The “Children’s Health Summit” webinar is going on this week, once again hosted by Carla Atherton, a functional nutrition coach specializing in children and families. It started yesterday and continues through Saturday, May 7, 2016. Each day’s presentations can be watched for free for 24 hours. You may also purchase the entire set of interviews […]
May 03 2016
Free Online Children’s Health Summit This Week
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Apr 24 2016
Children and Mental Illness
Learning disabilities may be in vogue, but they are not the only reason that some children have trouble in school or in life. One child’s emotional meltdowns can make it difficult for everyone. Unfortunately, it can take years before a child receives what he or she needs. Liza Long knows first-hand how bad the mental […]
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Jan 09 2016
Fractions Made Visible – and Fun
Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons The aptly named website, “Visual Fractions,” shows fraction concepts and operations the way I teach them – from a visual basis. Although it is standard for math curricula to introduce fractions visually, most of them drop the visualization too early. Worse, when many children are just starting to grasp these […]
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Dec 16 2015
Fetal Medicine for Down Syndrome
Down syndrome, also called trisomy 21, is perhaps best known for its role in delayed intellectual development and obvious physical characteristics. Possible errors in over 200 proteins encoded for by the DNA can wreak health havoc. Medical researchers are beginning to focus on ways to fix the biochemistry, giving hope that early detection will result […]
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Sep 29 2015
Could Your Child be Colorblind?
Color blindness can be problematic. One test for it is the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue Test. The online version is less accurate than the eye doctor would have, since monitors and room light variations may affect the outcome. Nevertheless, it’s worth trying because it is free and a high score indicates that further testing is warranted. […]
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Sep 25 2015
Toxic School Lunches
Healdsburg Patch has a good article about a study of BPA in children’s school lunches. Here’s one more reason to send lunch from home if you can afford it and to take political action either way: Low-income children are particularly at risk of BPA exposure because they are more likely to eat federally funded meals […]
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Sep 17 2015
New Osmo Game
Osmo®, the educational game platform that incorporates actual, hands-on pieces while giving software-based feedback and enhancements, has a new game for teaching basic math concepts and operations, called “Numbers.” As I mentioned in a previous post, Osmo uses the camera on an iPad to “see” which game pieces the player(s) have put in front of […]
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Jun 11 2015
Color-Changing Beads: Fluorescence from UV Light
The usual explanation for the behavior of color-changing beads is that they change color when they absorb ultraviolet light. True enough, but why? The name for this process is “fluorescence.” Some pigments absorb light of one wavelength and quickly emit ‐ fluoresce ‐ light of another (or sometimes the same) wavelength. This is similar to […]
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Jun 06 2015
Too Much Thought? Here’s What to Do:
Go to school for 13 or more years. I don’t mean just any school, but most schools. Most of the political and ideological interests struggling for control of American education share some basic assumptions about the meaning and purpose of schooling in modern society. They assume that schools exist to transmit a certain body of […]
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May 12 2015
New Story for Young Children Supports Nature as Natural
To counteract "Nature-Deficit Disorder," a new release from Barefoot Books, Outdoor Opposites, plays with words for opposites while portraying children enjoying the natural world. Macy Koch has written a nice description of the book (for ages 3-7) here. It is good to see a book that reminds children and parents how much fun playing outside […]
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