Project HappyChild NEWS

November 2001

[for ongoing updates, see Latest Site News]

First off we'd just like to mention the Gala Charity Evening taking place at the Liverpool Olympia on the evening of Friday 2nd November - 7.30pm-2am - tickets are only Ł5 if you're anywhere near Liverpool! - and also the Young World Series of concerts by school children from across the UK, scheduled during November, raising money for Gt. Ormond Street Children's Hospital [GOSCH] - see the General Events page.

Tickets became available during October for the UK Gala Preview of "Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone" benefitting GOSCH and the Unicorn Children's Theatre Charity - these sold out very rapidly as had the première tickets in aid of the National Council for One Parent Families, for which as you'll know, J.K. Rowling is an ambassador. There's been a lot in the press recently about "big business" having booked many showings of the film but on a personal level we've been able to get tickets at our local UGI Cinema for previews 10th/11th November [probably applicable through most of the UK].

Apparently the critics' preview generated a 10-minute standing ovation so we're all looking forward to the film. Needless to say visits to Sol's Guide to Harry Potter have increased! - we've left just the first chapter details on line for now, till the main film showings are past, though we've updated the guestbook page with a number of the e-mails received recently.

We've received an e-mail from the Hunger Site today advising that your "free click" each day over the next few months will provide desperately needed assistance to 50,000 displaced children in northeastern Afghanistan, give help and hope to American families facing hunger during the harvest and holiday seasons, and support other ongoing hunger relief efforts around the world - if you don't already visit the Hunger Site each day you may wish to bookmark their page at http://www.thehungersite.com.

A link to our page about the "Twin Towers" has been incorporated into the main Project HappyChild site navigation table and will remain there as an ongoing reminder of the impact of the events of 11th September 2001 and the days which followed. Whichever way things are eventually resolved, it is important that awareness is retained of the deep impact of these attacks and the threats they represented to civilization itself which underpins so much of the ongoing work - by so many different organizations - to create an equal-chance society for children worldwide.

Our thanks go to Pauline Munro at Corel Canada whose gift to Project HappyChild of WordPerfect Office 2002 including Paradox 10, provided the final insight to allow us to start building static html pages direct from a database. This was always a long term aim (even if no-one could previously fathom out quite how to achieve it!) and has already made a radical difference to speed of new pagebuilding here, with a total of 66 pages added this month to the free-to-print French resource - present tense worksheets for all the main verbs are now in place, and further tenses and more vocab pages will be added as soon as physically possible.

To spread the daily bandwidth load now that traffic is accelerating again, the free-to-print Maths resources on site will be mirrored at Freeway [Area 14], site changes for this being currently in progress. The new section for Fractions is receiving many visitors and the follow-up "Bart and Miss Walker" story, Addition of Fractions (which uses an apple and some elastic bands to reveal some of the logic underlying the means by which fractions are added) is now on line, together with some simple fractions worksheets to enable children to practise what they learn from the stories.

Three more pages have been created for the "Spellings, Sounds & Meanings" resource, but now that the database pagebuilding facility is in place, we would hope to add the remaining 300 or so worksheets comfortably within the anticipated completion date next summer.

With regard to Pokémon, we were delighted to receive an e-mail from Mike Andrews at Pathways Development Group this morning, advising us that Team Xtreme® for N64® has now been fully tested, approved, and licensed by Nintendo of America, and has been given the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality®. Production units are already being manufactured and should be available within three to five weeks, hopefully sooner.

PDG's interfaces and switches allow disabled children to play Nintendo games alongside their able-bodied friends, and the new N64 interface will work for any game, including Pokémon Stadium, thus allowing many disabled children to benefit from Andy's Guide to Pokémon, on the site here. It should be mentioned however that because of the additional cost of progressing CE Mark clearance for Europe, Asia and Australia (some $3500), the new interface is only currently available for the US market [priced at $349 plus shipping etc.]. PDG will gladly progress the CE Mark clearance if enough orders can be generated outside the USA to validate this. For more details of PDG products helping disabled children, please see our Special Needs page.