According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, early elementary school children need between ten and eleven hours of sleep each night, while elementary kids as old as twelve still need between nine and ten hours each night.

This can seem like an impossible number when your child has extracurricular activities in addition to hours of homework every evening, but making sure your children get enough sleep is as important as ensuring they eat healthy foods.

Sleep deprivation in childhood has consequences far beyond feeling grumpy in the morning. Children who do not get enough sleep produce less interleukin-1 which can hamper their immunity, leading to more illnesses.

Lack of sleep can also affect a child’s height and growth as the body produces its peak levels of growth hormone during periods of sleep.

Sleep deprivation can also trigger anxiety, depression, weight gain, diabetes, and emotional problems.

What should you do if your child isn’t getting enough sleep?

Although your kids won’t like the idea, consider setting an earlier bedtime. This is the most practical and easy to implement solution. Cut down on TV viewing time to make sure there’s enough time each evening for homework, and get your kids tucked in an hour earlier.

It’s also essential to keep a regular schedule for bedtime and wake time so their bodies learn when they need to sleep, and when it’s time to wake.

Don’t give your kids heavy meals or caffeinated foods and drinks before bedtime as this can keep them from falling asleep.

Make sure that your child’s room is dark and quiet once they go to bed. Invest in some thick window coverings to keep out light, and spend the time between their bedtime and yours doing quiet activities.

If a sleep disorder like night terrors, sleep walking or bed wetting is causing your child to get less sleep, talk to your doctor. There’s likely nothing to worry about, as these issues resolve themselves in a year or two, but in the meantime, there are often some things you can do to alleviate the problem.

If one of these disorders is severely affecting your child’s sleep, you might consider homeschooling or virtual schooling until your child outgrows the problem in order to allow them to get the sleep they need.

As a parent, you can be part of the problem as well as key to the solution. There are times that you’re going to have to acknowledge that it’s more important to avoid sleep deprivation over the course of a year in your child’s life than it is to push them to get an ‘A’ rather than a ‘B’ in fourth grade science, or adding one more extra curricular activity to their schedule.

Sleep is as important to a child’s health and well-being as nutrition and exercise. As parents in an age of overstimulation, we need to ensure our children are not suffering the effects of sleep deprivation.

Amusing Ourselves to Death (pt 1)

Amusing Ourselves to Death (pt 2)

Informing Ourselves To Death

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.” - (The Literal Meaning of Genesis)

Research on the relationship between teachers’ characteristics and teacher effectiveness has been underway for over a century, yet little progress has been made in linking teacher quality with factors observable at the time of hire. However, most research has examined a relatively small set of characteristics that are collected by school administrators in order to satisfy legal requirements and set salaries. To extend this literature, we administered an in-depth survey to new math teachers in New York City and collected information on a number of non-traditional predictors of effectiveness including teaching specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of self-efficacy, and scores on a commercially available teacher selection instrument. Individually, we find that only a few of these predictors have statistically significant relationships with student and teacher outcomes. However, when all of these variables are combined into two primary factors summarizing cognitive and non-cognitive teacher skills, we find that both factors have a modest and statistically significant relationship with student and teacher outcomes, particularly with student test scores. These results suggest that, while there may be no single factor that can predict success in teaching, using a broad set of measures can help schools improve the quality of their teachers. 

Link: Rockoff, Jonah E., Jacob, Brian, Kane, Thomas J. and Staiger, Douglas,Can You Recognize an Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?(November 2008). NBER Working Paper No. w14485. 

For our science lessons, we’ve been learning about some of the physical processes involved when gasses and liquids are heated up (or cooled down).

We measured a balloon filled with air, then measured again when we heated it over the furnace vent for an hour or so, then put it in the fridge for an hour and measured it again tp learn that when air is heated it expands, and when it is cooled it contracts.

We also tried some experiments to demonstrate the movement of hot and cold air. The most fun was the Warm Air Whizzer (from The Best of WonderScience)

On a piece of cardstock, we traced around the lip of a coffee mug to get a perfect circle. Then we fold it in half three times to get folds that look roughly like the image below.

We measured and cut 2cm slits down each of the folds, and folded the left side of each “pie piece” down and the right side up. Then we poked a hole in the center, and hung it from a knotted piece of string.

Then all we had to do was find a heat source. Sadly, we have over-greened our home, and we couldn’t find a light bulb that generated enough heat to spin our whizzer. They did quite adequately illustrate that it was NOT light that spun the whizzer, however. In the end we used a candle to demonstrate the air movement, and it worked rather well.

We spent several hours experimenting with the whizzer… getting it to spin the other way, trying to get it to spin using cold air above it, and using magnifying glasses and mirrors to see if we could get it to spin using solar energy.

My little guy sometimes has a hard time understanding why he’s being homeschooled. He has a desire, like many little kids, to be like everyone else.

I explain the benefits, and he doesn’t exactly want to go to school, but he still doesn’t want to be different.

Tonight I found and ordered a book about homeschooling called “I am Learning All the Time.”  I haven’t seen it yet, and won’t for at least a month, but I’m hoping that it will at least give my son a sense that there are more than just him and his handful of homeschooled friends who are ‘different’.

If your young child is feeling the same way as mine, this might be a good pick for you too.

Tables charting the chemical elements have been around since the 19th century - but this modern version will have a short video about each one.

Check it out here.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Have a wonderful day celebrating the birth of a country that turned the whole idea of government on its head. A country formed not by the idea that a government should ‘take care’ of its people, not that the people serve the government, but that the government exists solely to protect the liberties and inherent rights of its citizens to take care of themselves.

Happy Independence Day

What a darned good question.

The answer is, of course, nothing.

A high school graduate is not really trained for anything. Not by their traditional education, anyway.

If they’re lucky enough to have a gift for computer programming or art, they can certainly adapt those skills into a business or career, but by and large, the education you receive at school doesn’t even get you so far as to be perfectly competent as a retail clerk. If it did, I wouldn’t have gotten the confused and panicked look I got today when I dug up 31 cents after a cashier had run in $20 payment for a $10.31 bill.

And so, it’s not surprising to see that, according to an associated press poll,  Americans think that schools are not properly preparing kids for life.

Half of Americans say U.S. schools are doing only a fair to poor job preparing kids for college and the work force. Even more feel that way about the skills kids need to survive as adults, an Associated Press poll released Friday finds.

Given that in the not so distant future, we’re going to need to expand the workforce to include those high school graduates in order to pay for the benefits promised to retiring boomers, perhaps this is something that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Or, do we just need to accept that the new ‘high school diploma’ … the new benchmark for entry level jobs … is going to be a college/university degree?

And to those of you who are homeschooling, what do you want to say your children will be educated to do when they’re done high school?