Looking for the Perfect Hiding Place

As a child you probably had a hiding place – a nook under the eaves of
your house or a hideout in the backyard. But today’s kids have fewer
chances to play in these places than earlier generations did. As the
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports there are some
designers at the University of Michigan who are starting to pay
attention to what children want when they play:

The Road-Kill Lesson Plan

It’s not unusual for volunteers to help collect data for environmental
studies like frog surveys or bird counts. But there’s another kind of
project going on that studies wildlife in a very different way. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports:

Science Center Brings Lessons Home

In school when kids learn about the environment… they often learn
about the devastation of the rain forests in South America; they learn
about lemurs in Madagascar…. and about the melting of the polar ice
caps. They don’t often learn about the environment in their own
hometowns. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports…
some school children are getting a chance to learn about the environment
around them and what they can do to protect it:

Midwest Kids Struggle With Obesity

The report card on fitness is in – and it concludes that there’s a lotof room for improvement. The federal government has been keeping trackof Americans’ heights and weights for more than 30 years now. And eachtime the survey is taken, it shows that the population is heavier. TheUpper Midwest is the heaviest region in the country. The Great LakesRadio Consortium’s Joan Siefert-Rose reports on the theories behind thisdramatic increase in obesity … and the special problems faced bychildren:

Are Today’s Kids Less Active?

The U-S Surgeon General recently declared childhood obesity as aproblem of epidemic proportion in this country. Over the last 30 years,children have been getting heavier, relative to their height. Today,one in five children is at least 20 percent above an optimal weight.The problem may not be so much what kids are eating … as it is what theyare doing. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Joan Siefert-Rose hasthis report:

Commentary – Back to School Buying Frenzy

While millions of school kids are returning to classes, the retailers of the nation are counting up the profits from the back-to-school buying frenzy. But as Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Suzanne Elston points out, maybe the need to have everything new for the start of school year is one lesson we don’t want to teach our children: