Children lose educational ground during summer vacation

Johns Hopkins sociologist Karl Alexander
Johns Hopkins sociologist Karl Alexander and his colleagues tracked the academic progress of nearly 800 Baltimore students from first grade until age 22.
They found that 65 percent of the achievement gap between poor ninth-graders and their more advantaged peers was due to wasted summers that lacked stimulation and learning.
Forty percent of [...]

Understanding the bipolar child

Click here for the entire article.
People may think small kids don’t generally get as sick as grown-ups. But new research shows that when bipolar disorder, or manic depression, is involved, the exact opposite is true.
The little children that we see have the most severe form of the illness,” says Dr. Barbara Geller, one of [...]

One Legged Little Leaguer

He may never steal home, but he never quits trying.

Childhood Alzheimer’s

ReThink IT is a video with a message that is important to all Americans and a message that is especially important to our next President.
We hope this “IT” video will be forwarded to millions of people around the world who don’t even know they are losing their minds.
106 Million people worldwide by 2050 are expected [...]

Math for Younger Children

I found a new site called F2-4Kids that’s for younger children.
It’s designed to help parents teach them basic addition and subtraction and covers the numbers 1 through 9.
Even a 4 year old is capable of learning very basic math, add to this the alphabet and the ability to recognize a few one or [...]

7-year-old plagued by mystery illness

This is from KSL TV Utah

Two years ago, Tiffany Searle was an active, happy, healthy little girl. Today she’s confined to a wheelchair. The 7-year-old with bright eyes and big smile now has a body that hangs like a rag doll, muscles that she can hardly move, and no one knows why — not her [...]

Porphyria

I was reading a blog called “Madness Beckons” on the origin of the vampire myth and porphyria’s connection to it.
One of the diseases that has been most misunderstood through the ages is porphyria.
This is paragraph is from Pravda.ru
This is a rare disease – only 1 in 20000 people suffers from it. The body doesn’t produce [...]

When disability is not disabling

This is from an article in Al Jazeera:
The UN’s World Health Organisation estimates that at least 10 per cent of the world’s population has some form of disability. To the advantage of the disabled, Victor Pineda is one of them.

A degenerative muscular disorder does not faze Pineda, 29; however, how the world looks down [...]

We’re not in a recession. Providing you’re a millionaire.

Sales of new homes in the US fell more than expected in March to their lowest level since late-1991.
The median price of a home was down 13.3% from March 2007, which is the biggest fall since July 1970.
In other economic news, the Commerce Department said that orders for manufactured items such as fridges and washing [...]

Good article on insurance and Autism

This is from Devine Caroline in a blog under parenting titled: Who’s (Not) Paying for Autism Treatment?