As we all know, children are our future, and it's up to us to arm them with the tools to succeed. Sadly, today's children are sometimes being armed with more dangerous tools like weapons, drugs and gangs in the USA. Once a relatively peaceful environment, many schoolyards of today are becoming unsafe for both students and teachers.

    Home schools are available to give you choices. Home schooling provides top-quality education, flexibility and freedom to create your own schedule. At Sunny Home School we believe the choice should be yours.

    Thanks to modern technology, home schooling information is becoming readily available across the nation. A recent study by the ITBS (Iowa Tests of Basic Skills) and TAP (Tests of Achievement and Proficiency) shows us that students of home schools do particularly well when compared with the nationwide average. In every subject at every grade level, students of home schooling scored obviously higher than those in public and private schools.

    If you're new to home schooling, you may be asking yourself, “Will home schools really work for my children?”

Fact: A nationwide study using a random selection of 1,516 families found students of home schooling to be scoring, on average, at or above the 80^th percentile (百分位的第80位) in all areas, on standardized achievement test. (Note: The national average on standardized achievement test is the 50^th percentile.)

    Collectively, the staff at Sunny Home School brings 65 years of experience in home schooling curriculum. We've placed students in the top 2% of the nation in math and many are successfully moving on to college.

    One study found that of the home schooled students, 94% said home education prepared them to be independent persons.

    For more home schooling information, call us today toll free at (1800)542-8668.

    There might be as many as 10 million species of complex life on this planet today —— a huge number. But add up all of the complex species that ever lived and some biologists think the grand total would be about five billion. The estimate leads to an astonishing conclusion: a staggering 99% of species are not around any more. They have been driven to extinction.

    More species are joining the ranks of the extinct every year. Many scientists believe we are living through an episode of remarkably rapid extinction, on a scale that has been seen only five times in the last half a billion years.

    They call this current episode the sixth mass extinction —— a large, global decline in a wide variety of species over a relatively short period of time. And they tend to agree that humans are the main cause.

    Over-hunting, overfishing, and human-driven habitat loss are pushing many species to the brink. In fact, we have changed the planet so much that some geologists are now suggesting that we have entered a new phase in Earth's history; an epoch they call the ＂Anthropocene＂. By 2100, it is expected that humans will have caused the extinction of up to half of the world's current species.

    Because we are living through this extinction, it is relatively easy for us to study the driving forces behind it. But how do we determine what caused other mass die-offs that happened long ago? To do so we have to look at what archaeologists, palaeontologists, geologists and other scientists have concluded from the evidence they have gathered.

    The trouble is, those scientists do not always agree with one another —— even about the most recent extinction event. As well as the five-or six- mass extinctions, there have also been many smaller extinctions.

    One of these mini extinction events happened towards the end of the Pleistocene, a few tens of thousands of years ago. It is sometimes called the ＂megafaunal＂ extinction because many of the species it claimed were particularly large animals, weighing more than 97lb (44kg). However, its cause remains a debate amongst scientists.

    People who increased the number of times they chewed their food before swallowing ate less each meal, according to a new study.

    Slow eaters tend to be slimmer. Before the study, the researchers didn't know whether asking people to chew more would change the amount of food they ate. But they found meal sizes became smaller when adults chewed more before swallowing——whether they were slim, normal-weight, overweight or obese.

    “The study proves the benefits of taking time to chew food well,” said dietitian Brown Giggs.

    The participants were asked to eat five pizza rolls and count the number of times they chewed each roll. Researchers did not tell them what exactly was being tested in the study. 47 people went on to finish the study. 10 were slim, 10 were normal-weight, 27 were overweight. Those participants attended three weekly lunchtime test periods. Each day, researchers gave them 60 pizza rolls and told them to eat until they were full. Depending on the period, researchers asked people to chew every bite the same number of times as at their test visit, 50% more or twice as many times.

    Slim participants ate more slowly than normal-weight and overweight participants. Overall, people spent more time eating when they increased the number of times they chewed. The participants rated their appetite (食欲) the same after each meal even though slower chewing reduced how much they ate.

    Researchers noted that the study was conducted under lab conditions, so it's not clear whether it would adapt to normal life. The researchers are now looking to see whether how fast people eat, for example, influences how much they eat. “It takes about 20 minutes for the brain to signal your stomach that you're full,” Brown Riggs said.

    “Fast eaters can eat a large amount of food within that 20-minute period causing more calories, which can lead to being overweight or obesity.”

    Recently researchers went through some survey information about the health and habits of men and women in Scotland, {#blank#}1{#/blank#} (hope) to determine how much exercise is needed to keep the Scots {#blank#}2{#/blank#} feeling depressed. The answer: a mere 20 minutes a week of any physical exercise, whether sports, walking, gardening {#blank#}3{#/blank#} even housecleaning. The researchers found that more exercise brought more mental-health benefits. But their overall conclusion was that being active for 20 minutes a week {#blank#}4{#/blank#} (be) enough, if your goal is mental health.

    How much exercise is enough? This is a question difficult to answer, {#blank#}5{#/blank#} (part) because the amount of exercise needed depends on the benefits you hope to gain. Twenty minutes a week of housecleaning or other {#blank#}6{#/blank#} (activity) may, according to the Scottish study, increase your satisfaction, but it certainly won't do much for your physical fitness and is unlikely {#blank#}7{#/blank#} (reduce) your risks for diseases. It also won't help much with weight loss.

    Interestingly, they did not find that exercise beyond a certain point would bring additional health benefits. According to the report, “It {#blank#}8{#/blank#} (estimate) that people who are physically active for about seven hours a week have a 40 percent {#blank#}9{#/blank#} (low) risk of dying early than those {#blank#}10{#/blank#} are active for less than 30 minutes a week.”

    Bees may soon need to add protein shakes to their diet. Pollen (花粉) normally provides their protein (蛋白质). But rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the air have reduced the protein in pollen. That's what a new study finds.

    Scientists compared recently collected flowers from Canada goldenrod. Then they compared pollen in them to pollen in goldenrod reserved at a museum in Washington, DC. They found today's plants have less protein. Protein levels in pollen from the older flowers were 18 percent. Today's goldenrod pollen has only about 12 percent protein. That's about one-third less than 172 years ago. Over that same period, CO₂ levels have gone up by more than one-third. Back more than 170 years ago, they were about 280 parts per million in air. Today they are about 398 ppm.

    To test whether CO₂ changes had played a role in the falling protein levels, the researchers did some tests. They grew goldenrod for two years at CO₂ levels of up to 500 ppm. More CO₂ in the air led to lower levels of protein in the flowers' pollen.

    Joan Edwards, one of the researchers, says that this drop in pollen protein could affect a bee's diet and health. It would be like eating junk food, tasting good but offering less nutrition (营养).

    Honeybees need to eat lots of protein. They use it to feed their young. They also need it to keep their immune systems healthy, says Cédric Alaux, a bee biologist at the French agricultural research agency.

    Bee populations have been decreasing worldwide in recent years. A drop in their food quality might play a role, Edwards says. And that drop might affect crops too. "The health of the bee population is not just for the flowers and the bees and biodiversity." She worries it also could play a role in "human health and well-being."

American country music is also known as country western music. It has a very long history. It comes from the folk songs of immigrants (移民) from Britain.

 Country music uses simple music and words to express everyday feelings such as loneliness, love, and sadness. That is to say, country music describes life. It talks about friends and enemies, trucks and roads, farm and crops. People in many parts of the world like country music, because everyone can understand what the music is about.

Country western music became popular first among cowboys (牛仔) in the American west countryside. Cowboys had to take care of cows day and night. When they were alone with the cows, they often sang beautiful and peaceful songs to calm the animals and to overcome their own fear. They were not well-educated and so they sang about their daily life in very simple words. They played guitars, violins and other instruments. In the south of America, many people added instruments from their homes, like bottles and spoons. When cowboys visited their friends and families on holidays like Thanksgiving, they usually sang and played country western music.  

In recent years, many musicians have made country western music a little different from the one in the past. These changes make the songs sound even better. Today singers such as Carth Brooks, Reba McEntire, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, Eddie Rabbitt, LeAnn Rimes, Randy Travis and a group called Alabama are singing and playing in different styles. They have brought country western music more and more fans from all over the world.