Peaceful Playgrounds, Inc. has announced their new "Learn to Play" U.S. Map Stencil Giveaway Program. Enter today to win the geographically and proportionally accurate educational stencil which is Peaceful Playground's best selling playground stencil.

A winner will be selected each quarter and no purchase is necessary to win. Enroll your school today by signing up for the U.S. Playground Map Stencil Giveaway on the Peaceful Playg…

The American Academy of Dermatology offers a Shade Structure Grant program and is offering grants of $8000 each to fund permanent outdoor shade structures designed provide shade and ultraviolet ray protection.

Applications for the 2009 Shade Structure Program are now available for download. The applications can be filed electronically anytime between now and are April 10, 2009.

The 2008 Carol White PEP Grant winners were announced in a press release yesterday by the Department of Education Safe Schools Office. Ninety-seven schools, districts, and organizations were selected in this first round of funding.

The purpose of the PEP Grant Program is to provide funds to local education agencies and community-based organizations to initiate, expand, and improve K-12 Physical Education Programs. The funding it to be used to …

Tips for healthy kids:

1) Provide them with at least five servings of vegetables and fruit a day.
What does that look like? a small apple, half of a banana, a handful of baby carrots, one celery stalk cut up and a stalk of steamed broccoli.

2) No sugary drinks: offer water once an hour, and 100% juice (1 serving/day), and or low fat milk.

3) Encourage children to be active. Buy them consumable equipment like balls, hula hoops, beanbags etc. Children…

by Andrea Bossenmeyer

The new issue of The Journal of Pediatrics, published a Temple University study showing the true power schools do have in reducing rates of obesity.

The researchers chose to examine schools impact in reducing obesity, factoring in that kids eat 1-2 meals at school per day. They went into 10 schools and revamped their menus. Soda was replaced with water, fruit juice and low-fat milk; snacks were capped at 7 grams of total fat …

"TV Turnoff week promotes the idea that limiting screen time and boosting physical activity can lead to healthier living, sponsored in part by the Center for Screen Time Awareness (CSTA) and We Can!, a science-based national education program from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) makes the following recommendations for physical activity and tv watching time:
Limit TV viewing and video game playing …

By Andrea Bossenmeyer

A new report asked children what a healthy diet is, and they responded "One in which you do not gain weight." Rather than a diet that gives you all the nutrients, vitamins and minerals you need to grow and develop.

They also interviewed children as young as four. The research indicates that children can be strongly prejudiced against overweight people. Children had little sympathy for people who are overweight. The…

The increased cost of fuel is affecting the costs of everything. Many school districts are having to cut items from the menu because they don't fit into the budget any longer!

One school district in Bainbridge, Washington is trying to pass a bill that allows the school districts to favor contracts from local farmers to get local foods on lunchrooms menus. Groups of parents hope the measure will rejuvenate interest in adding nutritious, natu…

Creating safe routes for children to travel on to get to school is catching on as more school districts are realizing the benefits of an active commute. The Safe Routes to School program was created as a resource for schools and parents who want to consider activating a walking-to-school program. The Safe Routes to School website provides lots of information on the benefits of walking to and from school including information on Route planning…

Secretary of Agriculture Charles M. Kuperus and U.S. Department of Agriculture Deputy Regional Administrator Patricia Dombroski in celebration of a National School Breakfast Week shared a breakfast of cereal, low fat milk, juice and yogurt Monday morning with fourth graders from Anthony V. Ceres Elementary School.

Dombroski, who ate bananas and yogurt with the children, said research shows eating breakfast helps children to be ready to learn.

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NEW PEP GRANT BLOG: Go to the new PEP Grants Blog and sign up for a RSS feed or subscribe via an email message to be sent daily to your mailbox.




Tulsa Public Schools has piloted a new program. They are adding fruits and vegetable bars in their schools in an effort to curb childhood obesity and to add nutrition to their diets.

Lee Elementary is one of the first schools to try it out.

So far the students are enjoying the extra options to keep them …

Should Recess Be Mandatory?

Remember recess? Kids playing kickball or tag, hopping on the swings or skipping rope. Recess is endangered at many schools. To meet the demand for better academic performance, schools are cutting back on recess time. In some schools recess is more like study hall in a classroom. Is the decline of recess contributing to childhood obesity? Does recess help kids get along? Should the state make recess mandatory for all s…

A University of Minnesota study that appeared in the Review of Agricultural Economics shows school lunch sales don’t decline when healthier meals are served and that more nutritious foods don’t necessarily cost schools more to produce.

The study contradicts the findings of previous studies, which showed students preferred fatty foods and that healthier meals cost more to make, the authors said. The researchers analyzed five years of data for 330 …

By Fran Fifis
CNN


(CNN) -- Ann Cooper is on a one-woman whirlwind campaign to change the way kids eat in schools. "We're killing our kids with food," she says.

Ann Cooper sees her work transforming school lunch programs as a way to leave a lasting impact.

Half of all the Hispanic and African-American kids born in 2000 and one-third of Caucasian kids will have diabetes in their lifetime, many before they graduate college, Cooper says, c…

Curriculum Leadership Journal
Deidre Thian

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. It’s a well-known proverb. The wisdom underpinning the proverb, that if Jack works all the time he will be both boring and bored, seems forgotten in some schools in the United States.

For other schools, the a key question – what should the playground that Jack uses at school be like? Research would suggest that ‘good’ school playgrounds, that is grounds that supp…

According to a documentary directed by former Brigham Young University film student Steven Greenstreet, the way schools have reacted to the federal law contributes to a national childhood obesity epidemic. So do a lot of other factors that play out on the schools' stages.

Greenstreet, director of the award-winning documentary "This Divided State," about filmmaker Michael Moore's 2004 visit to Utah Valley State College, is puttin…

I live on what's called "the Westside" of Los Angeles. Our local schools are in the 600 school Los Angeles Unified School District. My local elementary school called Kentwood Elementary is surrounded by 6 foot tall fences. On weekend and after school the school yard and playgrounds (like the majority of LAUSD schools) are closed and empty.

Slowly - way too slowly - but surely, Los Angeles city and school leaders are inching tow…

A new UCLA study has found that elementary schools can significantly increase the frequency of fruit and vegetable consumption among low-income students by providing a lunch salad bar.

The findings, published in the December issue of the international peer-reviewed journal Public Health Nutrition, show that the frequency of students' fruit and vegetable consumption increased significantly — from 2.97 to 4.09 times daily — after a salad bar w…

High-tech "bully buttons" are being installed in some Australian schools so students can alert educators and trigger video cameras to record such incidents. "If students are confronted with footage then there can be very little denial, but it also gives us a clearer perspective of what happened because kids often remember their part but don't have an overall perspective," said Thomas Carr College deputy principal Vera Tre…

In honor of a new school year I thought the following poem was an appropriate reminder of "important learnings" that are sometimes over -looked.

Robert Fulghum wrote the now famous poem that provides worldly advise, “All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten”.

What I learned in Kindergarten:
• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don’t hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don’t take things th…