10 Great Ideas to Teaching your Kids about Earth Day!

Today, April 22 is Earth Day, but feel free to celebrate all week long with these 10 great ideas for teaching kids about Earth Day and what they can do to help take care of our planet.

1. Serve up eco-snacks. Mix up some trail mix (with raisins, sunflowers, peanuts, almonds, chocolate chips). Celebrating the global nature of the ingredients (raisins from California, chocolate from Africa, coconut from the Philippines) is a cute idea, but it's still a good idea to look for locally sourced ingredients whenever possible!

2. Make a nature craft. Try your hand at one of these cute nature craft ideas, (http://www.mnn.com/family/family-activities/blogs/nature-crafts-for-kids) or get creative and come up with your own eco-masterpieces.  

3. Host an Earth Day 5K (or 1K). This may seem like a big endeavor for Earth Day, but don't let it scare you. Even if you don't decide to do a big community-wide event, you can still challenge your friends and neighbors to a run or walk in honor of Earth Day. It's the perfect way to get out and enjoy the planet and the day.

4. Take a walk. If an organized walk or run is too intimidating, you can still get outdoors for a walk around the block or local park with your own family. Check out these tips for exploring the outdoors ( http://www.mnn.com/family/family-activities/blogs/how-to-explore-the-outdoors-with-kids ) with your kids.

5. Pick up a great green read. "The Lorax," "The Omnivore's Dilemma," "Seeds of Change," "The Giving Tree," "An Inconvenient Truth." There are so many great green reads to choose from. Check out MNN's book posts to find an old favorite or a new one to read in honor of Earth Day.

6. Plant a garden. Grab the kids, a shovel, and some seeds and hit the dirt with your family. Whether you plant one tomato plant in a pot or a large garden of fruits and veggies, gardening with your kids will teach them about the cycles of nature and the beauty of growing your own food.

7. Watch an eco-flick. Snuggle up on the sofa with your kids and your favorite brand of organic popcorn to watch one of these family friendly eco-movies. In the mood for a sobering documentary? Try a classic like Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" or a newer film like "Lunch Line," "Waiting For Superman," "The Cove" or "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead."

8. Host an eco-swap. What better way to get rid of your old stuff than to give it to friends who will find another use for it? Gather up your friends and neighbors for a good old community swap where everybody brings a bag or two of stuff (clothes, toys, you name it,) and then goes home with a bag or two of newish items in exchange.

9. Recycle. Recycling is a great way for kids to get involved in taking care of the planet. Talk to your kids about the items that wind up in the recycling bin and how they can be recycled into new products.

10. Bring it home. Earth Day is the perfect day to talk to your kids about the green steps you take around the house to protect the planet and how they can help. Turning off lights and faucets, recycling, keeping the heat and air down low, and cleaning green are great ways to teach your kids about your family's impact on the planet, and the steps that you can all take to minimize it.

Why Four Workouts a Week May Be Better Than Six!

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily.

For the new study, published this month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women, ages 60 to 74, and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.
One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.
Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.
The final group, as you may have guessed, completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

The exercise, which was supervised by researchers, was easy at first and meant to elicit changes in both muscles and endurance. Over the course of four months, the intensity and duration gradually increased, until the women were jogging moderately for 40 minutes and lifting weights for about the same amount of time.
The researchers were hoping to find out which number of weekly workouts would be, Goldilocks-like, just right for increasing the women’s fitness and overall weekly energy expenditure.

Some previous studies had suggested that working out only once or twice a week produced few gains in fitness, while exercising vigorously almost every day sometimes led people to become less physically active, over all, than those formally exercising less. Researchers theorized that the more grueling workout schedule caused the central nervous system to respond as if people were overdoing things, sending out physiological signals that, in an unconscious internal reaction, prompted them to feel tired or lethargic and stop moving so much.

To determine if either of these possibilities held true among their volunteers, the researchers in the current study tracked the women’s blood levels of cytokines, a substance related to stress that is thought to be one of the signals the nervous system uses to determine if someone is overdoing things physically. They also measured the women’s changing aerobic capacities, muscle strength, body fat, moods and, using sophisticated calorimetry techniques, energy expenditure over the course of each week.

By the end of the four-month experiment, all of the women had gained endurance and strength and shed body fat, although weight loss was not the point of the study. The scientists had not asked the women to change their eating habits.
There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.

The twice-a-week exercisers also were using more energy each day than they had been at first, burning almost 100 calories more daily, in addition to the calories used during workouts.
But the women who had been assigned to exercise six times per week were now expending considerably less daily energy than they had been at the experiment’s start, the equivalent of almost 200 fewer calories each day, even though they were exercising so assiduously.

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.
The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down.
Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

Despite the cautionary note, those who insist on working out six times per week need not feel discouraged. As long as you consciously monitor your activity level, the findings suggest, you won’t necessarily and unconsciously wind up moving less over all.
But the more fundamental finding of this study, Dr. Hunter says, is that “less may be more,” a message that most likely resonates with far more of us. The women exercising four times a week “had the greatest overall increase in energy expenditure,” he says. But those working out only twice a week “weren’t far behind.”

-By Gretchen Reynolds

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10 things to look forward to with Spring Approaching!

Patio Dining

Sitting out with the grill fired up, anticipating a nice meal in the cool spring breeze!

The Brevity


Spring doesn’t hang around so long that you get sick of it. Instead, it leaves you wanting more and moves right on to the blistering heat of a Philadelphia Summer.


That Lovely Yellow Sheen


Who doesn’t like a thick layer of powdery yellow pollen on everything?


Open the Damn Windows


We can finally turn off the heat and get some fresh air in the house. It’s been getting murky in there.


Lighting Up


It’s time to dig out the lawn chairs, mix up some lemonade and fire up the fire pit on the back patio.


Spring Festivals


Festival Pier on the Delaware, It’s true! And of course, the Phillies playing every week : )


Summer Concerts


Can’t wait for Justin Timberlake, Jay Z, New Kids, Rihanna, etc.


Not Freezing to Death or Dying of Heat Stroke


It’s actually a bearable temperature instead of the blistering heat of summer or the freezing snow we’ve just experienced.


Flip Flops


The best footwear ever … for women, at least. Guys, we don't want to see your nasty toes.


Summer


Spring means we're only a few months away from suffocating summer heat—and getting back to our favorite Philadelphia past time—complaining about the weather!