• Presidents Day is celebrated on the third Monday of February. According to History.com, when the holiday was first implemented in the 1800s, it was named “Washington’s Birthday” and was celebrated on Feb. 22 to commemorate first President George Washington’s birth date.
• In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Bill, which moved a number of federal holidays to Mondays — including Washington’s Birthday — so now the holiday is never celebrated on his actual birthday.
• In some states, the day jointly honors the birthday of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who was born on Feb. 12.
• In addition to Washington and Lincoln, two other presidents have February birthdays. Ronald Reagan was born on Feb. 6, 1911, and William Henry Harrison was born on Feb. 9, 1773.
• Presidents Day has become a day to celebrate the accomplishments of all presidents. PBS Kids has a list of little-known secrets about the first 43 presidents. Included: Ulysses S. Grant once got a speeding ticket for riding his horse too fast and Millard Fillmore was the first president to have a bathtub installed in the White House.

adapted from the work of Victoria Leigh Miller

How are you celebrating the holiday this year?

Thursday’s Homework Worksheet

Unit 4 review from class

It is a common complaint of our modern age that kids and teens don’t get enough sleep.

Video games, TV, social media, and our increasingly tech-centric lives are often blamed, but a new study shows that long before Facebook or PlayStation 3, kids were sleeping less than experts said they should.

When researchers in Australia reviewed sleep recommendations and actual sleep times among children over the past century, they found that kids consistently slept about 37 minutes less than recommended at the time.

Each time, new technological marvels — be it the light bulb in the early 1900s, TV in the 1950s, or computer gaming systems and social networking today — were blamed for declining sleep times.

“The message that children don’t get enough sleep has been the same for over 100 years,” says researcher Tim Olds, of the University of South Australia.

Olds says health policymakers have been making recommendations about how much sleep children should get each night for more than a century, with very little scientific evidence to back the recommendations up.

That is because studying optimal sleep times during childhood is very difficult.

Getting too little sleep has been linked to an increased risk for obesity, poor school performance, behavioral problems, and drug abuse.

But like adults, individual children and teens appear to have different sleep needs, Olds says.

Some Kids Need More Sleep, Some Need Less

According to the National Sleep Foundation, school-aged children who are 12 and under need at least 10 to 11 hours of sleep each night, while teenagers need eight-and-a-half to nine-and-a-half hours of sleep.

Olds says parents should not be too concerned if their children or teens get a little more or a little less sleep each night, as long as they seem to be functioning well at home and school.

Pediatric sleep specialist William Kohler, MD, agrees.

Kohler is medical director of the Florida Sleep Institute at Florida Hospital in Tampa.

“A child who is alert and doing well in school with no behavioral issues is probably getting enough sleep,” he says.

But he adds that when there are issues, poor sleep quantity or quality should be one of the first suspects.

“We may not have good standards for understanding how much sleep an individual child needs, but there is plenty of good evidence that getting too little sleep or having poor-quality sleep leads to a wide range of health and behavioral problems.” link to original article

Some Questions to Consider:

How much sleep do you get?
What is Your Bed Time?
What keeps you from sleeping well?

Mrconte.com now includes feeds from DOGOnews, Scholastic, and Science News for Kids.

Another great party is flushed into History. Thank you to the many grown-ups who contributed to the event, and particularly to room-mom Granny-Annie for all her hard work.

New Lunch Plans

Reuters – U.S. schoolchildren, accustomed to a steady diet of pizza and french fries, will find more fruits, vegetables and whole grains on their cafeteria trays under new government school lunch rules announced on Wednesday.

The new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) rules aim to boost the nutritional quality of the federally subsidized meals consumed by roughly 32 million U.S. schoolchildren daily.

The rules are the first major revision of school meal standards in more than 15 years and are intended to combat the nation’s childhood obesity crisis. Nearly one in three children in America is overweight or obese.

In addition to doubling produce servings, the new guidelines call for fat-free and
low-fat milk only, child-appropriate portion sizes and reductions in sodium, saturated fat and trans fats.

The changes were adopted under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA), which was championed by first lady Michelle Obama and signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010.

The new standards will be largely phased in, starting in the 2012-13 school year. They are expected to cost roughly $3.2 billion to implement over the first five years.

As an example of a new meal, the USDA said an elementary school lunch might consist of whole-wheat spaghetti with meat sauce and a whole-wheat roll, a vegetable mix of green beans, broccoli and cauliflower, plus sliced kiwi, low-fat milk, low-fat ranch dip and soft margarine.

That lunch would replace a meal of a hot dog on a bun with ketchup, canned pears, raw celery and carrots with ranch dressing, and low-fat chocolate milk.

Let the conversations begin!