Project HappyChild NEWS

September 2002

[for ongoing updates, see Latest Site News]

Hi there! Hope everyone had an excellent holiday, we certainly have although things have been very different at the site this month. *So* much going on - and huge quantities of visitors (which we wouldn't usually expect in August!) - the visit count passed five million and to celebrate this major landmark, a whole new area of the site is being created - see "A Central Frame of Reference", further down this page, for which we'd greatly appreciate input from visitors.

At this time of year, many people's thoughts are returning to the tragic events of last September, and our thoughts are with all those who lost friends and loved ones. Many of you will have seen our page about September 11th 2001, which remains on line as a permanent record of how things were - and remains largely unchanged from how it was first written, between 11th and 16th September 2001, a memorial to the sheer tragedy of what had happened, and its deep effect on the world as a whole.

We have recently added details of the John J Harvey, a retired fire boat built by New York City in 1931, decommissioned in 1994 and sold to new owners in 1999, which pumped millions of gallons of water to the World Trade Center in the days after the disaster. The hydrants west of Ground Zero had no water, but the John J Harvey took its water straight from the river.

It's now based at Pier 63, just north of Chelsea Piers and twice a week if the weather allows, is piloted into the harbour, playing "God Bless America" as it passes the Statue of Liberty. The boat's eight cannons shoot water out of the river at the rate of 18,000 gallons a minute, making rainbows on sunny days, and some days there are trips where children and adults can travel on this boat free of charge (the boat's ongoing costs are funded by sales of T-shirts, sweatshirts etc.).

See the Peace page for more details and a link to the John J Harvey site which has its own record of the help given on September 11th and subsequently, as well as a calendar of scheduled events for the months ahead.

PROJECT HAPPYCHILD DIRECTORY: We're delighted to say that we have added an entry for Whizz-Kidz to the Project HappyChild Directory of organizations helping children. Whizz-Kids helps disabled children and young people under 18 in the UK by providing customised mobility equipment such as wheelchairs and tricycles that are not available through the NHS, as well as providing help and advice to the children and their families and raising awareness of mobility-related issues through national campaigning.

Whizz-Kidz has also been added to the Syndromes Links Index page and we've included two of their events later this year on the Sponsored Events page - the Dublin City Marathon and the New York City Marathon. They have more sponsored events scheduled for 2003 [our calendar lists mainly 2002 events at present] and you can find details of these by clicking the "Events" link on their Directory entry.

We're deeply sorry to report that Millfield, the children's home run by the St. Pancras Foundation (est. 1776), which was previously in the Directory, has had to close its doors after being unable to find the Ł600,000 required to bring it up to modern Government standards. We understand however that the St. Pancras Foundation will use the proceeds from the sale of Millfield to help needy children in other ways. Our thanks to Sarah Harrison at the Ham & High, and to Chris Taylor of the St. Pancras Foundation, for information provided.

INTERNATIONAL APPEALS: We've recently been approached by people trying to help the islanders in some remote and isolated fishing villages in Tamilnadu on the edge of the Indian Ocean. What's happening there defies belief but no-one knows about it - and it's a highly complex situation, summarised on a webpage we've built for them - click here.

The focus of the story is the 1000 child fish workers - but the background to it is an entire community being put at risk by an appalling combination of circumstances. If you have time, please read the Tamilnadu page and forward it to everyone you know - this is a tiny corner of the world without the power to attract the publicity - and the help - that it needs.

We've also received an appeal for help from a single parent in Gary, Indiana; one of her sons has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and having lost her job, she's struggling to cope and make ends meet. Please take a look at the Guestbook page; any help at all would, we know, be very much appreciated.

TEENAGERS: Dedicated leisure facilities for pre-teens and teenagers - even in the supposedly-evolved Western world, are still at an all-time low. Teenagers regularly hang around on street corners because there aren't places they can regularly go, low-cost or free, to channel their energies into constructive pursuits. Two-hours-a-week at a youth club simply doesn't fill the void for these kids, who often don't have anywhere they can meet up each day with groups of friends.

Recently we received a letter from a Stranraer parent (Scotland) who expressed her dismay at the lack of free facilities for pre-teens and teenagers. In the UK at least this seems to be a problem across the board; in Epping, England (a town of around 5000 people) for example there was loud trumpeting of a "free skate park" for kids which, when built, consisted of just one ramp (not even a half-pipe) and totally unsuitable for anyone except experienced skaters.

In total contrast, an enterprising Epping Forest District Council employee called Rashid Ali managed to secure a lottery grant for totally-free "summer university" courses for kids - and for four weeks during July/August 2002, local 11-18 year olds had an amazing time doing everything from Indian cooking to kayaking and abseiling. There's a real need - everywhere - for free activities for children of all ages, particularly for the many families who simply couldn't otherwise afford it, if we're to encourage kids to do something positive with their lives and set the pattern for what comes later.

We'd be interested in details of enterprise shown by other local councils to provide free activities for kids, not only during holiday times but for weekdays outside school times and during the evenings and weekends as well, to try and identify working models that could be adopted in other towns on a country-wide basis. We'll put relevant details up on the site in due course, if we have enough constructive feedback.

Bored teenagers have little to fill their time with, and drug use continues to be a significant problem in more towns than ever. Cannabis has been in the news lately, with the recent proposed changes to UK law on drugs. "CANNABIS ..... the gateway" explores this subject from both teenage and adult viewpoints, and is written by a Trustee of Project HappyChild. We'd like to see this problem addressed ... but more importantly we'd like to see teenagers everywhere given some positive alternatives in terms of ways to spend their time constructively.

SCHOOLS INTERCHANGE: An e-mail from a site visitor has alerted us to the fact that a major USA school net to which we linked previously, now appears to be charging people to access their schools listings (which were previously free of charge, or we wouldn't have linked to them). This is obviously a dismaying development and we will be looking for alternative (non-commercial) schoolnets for American states over the coming weeks.

We've modified the Texas schools' link to a schools page at Austin University, but it may take some time to track down other suitable links (ones without commercial advertising or chat areas or anything else unsuitable for five-year-olds, as our link criteria are designed to keep all linkages safe and as non-commercial as possible). Help from visitors in identifying suitable school nets would, as ever, be very much appreciated.

The listings for Canadian Schools have also been amended: Canada SchoolNet has now grouped the Atlantic provinces (Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Newfoundland) for schools' website listings, whereas for example the British Council lists universities by individual province. Links from individual province pages have been amended and the index page for Canada has now been updated to indicate the new groupings for schools whilst still allowing individual province pages to be accessed separately for the university listings.

We'd like to thank Herbert Christiaen in Belgium for kindly advising us of a modified link for the Spain school net page, and thanks go also to Claire Openshaw, Web manager at City of York Council, for sending in the new page address for York Schools (see Schools England N-Z).

ACCELERATED LEARNING: Michael Tipper's September feature article" is now on line, focussing on "Remembering Times Tables". Thanks to everyone for the ongoing flow of e-mails to Michael over the summer; there's been a two-month break in article-writing over July/August simply because Michael's schedule is so very busy these days, but new articles are now scheduled to be added regularly again to the already-huge Accelerated Learning area.

GAMES: After many requests we have finally created a small on-line "games" area for children. Inter-active java script was not an area we had touched on previously, and our thanks go to the Javascript Source for making available scripts which could be integrated to some degree with our existing page format.

The new "games area" includes two for memory development ("Pairs" and "Copy Cat"), a simple game called "Breakthrough" which helps with hand-eye coordination, and one called "Squares", an online version of a traditional pen-and-paper game with which most children will be familiar. Kids are surprisingly quick on the "Pairs" game - average time for completion of this game for children was around 2 minutes whereas adults often took considerably longer .....

A CENTRAL FRAME OF REFRENCE: As you will know, a major emphasis at Project HappyChild is on free educational facilities. What appears to be *missing* from education generally, is a "common frame of reference" to which all children can relate. Schools in different countries have various nominated "themes" to cover, in the course of the school year, but what *doesn't* always get taught in schools is the framework itself, into which all the bits of learning fit and inter-relate, so that kids have a defined structure into which to slot the bits of education they are given.

Our world is becoming a "global village" and it seems time now to create a "common framework" where kids can look up all the components of any theme they might reasonably be expected to know about. This whole area is in various stages of construction but, for example, the human body is subdivided into twelve main "lists of keywords", one of which (processes 1) lists circulation - heart - blood vessels - oxygen - arteries - arterioles - capillaries - venules - veins - carbon dioxide - liquid plasma - red blood cells - haemoglobin - white blood cells - lymphocytes - antibodies - clotting - platelets - fibrin - repair.

Other "human body" areas cover everything from digestion to teeth-related words (canines, incisors, molars etc.), the bones, respiration, veins and arteries and much more. What we're aiming to create (across the board) is structured lists of keywords, identifying the main themes of learning and then subdividing into separate lists where necessary.

However - children don't find "lists" particularly interesting! But they *do* enjoy wordsearches - so what we're doing, working closely with Mario Becroft in New Zealand, who designed the wordsearch program and is currently working on the programming to convert the lists database - is generating wordsearches for each keyword list, so that (say) a class learning about the digestive system can use the relevant wordsearch to absorb the keywords related to that particular theme. The lists can equally well be used for revision purposes, ensuring kids have a framework on which to hang all the related bits of learning.

This is a *huge* project! And we'd really appreciate input from visitors - whether you're a carpenter and can send us lists of tools and materials you use, or a history teacher who can define the primary periods of history and subdivide the different areas into the relevant keywords which summarise the things which happened in that period.

There's more background info on the Central Frame of Reference page, and details of broad categories we've already identified (though infinitely more can be added). Lists already generated include Shakespeare's plays (subdivided into Histories & Tragedies, and Comedies); major river systems worldwide; football teams; types of insects; women in the Old Testament; and many more. Click here for more details of how to add your personal area of knowledge to the CFR (any lists you send in, that we're able to use, will carry your name on the site as the author).

There is a *lot* more going on here at present, about which we can't release details until pagebuilding and databases are just a little more advanced. Plus many more updates and new entries queued up for various areas of the site ... we'll get to everything in time but regular visitors will know that times of new pagebuilding here always create some degree of backlog until the new areas are fully uploaded.

At present we're also being swamped - like all too many of you, probably - by large quantities of "undesirable" e-mails - there's an organization called the Internet Watch Foundation to which you can report any containing images of children. Our ISP, PlusNet, is currently working on an anti-spam measure which should reduce the quantities of such e-mails being received here, including the vast quantities of commercial spam originating from various countries in Asia, thus freeing up more time for us to focus on the pagebuilding tasks in hand.

Thanks go as always to the many people who visit regularly and help to publicise this site, and also to those whose help behind the scenes enables us to expand the resources available. This has been an extraordinary summer (especially as a relatively-quiet period had been anticipated!) but a very productive one, and we look forward to sharing with you soon the mass of developments in progress.

Best regards,

Penny.

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