Readable, teachable news.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Obesity rates in young children in the U.S. have dropped by 43 per cent.
In this case, obesity means “very overweight,” which is not good for a person’s health.
Over the last 10 years, the number of young children in the U.S. who are obese has gone down by a lot.
In 2004, nearly 14 per cent of American children aged two to five were obese. In 2012 the number went down to 8.4 per cent.
Sesame Street may be where the air is sweet, but these days it’s also where the food… isn’t.
The children’s television show has started a program to help get kids eating food that’s better for them.
The program is called, “Food for Thought: Eating Healthy on a Budget.”
About one in four children in the United States does not get enough nutritious food to eat, often because parents can’t afford it.
That’s about six million children, according to the Sesame Street website.
Many people use tablet computers, like the Apple iPad or the Samsung Galaxy.
The small, flat computers, which you operate by swiping their surface with your fingers, are very expensive. They can cost as much as $800.
But one company, Datawind, says they have a tablet that sells for just $40.
Datawind’s tablet is called Ubislate, and it is already widely used in India.
Datawind has just launched Ubislate (pronounced oo-bee-slate) in Canada and the U.S. There is a lot of interest as well as debate over whether it offers enough speed, screen clarity and features.
Ubislate can’t do everything the expensive tablets do, but Toronto Star technology reporter Raju Mudhar used the tablet for a few days and said that what it does, it does well.
Lots of people wear glasses to make their vision better, or even just for fashion.
But when Noah, 4, found out he needed glasses, he wasn’t happy about it.
In fact, he was downright sad.
His mother asked him why he was so sad about having to wear glasses.
Noah told her he was worried that everyone would laugh at him.
Noah’s mother started a Facebook page to show Noah that wearing glasses is cool.
She asked people to post pictures of themselves and their kids wearing glasses.
The good people of San Francisco, California can sleep a little more soundly.
Last Friday, their city was been made safer by a very special superhero.
Batman and a special Batkid spent the day patrolling the streets and battling crime.
Batkid’s real identity (ssssh, don’t tell anyone!) is five-year-old Miles.
Miles has been winning his own battle, ever since he was just one year old—against a disease called leukemia, which is a form of cancer.
Miles’s leukemia is in “remission,” which means that he is doing very well now. In fact, he started kindergarten this year.
It was a year ago this week that the world came to know young Malala Yousafzai.
The girl, who is now 16, was riding a bus on her way home from school in Pakistan.
Two men, who were members of a terrorist organization in Pakistan, came on the bus and attacked Malala. The group known as the Taliban, doesn’t agree with girls getting an education.
Malala had been writing online about the importance of girls going to school and about her own love of learning.
The Taliban wanted to stop Malala—but their actions created a world-wide outpouring of affection for the brave girl, who has since nearly fully recovered from her ordeal.
Malala was taken to a hospital in England, where she had a life-saving operation. She now lives and goes to school in England.
A family in Guelph, Ontario is spending a year living in 1986.
They’re doing it so their kids can see what life was like before complicated technology like iPads, sophisticated computers, tablets and even complicated coffee machines were part of everyday life.
They have banned all technology from their home and are relying on the things people would have used back in the 80s.
There is a box at the front door where people can temporarily deposit their mobile devices, like cell phones, while they’re visiting the family.
Blair McMillan and his girlfriend, Morgan want their kids—Trey, 5, and Denton, 2—to have a year free of technology.
Has Lego gotten grumpier?
A new study says that the faces on Lego minifigures have become less happy and more often mad or sad.
The study was designed to find out if the Lego characters have become grumpier over the years.
Christoph Bartneck works at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He loves Lego and even worked for the company in the 1990s. He worked with another researcher on the project.
They looked at all of the 6,000 figures made between 1975 and 2010.
They made a note of each figure’s facial expression: happy, angry, afraid, disgusted, surprised or sad.
They discovered that while in 1980, all of the figures were described as “smiley,” by 1990, only about 80 per cent of them were “smiley.”
Four-year-old Gavin Pope of Garfield, New Jersey, loves to cook.
But when his family decided to buy him an Easy-Bake Oven, they found that the colour and packaging made it look like a “girls only” toy.
The Easy-Bake Oven and its box are purple.
The packaging and advertising show only girls baking with it.
So McKenna Pope, Gavin’s 13-year-old sister, started an Internet campaign for a gender-neutral oven.
More than 54,000 people signed the petition.
Hasbro executives met with McKenna and told her they planned to introduce a black, silver and blue oven next fall.
Hockey Canada – the organization that sets the rules for amateur hockey leagues in Canada – has voted to eliminate bodychecking for peewee players across the country.
The ban will start in September 2013.
One of the main reasons for the ban is safety, says Paul Carson, vice-president of hockey development for Hockey Canada.
Last year, researchers at the University of Calgary found that young players are three times more likely to be injured in leagues where bodychecking is allowed than in leagues with no bodychecking.
The study showed that peewee players in Alberta, where bodychecking was allowed, suffered 209 injuries and 73 concussions.
In Quebec, where bodychecking is not allowed, there were 70 injuries and 20 concussions.
