[photo credit: Ben Garvin for The New York Times]

Here's a rather interesting trend: Stand-up furniture coming to schools. Apparently, having the option to stand at variable-height desks can help kids burn calories and even improve concentration. As the Times reports,

The children in Ms. Brown's class, and in some others at Marine Elementary School and additional schools nearby, are using a type of adjustable-height school desk, allowing pupils to stand while they work, that Ms. Brown designed with the help of a local ergonomic furniture company two years ago. The stand-up desk's popularity with children and teachers spread by word of mouth from this small town to schools in Wisconsin, across the St. Croix River. Now orders for the desks are being filled for districts from North Carolina to California.

...The stand-up desks come with swinging footrests, and with adjustable stools allowing children to switch between sitting and standing as their moods dictate.

..."At a stand-up desk," Ms. Seekel said, "I've never seen students with their heads down, ever. It helps with being awake, if they can stand, it seems. And for me as a teacher, I can stand at their level to help them. I'm not bent over. I can't think of one reason why a classroom teacher wouldn't want these."

..."We're talking about furniture here," she said, "plain old furniture. If it's that simple, if it turns out to have the positive impacts everyone hopes for, wouldn't that be a wonderful thing?"

Read all about it, and the research going into it, here.