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.

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. 

“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

I love weekends. Every weekday I get to spend the day at home, but I have to work. I have to answer the phone, and work in front of the computer, and I feel guilty if I spend a few extra hours playing a game or going to the park on a Monday afternoon.

But weekends are all about NOT working. It’s not like we do millions of things. It’s just that there’s no guilt, or opportunity cost, associated with doing them, so it feels all that more free.

It wasn’t always that way.

When we started the business, we didn’t distinguish between one day and another. The only difference on weekends was that that phone rang less. We still sat and worked as much as we could.

Now, as I approach 40, I just can’t keep up that pace, and with a 5 year-old son to enjoy, I don’t want to.

So, yesterday we went to the barn and helped with the haying. We groomed and grazed a horse, and ran around the fields like madmen. We went to a movie (Kung Fu Panda) and ate pie.  Today we played in the garden, made messes in the mud, and spent hours playing Treasure Quest, a game I picked up  from a clearance bin at Toys’R'Us.

Now, I’m having a coffee, while kiddo plays in the mud puddles. When he comes in we’ll have bathtime then a story.

No regrets. No worries.

I love weekends.

This year, our summer project is container gardening. Last year, our gardening attempts failed miserably with snails, slugs, squirrels and chipmunks eating nearly everything we planted before it even ripened.

This year, we’re working on solutions… copper for the slugs and snails, bloodmeal for the rodents. So far, it’s working pretty well. The tomato plants look healthy, and already have a dozen small tomatoes growing, with many more flowers indicating a bumper crop. The green peppers and celery seem to be thriving too.

We’ve been getting a TON of rain lately, which seems to be bothering the carrots, parsnips and onions. Perhaps they weren’t quite big enough to survive the deluge. We’ll cross our fingers and see.

So far the only casualty of the garden pests has been our lettuce, but I’m going to try plant some new in pots and place them higher up in a windowsill instead of near the ground, in hopes that it’ll be more difficult for the rodents to reach.

David’s flowers are doing amazingly well. He’s got poppies, violets and marigolds planted from seeds earlier in the year all over the flower beds. They look amazing.

Last year we learned that he’s got quite a green thumb when the marigolds and delphinium he planted and tended bloomed and thrived when the rest of the garden crashed. This year he’s got a bunch of vegetables too… maybe he’ll be feeding our family with his harvest before long.

Is the Internet making us stupid?

NPR has an interview with Nicholas Carr, who has recently written an article for The Atlantic Monthly called, “”Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr says that even though the Internet allows us access to a vast amount of information very quickly, it imposes on us a new way of thinking. Rather than reading deeply, or contemplating any single subject, we tend to jump around. As a result, our attention spans are shortening, and our ability to read longer articles and books might even be in jeopardy.

Just as the arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press helped to make reading universal, in the process ushering in enormous social revolutions, Carr says the Internet is producing a revolution of its own that is once again changing how we structure everything. While much of the revolution is positive, Carr says, he thinks that we should be aware that there might be some casualties, including prolonged reading and time for contemplation.

Listen to it here.

It has been more than a year and a half since I’ve been alone in the house. It seems weird to go to the kitchen and not find anything that needs to be cleaned up since the last time I was in there. I’m startled that the bathroom sink is still as clean as it was after I wiped it down this morning. I picked up all the toys off the floor  this afternoon, and nothing has returned to fill the empty space.

It’s astonishing. And wonderful. And happily it all ends tomorrow afternoon.

I miss my guys.

A very interesting meme from Joyful Chaos by way of Trail Mix.

From What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

Bold the true statements.

1. Father went to college

2. Father finished college

3. Mother went to college

4. Mother finished college

(The education of both my parents was cut short due to the German occupation of Holland in WWII. It may be that under different circumstances one or both would have gone on to college. Many of my mother’s younger siblings were well educated, some becoming renowned in their fields.)

5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.

6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.

7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.

8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.

9. Were read children’s books by a parent

10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
(Organ lessons. I still look back on those lessons with dislike. )

11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18

12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively

13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
(Since this was a result of succumbing to the credit card tables at University registration, I’m not sure it counts. The card had my name on it, but so did the bills.)

14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs

15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs

16. Went to a private high school
This was a big expense for my parents, but they sent me because the high school in my area was bad, bad, bad.)

17. Went to summer camp

18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18

19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels

20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18

21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them

22. There was original art in your house when you were a child

23. You and your family lived in a single-family house

24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home

25. You had your own room as a child

26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
(Does it still count if I paid for it myself?)

27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course

28. Had your own TV in your room in high school
(I got a black and white TV from my brother when I was sick for nearly an entire year when I was about 8. It wasn’t a great set, but it was very welcome to alleviate the boredom.)

29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college

30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16

31. Went on a cruise with your family

32. Went on more than one cruise with your family

33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up

34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

It seems there’s a new online magazine for homeschoolers, “Heart of the Matter“, and they’re running a meme asking home schoolers to share a day in the life of their families.

I’m only homeschooling one five year old right now, and because he’s only five we take a pretty relaxed view of what goes on in a day. No day is typical for us, but this is what today was like….

Morning:

Woke up late after staying up a little too late last night. Had breakfast, made a HUGE pot of coffee, and started David on his Mathematical Reasoning book, while his dad and I got ready for a conference call. David worked while we explained to a client why we didn’t spend our Christmas holiday working on their stuff. The call lasted about an hour and a half, after which I checked on David’s progress and saw he’d finished a quarter of the book and covered sections on bar graphs, venn diagrams, and probability along with oodles of review pages.

Feeling guilty for leaving him to work on math for so long by himself, I teach him how to make paper chain people. He tries a few, and once he gets a chain he thinks he likes, he starts turning all the people in the chain into his favorite superheroes. So far he’s got Batman, Robin, and … Santa Claus. Ok, maybe not all superheroes.

Lunch time!

I go downstairs to make lunch. David follows me down and plays with his Crazy Fort in the living room while I cook up some food. I try to do dishes afterward to find out there’s no hot water. Sending Dad down to check it didn’t increase the water temperature at all, so I boiled water for the dishes while he called the repair man and argued that we really need hot water before next week.

After lunch, David practiced his piano. His last lesson was before Christmas so he’s been practicing the same songs for a long time. I think we’re both getting a little tired of them, though they’re sounding really good at this point.

I’ve still got piles of work to do, so David sits down and reads a few of the books we borrowed from the library. He reads out loud, and as long as I can follow with half an ear, I can help him with words he is having problems with from the context.

When he’s tired of reading, he goes back to his paper chain people and makes Superman before I pull him away to go to his piano lesson.

Evening

The piano lesson goes splendidly, and he’s got six new songs to practice for next week. At least the songs are getting a little more interesting now that he’s playing with both hands.

After his lesson, I start making supper while he sorts the recycling into the blue boxes. When he’s done with the blue boxes, he plays his RushHour game for a half an hour while I cook. After supper I take out the garbage and blue boxes and boil more water for dishes.

Once clean-up is done, we head back up to my office where he works on some more chain people while I work and we both listen to Alice in Wonderland. We’re listening to the version from kiddierecords.com this week. Last week we listened to a podcast version from Curiosoft. They are very, very different to listen to. Perhaps we’ll grab a third version from Audible next week.

Since the repair man isn’t coming to fix the hot water heater till tomorrow afternoon, there’s no bathtime tonight, so after brushing his teeth, David writes a line in his daily journal, gets is jammies on, and climbs in bed where I read him a few chapters from his latest book.

It’s another late bedtime, thereby dispelling any hopes I might have had of getting an early start tomorrow.

During the summer, our family went on a road trip that included a three day rock concert. During that trip, I realized that coloring and activity books weren’t going to be enough to keep a four-year old occupied between sets and during performances he wasn’t the least bit interested in.

So, at the nearest mall, I found a box of “Edushape Magic Shapes” magnetic foam blocks for about $20. (You can get them at Amazon.com for that price here.)

They were a huge hit with both David and his 15-year old brother, who spent hours together making castles, houses, animals, trains and other unidentifiable creatures.

Their primary complaint was that 54 pieces wasn’t enough. I didn’t want to buy another box, though, for about the same reason. 54 shapes for $20 just seemed a little overpriced.

So I was overjoyed when I found this 108 piece set of Magnetic Foam Blocks for only 12.95. The blocks are EXACTLY the same size as the Edushape kit, and the two sets fit together perfectly.

The building board in the cheaper set is both larger and sturdier than the Edushape set too. The only down side to the cheap set is that it doesn’t come with a handy carrying case/box.

Still, for under $13, it is a fantastic camping and travelling toy that doesn’t take up much room and can entertain kids for hours. A great deal!