【推荐1】New rules and behavior standards (行为规范)for middle school students came out in March. Middle school is going to use a new way to decide who the top students are. The best students won’t only have high marks. They will also be kids who don’t dye (染) their hair, smoke or drink. The following are some of the new rules.

Tell the truth. Have you ever copied someone else’s work on an exam? Don’t do it again! That’s not something an honest student should do. If you have played computer games for two hours in your room, don’t tell your parents you have done homework.

Do more at school. Good students love animals and care for other people. April is Bird-loving Month in China. Is your school doing anything to celebrate? You should join! That way, you can learn more about animals and how to protect them. When more people work together, it makes it more fun for everyone.

Have you ever quarreled with your teammates when our basketball lost? Only working together can make your team stronger. Be friendly to the people you are with. Try to think of others, not only yourself.

Be open to new ideas. Have you ever thought that people could live on the moon? Maybe you’ll discover Earth Ⅱ someday. Don’t look down on new ideas. Everyone’s ideas are important. You should welcome them, because new ideas make life better for everyone.

Protect yourself. Has someone ever taken money from one of your classmates? Don’t let it happen to you. If you have to go home late you should let your parents know.

Use the Internet carefully. The Internet can be very useful for your studies. But some things on the Internet aren’t for kids, so try to look at Web pages that are good for you. You can use the Web for fun or homework. Can’t you find any good Web sites for children? Here some:http://kids.eastday.com/http://www.chinakids.net.com/http://www.cycnet.com

【推荐3】I am sanding outside my childhood primary school, near front gates and the teacher’ car park. It is a bright sunny day and I am surrounded by my classmates. There must be more than a hundred of us.

I have a dim feeling that some of my teachers are nearby, but my attention is on two adults, neither of whom I recognize. I remember the details-from his hair to his golden sunglasses. The other man holds up some kind of device that emits a screaming. I drop to my knees with my hands against my ears. My schoolmates are all doing the same. The man is laughing.

I had that dream nearly 40 years ago, but can remember the details as if it, were yesterday. Ask me to relate anything from a dream I had earlier this week, however, and I draw a blank. Sleep is more complicated than we once thought. Rather than being unconscious, our resting brains go through a roller-coaster of mental states. Dreaming is most closely associated with the sleep state known as Rapid Eye Movement (REM). In REM sleep, the eyes twitch rapidly, and it’s at this stage that our brains tend to dream.

“If you’re the kind of person who leaps up out of bed and goes about your day, you’re not going to remember your dreams. When you sleep in on Saturday or Sunday morning, that’s an excellent time to remember dreams,” says Harvard Medical School sleep researcher Stickgold.

Stickgold says, “I tell people to drink three big glasses of water before they go to bed. Not three glasses of beer, because alcohol is an REM suppressant. You’ll wake up three or four times in the night and you’ll tend to wake up at the end of an REM cycle of sleep, which in natural.”

And here is another piece of advice offered by some sleep researchers-that simply repeating to yourself as you drift towards sleep that you want to remember your dreams means you wake remembering them.

【推荐2】On Us TV shows, you may sometimes see rubber balls on people’s desks. These balls are known as “stress relief balls”. People can squeeze them when they feel stressed out. It’s believed that by concentrating on the act of squeezing, they can let go of the negative energy in their bodies.

    1    Fortunately, we have many ways to deal with it.

In fact, the rubber stress relief balls that are so popular today in the US are believed to date back to ancient China.     2     By squeezing them during moments of anxiety, soldiers were able to calm themselves down before going into battle. And in the Ming Dynasty (1368—1644), people started rolling walnuts in their hands. Ordinary citizens—not just soldiers—developed the habit of rolling two walnuts, or balls made from iron or stone, around in their hands.     3    

And today, we have many gadgets (小器具) and toys that are designed to reduce stress in addition to stress relief balls. One example is the popular fidget spinner (指尖陀螺).     4     You just spin the gadget around. There’s also the fidget cube, which features different “gimmicks (机关)” on each side of the cube. You can click, spin, pull, push and rotate different parts of the cube.

    5     But perhaps we should take them more seriously. “After all, the history of stress balls is a history of modern-day coping,” reporter Nadia Berenstein wrote for Woolly magazine.

【推荐3】Nowadays, children spend less time in the fresh air. Many of them are addicted to a screen either on a computer or a TV—they seem to be living in a virtual world. They have lost touch with nature.

But now 400 organizations in the UK, from playgroups to the National Health Service, are encouraging children to have some “wild time”. They want kids to swap at least 30 minutes of watching TV or playing computer games for time playing outside. Activities such as building dens, climbing trees, rummaging for conkers and playing hide and seek are just some of the things kids can do. Even if they live in a city, they can go on adventures in the garden or the park.

Children often need a helping hand from mum and dad. They need to be shown what to do and where to go. Andy Simpson from National Health Service says, “We want parents to see what this magical wonder product does for their kids’ development, independence and creativity, by giving wild time a go.”

So despite the complicated world that young people grow up in now, it seems that going back to basics and experiencing “nature’s playground” is what modern children need. David Bond from Project Wild Thing says, “We need to make more space for wild time in children’s daily routine, freeing this generation of kids to have the sort of experiences that many of us took for granted.”

This might sound a bit old-fashioned to you or maybe, like me, it’s made you think about sticking on your boots, getting outdoors and reliving your childhood. There’s no age limit on enjoying yourself!