3 . Turning soil, pulling weeds, and harvesting cabbage sound like tough work for middle and high school kids. And at first it is, says Abby Jaramillo, who with another teacher started Urban Sprouts, a school garden program at four low-income schools. The program aims to help students develop science skills, environmental awareness, and healthy lifestyles.

Jaramillo’s students live in neighborhoods where fresh food and green space are not easy to find and fast food restaurants outnumber grocery stores. “The kids literally come to school with bags of snacks and large bottles of soft drinks,” she says. “They come to us thinking vegetables are awful, dirt is awful, insects are awful.” Though some are initially scared of the insects and turned off by the dirt, most are eager to try something new.

Urban Sprouts’ classes, at two middle schools and two high schools, include hands-on experiments such as soil testing, flower-and-seed dissection, tastings of fresh or dried produce, and work in the garden. Several times a year, students cook the vegetables they grow, and they occasionally make salads for their entire schools.

Program evaluations show that kids eat more vegetables as a result of the classes. “We have students who say they went home and talked to their parents and now they’re eating differently,” Jaramillo says.

She adds that the program’s benefits go beyond nutrition. Some students get so interested in gardening that they bring home seeds to start their own vegetable gardens. Besides, working in the garden seems to have a calming effect on Jaramillo’s special education students, many of whom have emotional control issues. “They get outside,” she says, “and they feel successful.”

5 . A new study from North Carolina State University found that biology textbooks have done a poor job of including material related to climate change. For example, the study found that most biology textbooks published in the 2010s included less information about climate change than they did in the previous decade--despite significant advances in our understanding of how climate change is influencing ecosystems and the environment.

“In short, we found biology textbooks are failing to share enough information about climate change, which is a generation-defining topic in the life sciences,” says Jennifer Landin, author of the study. “These books are the baseline texts for helping students understand the science of life on Earth, yet they are providing very little information about a phenomenon that is having a great impact on habitats, ecosystems, agriculture--almost every aspect (方面) of life on Earth,”

For the study, researchers investigated coverage of climate change in 57 college biology textbooks published between 1970 and 2019. The researchers found climate coverage has varied greatly over those five decades and that the amount of climate coverage in textbooks fell off in the 2010s. In addition to length, the nature of the content has also changed greatly over time.

“One of the most troubling findings was that textbooks are devoting less space to addressing climate solutions now than they did in the 1990s--even as they focus more on the effects of climate change,” Landin says. “That suggests to students that nothing can be done,which is both wildly misleading and contributes to a sense of fatalism (宿命论) regarding cli-mate change.”

“We are hoping that this study will serve as a wake-up call for publishers and instructors. We need to do a much better job of putting climate change into our courses if we want to pre-pare students to understand the role that climate change is playing in shaping life on Earth and how we study it,” Landin says.

Primary schools now attach great importance to labor education, advocating students to do activities such as cooking, making handicrafts     1     decorating houses.

Xue Youmei, a Grade 3 student, spent the winter holiday in Guangxi. Everything about village life was novel to Xue who was used     2     urban life. Xue joined her family to work at a farm field planted with Chinese water chestnuts. Xue,     3     (wear) a pair of gloves, helped her father pick up water chestnuts at the field.

For Yang Liqiao, a Grade 6 student, the past winter holiday gave her     4     new identity-garbage sorting guide. Yang wore a volunteer’s vest and recorded the situation of the garbage sorting work at her residential community.     5     (additional), Yang also invited her classmates to walk around the park nearby to pick up garbage on the ground. Yang’s father observed labor activities offered students a chance     6     (acquire) knowledge, which was not taught at class.

At the same time, some schools in China also assigned specialized homework during the winter vacation to let students enjoy play-based learning. Some students     7    (ask) to cooperate with parents to decorate their homes with New Year     8    (painting). The task aimed to develop students’     9    (innovation) thinking. And some were required to collect physics-related Chinese poems, make an     10    (analyse) and draw a conclusion.

7 . One morning, my four-year-old daughter and I were getting ready to leave the house when she suddenly yelled “Idiot!” right at me. As I processed the word, I noticed she was upset. Tears streamed down her face as she half whispered and half yelled “you are an IDIOT Mama.” Total silence followed as we looked at each other. We were staring at each other for so long, and I nearly forgot to breathe out, and in again. Idiot. How could my daughter call me an idiot?

There are many behaviors that really push parents’ buttons. Disrespectful, rude words tend to top the list. The wrong response to such rude remarks is often a serious warning. But I didn’t offer any serious remarks.

I realized that my daughter’s intention wasn’t to disrespect me. She was expressing the disconnection. And punishment doesn’t solve disconnection. It creates more of it. Her choice of word said it all. She was annoyed. She sensed the stress. I needed to hear her. I was being careless. I was the one being rude to her.

So, why punish our children when they need guidance? We must know the words we use matter, and become our children’s words too. The words include those we use to handle emotional overload. Idiot is a word I regretfully must admit to using when I’m extremely annoyed. Not at my children, but yes, they have heard me say it. So, instead of punishing my daughter for misbehavior, I chose to focus on her real message: Idiot means that “Mom, you are stressing me out!”.

No blame. No punishment for honest feelings. No criticizing her choice of words. Just focus on our relationship. I admitted my ignoring her, and we hugged and kissed each other. I walked into her play school with interest and was ready to see all her current projects.

Don’t be afraid to focus on your relationship, to show kindness, and to model forgiveness. Don’t be afraid to look beyond misbehavior, find the true message and trust the power of connection.

8 . On Mondays, two of my children get ready for school in an unusual way. Each packs plenty of food and water, a pair of rubber boots and sometimes a cup of hot chocolate. Then, I drop them off at a nearby park where they spend the entire day outside at a certified forest school.

When I first signed them up for forest school program, I loved the idea, but as a mum, I was concerned about a few things: Would they be comfortable outside for that long? Would they stay engaged for that many hours? Then I asked them if time ever seemed to move slowly, they stared at me in confusion. They didn’t understand my question, which fittingly removed it.

In this program, kids direct their own play, climbing tall trees or testing ice on the frozen lake. They are never told their play is too high or too sharp, but are rather trusted to self- adjust. Something else my sons appreciate about forest school is not being told to move on to the next activity, but being left to stay in a particular spot for as long as their curiosity allows. :

“What about all the things they’re missing in real school?” concerned parents have asked me. Neither of their classroom teachers thinks it’s a problem, but most significantly, my kids are learning new and different skills that a classroom cannot teach. They are learning to sit silently and observe nature up close-a skill that’s virtually impossible to develop in a noisy and overcrowded classroom setting. They are making social connections across a broader range of age groups. They cooperate together, using their different sizes and strengths to fulfill various roles within their games.

I appreciate it that forest school is shaping my boys’ relationship with the outdoors. They’re learning how to spend extended periods of time in nature, what to do to pass the time, and developing knowledge that will get them much closer to nature in the coming decades.

10 . Our lives are full of habits. Unfortunately a great many of them are bad habits. One way to break these bad habits is to fill our lives with good habits. Most people decide one day that they need to make changes to their lives and then they go all out to make big sweeping changes. This may work for them for the first few days, but then they get burned out.     1     This is a very unproductive way to spend your time and energy.

    2     Say your goal is to get up an hour earlier every day. One day you start setting your alarm for an hour earlier and you keep this up for one week. Then because you are naturally resistant to change, you go back to your old habit. A better way is to set your alarm one minute earlier every day. After two months you are getting up an hour earlier and you will not even notice the change.     3    

This approach can work for just about anything. If you are exercising for half an hour every day and you want to increase that time to one hour then add a minute every day. After one month you will have reached your goal with very little resistance from your body and mind.     4    

This method of change is gentle, but very powerful. Think of everything you can accomplish if you just continuously improve a little at a time. The change itself creates the momentum (动力) you need to keep going.     5     What one minute change can you make to your life today?