The two key words in that last sentence are sitting still. Increasingly, in classrooms across the U.S., students are doing neither.

Following a trend gaining increasing visibility in offices, some schools are replacing traditional desks and chairs with height-adjustable workstations and stools, so that students can sit, perch, stand, and even fidget at their desks. Students are learning to think on their feet, literally and figuratively.

If, as many doctors insist, it’s not natural for people to sit still for long periods of time, then why not, these schools say, apply that idea to children in classrooms? Speaking of doctors, more than one school is coupling this stand-up approach to learning with a study on student exercise. In a bid to combat childhood obesity, one school in Idaho is taking part in a Mayo Clinic study by issuing pedometers to its students. The students are motivated to rack up ever larger numbers on their pedometers, and they are not discouraged for moving about the classroom.

One particular side benefit identified by a few teachers has been the ability to address the problem of students who literally cannot sit still, for whatever reason. Now, with desks that allow them to stand or perch, they don’t have to just sit.

Money can be a problem, of course, since most schools already have classrooms that accommodate students sitting in chairs at desks. But private funding and fundraising have solved that problem at schools in the Midwest.

Whether students are able to sit on exercise balls or stride on a treadmill at their desks — as is the case in some American offices — remains to be seen. What is the case is that more than ever before, teachers and schools are thinking outside the desk-chair-student-sits box.

By: socialstudiesforkids.com

The traffic moved only north, meaning upstream. Southbound traffic should be able to resume soon, officials said, reiterating plans to raise the sunken barges. Twenty-seven ships were waiting for permission to move downriver. Every day that goes by means a drop in the amount of grain and other crops that don’t go down the river, out of ports such as at New Orleans, and on to other states and countries.

Flood risk along the river is by no means gone, however. Large areas of land surrounding the river remain flooded, including large swathes of farmland and residential land. The Mississippi cities of Vicksburg and Natchez have suffered remarkably high water levels in recent days, but officials reported that the river had crested and was receding, if slowly.

Thousands of people have been left homeless by the floodwater, which was has been encroaching on living and planting space for a few weeks now, the result of higher-than-normal rains and snowmelt all along the Mississippi River. Levees along the river and delta are holding, for most of the part (with one well-publicized manmade exception), but officials are preparing for more flooding even as residents continue to place sandbags at multiple strategic locations.

New Orleans residents remember all too well the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina.

The flooding is the latest in a series of natural disasters visited on Americans in the past year. For many people, it was a brutal winter full of snow and ice. For others, it has been a spring of tornadoes and thunderstorms. The latest tornado was the deadliest in nearly 60 years.

By: socialstudiesforkids.com

Government engineers have blasted three separate holes in the Birds Point levee, in hopes of diverting the river from continuing to flood more than 100,000 acres of Missouri farmland so that homes and businesses in neighboring states aren’t further inundated. Residents of many states along the Mississippi River say that this year’s flooding is the worst they have seen.

President Obama declared disaster areas for parts of Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee, as Mississippi residents braced for what be a situation similar to the one being attended to by Corps of Engineers-generated explosions. Arkansas closed one well traveled part of its major interstate highway, Memphis residents reported flooding on major city streets, and people in Louisiana were on high alert.

The flooding follows on the heels of a series of deadly tornadoes and thunderstorms that killed a few hundred people across several Southern states and is the latest in a string of extreme weather events. The 2010 winter was extremely harsh in many parts of the country, and the resulting snow melt has also caused the Mississippi River to flood in North Dakota and South Dakota and in parts of Canada.

By: socialstudiesforkids.com

Thousands of people have gathered in Madison, the capital of Wisconsin, for more than a week to protest a series of bills that would weaken the power of collective bargaining — the practice of workers and employers negotiating in good faith on things like wages, insurance coverage, and unemployment benefits. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has put forward the bills, which would put a limit on salary increases and the number of things that workers could bargain about, including the very possibility of joining a labor union.

Walker, a Republican, has GOP majorities in both houses of the state legislature, so passage of the bills would seem to be assured. Yet Democratic Senators have fled the state in order to prevent a vote on the bills. (Each state house would need to have a quorum, the minimum number of people needed to vote on something, and Republicans don’t have a large enough majority to get a quorum all by themselves.) Democratic members of the Wisconsin lower house have succeeded in filibustering the union bills.

The same was true in Indiana, where smaller crowds protested against similar bills and Democratic lawmakers were also absent, and in Ohio, where Republicans had a much larger majority and so could probably be assured of passing the bills along to the Republican governor for signing. Recently, though, Mitch Daniels, the governor, has asked GOP lawmakers to stop pushing some of the bills so the state government could back down to business.

All three governors and their fellow Republican lawmakers claim that the bills are necessary to curb spending on worker salaries and benefits in order to confront a growing budget deficit. Union leaders and Democratic lawmakers claim that the proposed legislation severely weakens workers’ ability to get and keep benefits.

Among the proposals in Indiana was a bill granting retired teachers a cost-of-living increase.

By: socialstudiesforkids.com

The protesters swelled in size and volume in the square, after security forces abandoned their attempt to disperse the crowd. After some initial violence, during which seven people were killed and hundreds injured, government forces have refrained from interfering with protesters.

For his part, the king has offered to release political prisoners and to open a dialogue with opposition leader Hassan Mushaimaa, currently under order of arrest and living in London. Emboldened by the king’s promise not to have him arrested, Mushaimaa, who leads a movement called Haq, is due to return to Bahrain soon.

Bahrain’s troubles stem in part from religious differences. Sunni Muslims, one of two main denominations of Islam, are a minority in the country but a majority in Parliament. But the major source of discontent comes from the autocratic nature of the government itself. The al-Khalifa family has ruled as monarchs for 200 years. Government leaders are named by the king and are intensely loyal to him. In fact, many members of the ruling cabinet are also members of the ruling family, including the king’s uncle, who has been prime minister since 1971.

Other world leaders, including British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have called on the king to use restraint in dealing with the protesters.

Mushaimaa’s Haq movement is not the only opposition group involved in the protests. Seventeen members of Wefag, a Shiite political party, resigned from Parliament to protest the use of violence against protesters.

By: socialstudiesforkids.com

The crowd in the square remained at about 100,000, many having been there for more than a week.

Sporadic conflicts between government protestors and Mubarak supporters continued to flare up. Also, for the first time, signs of army impatience appeared.

Mubarak had ordered tanks and soldiers to surround the square but not to fire on protestors. That order has remained in place, but tanks have flattened some burned-out vehicles that protestors had used as barricades in recent fights with pro-Mubarak forces. In a few cases, tanks stopped only when protestors sat on the ground between the tanks and the burned-out vehicles.

One other report was of soldiers attempting to stop food and supplies from reaching protestors who had camped out in Tahrir Square, either by turning back the people delivering the food and supplies or demanding a share of it for safe passage.

Despite worldwide pressure to step down immediately, Mubarak remains in power.

Source: socialstudiesforkids.com