cancer mortality varies a great deal for all cancers by individual level of education."

The goal from the result of this study would be to get most people to the level of cancer mortality that the best-educated see. But, with education generally tied to socioeconomic status and access to god medical care, who knows if that would ever be possible.

From one perspective, more educated people may know more about the risks of cancer overall. Access to medical care to take care of cancer-related issues also comes to the educated (since they can afford it) more than the under-educated. Does that make it right, or will inequalities like this always exist?

I never get much out of my first-grade kid when he gets home from school. "What did you do today?" I inquire. "I don't know," is his usual reply. "Who did you sit with at lunch?" I ask. "The same boy I sat with yesterday," Joey tells me. "What's his name?" I probe. "I don't know," Joey declares. The same pattern happens when I ask about math, spelling, art, recess. Prying information out of Joey is like pulling teeth.

Joey did manage to blurt out some important information the other day, though. He told me he exercises at school every morning. He said he stretches and bends and reaches and jumps with the other kids in his class. His daily fitness routine lasts for 15 minutes every day. Joey didn't tell me this. I saw it posted in his classroom during open house the other night. All this tops off his once weekly 40-minute physical education class.

I'm happy for the moving and grooving Joey gets at school, although it's nothing like what I did when I was his age. I remember attending gym class every day. Back then, we'd change into our gym shirts and shorts before engaging in a painful game of dodge ball or a choreographed mess of square dancing. Gym class was a sure presence in the school day. Times sure have changed. But maybe we're getting back into the swing of things.

Get a good and healthy breakfast or your learning may suffer! Those words, or some like them, may come out of the mouths of many concerned parents in the morning, and there is quite a bit of truth to them. If you don't give a growing mind the right type of energy, how can it perform at its best?

There's more to it than brain food, too -- things like good self–esteem and not creating "ups and downs" using refined carbohydrates and sugars are all tools to help your child succeed better in school.

Hindering learning is never a good thing, and by ignorance alone, many parents allow this day in and day out -- and then wonder why grades suffer and attention levels wander throughout the day. Want more? Read this. Then, act.

At this point, you'd have to be living under rock not to at least be aware of the obesity epidemic in the United States -- especially among children. You're also most likely familiar with at least some of the negative side effects obesity has on a person's physical health, but a recent study finds that, for teenage girls, weight issues could be affecting every facet of their lives -- even their academic careers.

The study, soon to appear in an upcoming issue of Sociology of Education, finds that obese girls are half as likely to attend college as their non-obese peers -- particularly if those girls went to high school with a small number of obese students.

Surprisingly, the same did not hold true for obese boys, suggesting that obesity is especially damaging to the self-image of young women.

I can only imagine the difficult task facing parents of teenage daughters. On the one hand, you want your child to be healthy, and to avoid the health problems that come with excessive weight gain. But at the same time, putting too much focus on her weight issues is likely to severely impact her self-confidence, which -- if this survey is any indication -- could have life long consequences.

They need to stop doing studies on college and higher-education, because every time they do I just get more confused.

The latest research finds that people with higher educations suffer faster memory loss as they age. The study looked at people over age 70 and asked them to remember 10 words. The same people were tested up to 4 times between 1993 and 2000, and those with more schooling had a greater loss than those with less. Given, they had more "knowledge" to start with, but a lot of good that did them since they ended up at the same place as their less-educated counterparts in the end.

Okay, so college reduces your risk of stroke as you get older, but now it also increases your risk of memory problems. However will we choose?