finger on
the pulse
OK
to eat?
Parents
matter most
Until very recently, doctors recommended that parents hold off on offering
problem foods, such as peanut butter, milk, fish and eggs to babies. But recent
recommendations from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology
suggest that these foods can safely be given to babies as young as four to six months,
and that offering them early might actually prevent food allergies from developing.
The new recommendations are a big departure from earlier guidelines from the
American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which in 2000 suggested waiting until a child
was 12 months old before introducing milk, two years before introducing eggs, and
three years before introducing peanuts and fish. While the AAP revised its rules in 2008
and 2011, noting there was no data to support delaying problem foods, many parents
and paediatricians still adhere to the early guidelines.
source:
NBC News
A study of 10,000 teenagers has found the home environment is three times more
important than the school when it comes to 18-year-olds’ test results. Researchers
found that pupils at weaker schools who came from homes where parents were
closely involved in their children’s education performed better in tests than
children at better schools who had apathetic parents.
source:
The Telegraph
New research from US-based Penn State University shows that toddlers
learn new words more effectively by using their knowledge about
the world to infer the label of an object, rather than by simply being
instructed and told which word goes with which object. Researchers
tested pre-schoolers’ ability to learn new words through inference and through
instruction. To test inference, the kids were shown a familiar object and a new,
novel object and were asked to point at the new object. In instruction trials, the
children were told the name of the new object and no recognisable objects
were shown. Results showed that even though children looked at the new
object longer during the instruction trials, they retained the newly learned word
better during inference trials. Lead researcher Jennifer Zosh says, “People tend
to think that parents must directly instruct their children by telling them the labels
of the objects that surround them, but this research tells us that children are even
better word learners when we ask them to figure things out for themselves.”
source:
Penn State Newswire
Figure it
out
The number of students at The City
Montessori School in Lucknow,
India, named the world’s biggest by
Guinness World Records.
45,000
*
18
Playtimes