Curriculum Resource: Body Systems Survivor

I ran across a creative idea for a human health class for middle schoolers--a curricular idea entitled Body Systems Survivor.  This program, which was created by a school in Long Island, NY, covers a typical human anatomy topic--the six body systems in the human body--by presenting it as a contest between the competing body systems a la reality TV competition Survivor (or that's what I assume, at least....I'm never actually seen the TV show).  Students work together in six competing teams, performing various challenges, and ultimately producing a multimedia work to argue why their body system is the most important system in the human body.

The Body Systems Survivor website is not a curriculum per se, but it demonstrates what the school did, and shares many components, resources, and student output.  So it can provide you with assistance if you would like to do something like this in a group setting.

A New Independence Day Tradition?

As I explained in yesterday's post, our 4th of July traditions center around the actual history behind the 4th of July.  However, we're not such history nerds that we don't add in some food and some fireworks.  But yesterday's food contained something new.

A few days ago, my son announced that he had decided that he was no longer allergic to dairy and eggs.  Now, he has been testing allergic to those things, along with many others, since he was a baby.  (It was really bad when he was young;  as I told someone recently, I made the frosting for his first birthday cake out of mashed sweet potato because he was allergic to dairy, corn, and soy--basically all the butter and butter alternatives available at the time.)   And ever since he was really young, he has been very good about not eating the things to which he is allergic, or complaining that he couldn't have ice cream or pizza or other things that his friends could eat.

However, in many cases, allergies change as part of all those physical developments in adolescent.  Sometimes, allergies get better or disappear altogether, although the opposite can also happen; in my case, my allergies got worse when I was about 12....come to think of it, when I was about my son's age.

We had noticed that my son's skin problems, which is where his food allergies seemed to have manifested themselves, had been doing much better recently, and discussed whether maybe he had outgrown his allergies.  But, unknown to me or my husband, my son had been doing some experimentation by eating some of the cheese we had for other family members, and sometime or other, cooking and eating an egg, which we keep for his father to fix omelettes for himself when we aren't around for a meal.  And he seemed to be doing OK after eating those foods.

So as part of our Independence Day celebration, we made something that there is not really a good dairy-free substitute for--a Red, White, and Blue Cheesecake.  We used the ingredients that he had traditionally been allergic to--real cream cheese and eggs, as opposed to soy cream cheese or tofu and Egg Replacer.

However, not throwing caution (or health) to the wind, we made ours with coconut milk and minimal sugar, and decorated the top with red and blue fruit in its natural state:

So we are waiting to see if any health problems occur after eating such formerly forbidden foods.  But I hope not, for my son's sake.  It would be wonderful if we can celebrate this holiday as a day where he declared his freedom from his dietary restrictions.  If so, we may make this dessert a new addition to our Independence Day observances.

Sometimes these physical changes that our middle schoolers are going through can bring about some positive changes.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that will be the case for our son.

Mother's Employment Increases Children's Health Risks

NCSU economics professor Dr. Melinda Morrill has some bad news for working moms.  In her study comparing health statistics of school-aged children with working mothers to those with mothers who stay at home, Morrill found that the children of mothers who worked were 200% more likely to be hospitalized overnight, to suffer an injury or poisoning, or to have a asthma attack.  

Morrill’s study looked at 20 years of health statistics involving approximately 89,000 children aged 7-17.  Her results differ from previous studies that indicated  children of working mothers were healthier, presumably because of higher income, greater access to health insurance, and increased maternal self-esteem.  Those studies were flawed, according to Morrill, because they had reversed cause and effect.  That is, the stay-at-home mother group had numbers of moms of children with such severe medical problems that they required full-time care or supervision, effectively eliminating the option of the mother to work outside the home.  But these children weren’t getting sick because their moms were home; their moms were home because the children were so sick.  When Morrill used advanced statistical techniques to account for such issues, she found that the opposite was actually true--that children of stay-at-home moms had highly significant better chances of avoiding injury and poisoning, hospitalization, and asthma attacks.

Morrill clearly wants to avoid setting off another “mommy war.”  She states “I don’t think anyone should make sweeping value judgements based on a mother’s decision to work or not work.”  “But,” she continues, “it is important that we are aware of the the costs and benefits associated with a mother’s decision to work.”   Apparently, one of those costs is increased health risks for the children of working moms.