By Dr. Harry Tennant
Thursday, November 18, 2010 Trends: Child Nutrition & Physical Education to Improve AcademicsWe try everything to improve student performance, particularly with our struggling and "bubble" students. We require more differentiation, relevance, and real-world application in the classroom. We offer tutoring "camps", tutoring detentions, and tutoring during special class periods. We pull students out of other classes. We tutor before school, and after school. Principals arrange for "late" buses, or tutoring transportation, to drop students off at their doorstep. We mentor before, during, and after school. We disaggregate data like a statistician. And these are but a few of the measures we take to improve student success.Where do we consistently miss the mark in the majority of American schools? I was always amazed during my thirteen years as a teacher and administrator how poor the food is that we feed students. Performance engines do not circle the track running on regular unleaded gasoline. Too often, I'd argue, good nutrition is a missing component of our academic strategy. Couple that with trends toward less physical education during the school day, plus less overall fitness by young people in general. Are nutrition and physical education/exertion the most often ignored factors in improving student academic performance? Presumably, our more at-risk populations are disproportionally affected by poor nutrition. All young people have the potential to be high performance...the fuel our schools serve them should be as well! Putting Nutrition At The Front of the Line By LESLEY ALDERMAN Published: November 5, 2010 Read the entire article here.
Posted at 6:13 PM Keywords: Nutrition , Child Nutrition , Physical Exercise 1 Comments |
Scholar said... A book on this topic that I recommend is "Spark: the revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain" by John Ratey. Saturday, November 20, 2010 7:20 PM |