Still Putting It All Together

Early Tuesday Morning volunteers from many different companies joined together for one common interest, our children. Between 16 and 33 percent of children and adolescents are obese, it is up to us to help encourage our youth to stay active, get outside and stay healthy. Obesity is one of the easiest diseases to diagnose but could be the hardest to treat, which is why our youth need our help.

United Way along with GMC have come together to build Healthy Kid Zones in nine NFL markets as part of GMC’s Monday Night Football Tour.  Tampa Florida being the second stop on the tour welcomed them with open arms. United Way chose the Drug Abuse Comprehensive Coordinating Office (DACCO) to be the location for Tampa’s Healthy Kids Zone. DACCO houses women that are a part of the program who want to live a drug free lifestyle. DACCO helps them achieve that by giving them the tools that it takes to promote positive relationships with the community and amongst their families.  The women of DACCO were more than willing to break a sweat to help build the Healthy Kids Zone that their own children would be utilizing.

I am very interested in helping to teach kids good health practices.   It really concerns me the rate of childhood Type 2 diabetes.  The lack of education among adults on the increase of children with diabetes or at risk for diabetes is alarming (only 4 years ago I had a co-worker screaming at me in anger because she believed children could ONLY get juvenile diabetes).   The more we can get kids out moving, and making healthy choices the better.  (Ohmuffins, you are a hero.)

This law regulates what websites can collect about children under the age of 13.  It is why children under the age of 13 are not allowed on Facebook (although I’m sure Facebook would love to have this).  There are good reasons why this act is in place, and I really wish that more parents understood this.  A number of students at the school I just left had facebooks as young as 9, with their parents helping them set it up by lying about their birth date.

Neuroscientists have confirmed what any kid knows: Third grade changes everything. Compared to kids just out of second grade, recent third-grade graduates use their brains in an entirely different way when solving math problems, a study in an upcomingNeuroImage finds.   

“I think this is really fascinating,” says cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Ansari of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. “Anybody who doesn’t believe that development is important needs to read this paper, because it really shows how dynamically the brain changes as we learn.”

Cognitive neuroscientist Vinod Menon of the Stanford University School of Medicine and his colleagues recruited 90 children, aged 7 to 9, who had just completed either second or third grade.

The youngsters calculated easy (3 + 1 = 4) or more complex (8 + 5 = 13) addition problems while Menon and his team scanned the children’s brains using functional MRI.

Third-graders’ brains behaved very differently than second-graders’, the team found. “It’s not a minor change,” Menon says. “At this point, what’s clear is that the brain and brain function is undergoing major changes.”

Overall, second-graders’ brains tackled the easy and hard problems about the same way. Third-graders’ brains responded very differently to the easy and the hard questions. This may reflect a cognitive strategy shift as third-graders grow more adept at handling the easy problems.

Third-graders showed heightened activity in a brain region important for working memory, which keeps relevant info handy. Earlier studies of older children found that this region, the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was less active with age while doing math, so the new results may reflect an age-specific approach to math that later gives way to something else, the authors suggest.

It is important to understand the development of the brain when considering how we teach kids in different grades.

Students: Tell us what you think about parents sharing their family-related frustrations, concerns and stories with online readers. Should they obtain their spouses’ and children’s permission first? Would you approve or disapprove if your mother or father were sharing stories about you online – in, say, a blog, or on Facebook or Twitter? What ground rules would you want your parents to agree to? How protective are you of your privacy?

This poses an interesting question after the rants of a teacher on a blog.

For the record, I believe in the right to free speech.  I also believe in speaking positively about my students and being professional.  I know that teacher had the right to write what she wanted, especially since her district did not have a policy on the matter.  I just don’t like what she wrote, or that it was so unprofessional and put a bad light on teachers.