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| Project HappyChild has 14 areas | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | click any area to access |
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Project HappyChild NEWS 1st September 2000 [for ongoing updates, see Latest Site News] |
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| Hi everyone! A huge welcome to everyone who's joined the mailing list this month - the site's had over 116,000 visits during August (first time we've been over 100,000 in a single month!) and it's been an awesome experience keeping pace with everything as well as completing the mass of pagebuilding scheduled for the holidays. |
| If you've been following the Latest News page you'll know that solo skipper Vinny Lauwers came unbelievably close to tragedy whilst rounding Eclipse Island, south of Western Australia but finally made it back - on schedule - on 12th August. There are some amazing photos on the Latest News page and the entry of 25th August links to his diary entry for the day of his homecoming, complete with photos of his arrival back at his home port. A stunning achievement - the photos of Vinny in his wheelchair really bring home the magnitude of what he's achieved, single-handed and at the mercy of the elements for so very long - it's wonderful that disabled and disadvantaged kids will benefit as a result and we look forward to the release of the documentary in a couple of months' time. |
| A significant addition to the website this month has been a link from the Syndromes Links Index to the New Zealand site "Cot Life 2000" - established by Dr. Jim Sprott, a Consulting Chemist and Forensic Scientist who campaigns actively for the endorsement of mattress-wrapping and associated measures for cot death prevention - "there has been no reported cot death among the tens of thousands of babies who have slept on mattresses wrapped to the Cot Life 2000 specifications" - for more details see the entry on the Syndromes page. |
| On the pagebuilding front, the newest area, Andy's Guide to Pokémon,
is largely completed now with 170+ pages on line. This area is
extraordinarily popular with children across the world and there's a
high level of feedback as kids share their experiences of the game as
well as making active use of the Walk Through and the huge reservoir
of inter-related facts now on line.
We were interested to discover a quote from a "Sunday Times" article (20th April), on Yahoo today, which said that "The Vatican has given its blessing to the children's craze Pokémon, saying that the irritating but addictive 'pocket monsters' are morally improving."... "Sat2000, the satellite television station run by the Italian Bishops' Conference, said that Pokémon was 'full of inventive imagination' and had the virtue of pushing children 'in the direction of imagination and inventiveness'. Sentiments which are shared here, although we've put the resource on line primarily to make it possible for kids (especially younger ones) to have an easy reference source for some of the more complex aspects of the games - and also so that parents have somewhere they can look up the info their children need to complete the games successfully. The Pokémon blue/red/yellow games are unbelievably complex - challenging and fun, certainly - but younger kids can get swamped by the volume of inter-related facts they need to remember [have a look around the Pokémon area and you'll see why this resource is so popular - and so much needed] . |
| We've had to leave aside the pagebuilding of the remaining Pokémon
pages for the time being as there's been a lot to do, to tidy up the
rest of the website before the schools go back next week - the
biggest task was link-checking and updating the index to free
educational resources across the Internet. This was completed on 31st
August and it's hoped to update the foreign-language versions of this
page (French/ German/ Italian/ Norwegian/ Portuguese and Spanish)
over the next couple of days.
Meanwhile there have been some information changes on the site - the Dyslexia Institute in the Project HappyChild Directory has new listings for telephone number and address, and MERU, which designs custom-made seating for disabled children, now has a new website address (see the MERU page in FOCUS); we've also added an e-mail address for the Ugandan girl who wrote to the Guestbook asking for any support possible to enable her to continue her studies. The General and Sponsored Events calendars have been updated, and we should mention here that the celebrity football match, "Battle of the Soaps" (Coronation Street, EastEnders etc.] takes place at Villa Park on Sunday 10th September (in aid of Children in Crisis) and the Chipperfield Ride benefitting Norwood Ravenswood takes place on Sunday 24th September [see General Events]. |
| Michael Tipper has just forwarded details of the World Memory
Championships (which he organised and which took place last week in
London); we hope to have these on line by the end of the weekend
along with his September articles for the Accelerated Learning area
of the site.
We still have a fair amount of site admin. and pagebuilding to clear, but with a following wind the bulk of it should be done by the end of this weekend. The main pagebuilding for the next major area, free French worksheets, is now scheduled to run from September to December (this is likely to span several hundred pages) and we're hoping to be largely clear of residual admin. by the time the new area building commences. |
| And finally .... we've taken the decision to add one more major
resource to the site - "The Magical World of Harry Potter". Pokémon
and Harry Potter between them hold the interest of the vast majority
of children and being that the Pokémon resource has been so tangibly
welcomed, it seems more than appropriate that Harry Potter should
be included as well. However, building this will be a major task and
we're still exploring ideas - a couple of introductory pages have been
put on line [click here] for the time being, and the pagebuilding of this
new area will be progressed whenever time allows over the next few
months.
Penny. ****************************************************************** |
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sign up here for our free Newsletter - Project HappyChild News - see also our "Latest News" page
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| Project HappyChild News - 1st September 2000 -
http://www.happychild.org.uk/nvs/news/2000/09.htm located in Area 6 at Project HappyChild - PO Box 911, Epping CM16 4AA, England.
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