Project HappyChild NEWS

22nd June 2003

[for ongoing updates, see Latest Site News]

Hi there. Nice to be in touch again! We know we're running late - but there has been *so* much going on here these last weeks that this is the first chance we've had to update you all.

Firstly, the Sounds Database is live! Mario in New Zealand has completed nearly all the programming and the first block of 558 free worksheets for Spellings, Sounds and Meanings is now on line - click here - for writing / spelling, wordsearch puzzles, dictionary meanings, use in sentences, making crossword clues and translation (for teaching English as a foreign language). If everything stays on schedule, we're hoping to have the remaining 11,500 worksheets (including those for translating English into any other language) for all sound groups on line by about September 2003.

HARRY POTTER: Well, of course this is a "big week" for Harry Potter with book five, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" being sold across the world just after midnight (GMT) on Saturday. We've put on line a review of the first few chapters (no plot disclosures!) on the "intro" page at Sol's guide along with details of the "live webcast" of JK Rowling at the Albert Hall with Stephen Fry on Thursday this week (26th June) and a link to the transcript of the BBC Newsnight interview with JK Rowling last Thursday.

FIJI FOOTBRIDGE: However complicated it may be for children in your household to get to school, the children of Qelemumu probably have a tougher time of it. See Latest News (22nd June 2003) for more info about the Footbridge appeal for kids in Fiji.

EVENTS CALENDAR: Just a reminder that the "Big Toddle" where thousands of playgroups across the UK raise funds for Barnardo's (and themselves) has been taking place since the beginning of June - if your group hasn't booked to join in yet, you still have time to contact Barnardo's to set up a Toddle before the end of the month [see the Events Calendar for details of this and many other events].

FREE MATHS WORKSHEETS: After many requests, we've now been able to add more free worksheets for simple Addition (now totalling 2000 worksheets in all) and there's also a new area for Subtraction, with a further 2000 free-to-print worksheets on line.

In the process of adding these, we've now standardised all the free Maths worksheets to some degree, with the addition of translation facilities so that all 4100 free worksheets are available in 25 languages - eg click here for sample worksheet. We know from past e-mail contacts (like Michelle's letter about them being used for Mongolian street children, added to the Guestbook about 18 months ago) that they're widely used, and we wanted to make the whole range of free worksheets easily accessible for many more children who don't speak the most-commonly-used languages.

The FREE TRANSLATION aspect of the site is quite complex now, because in addition to the grammar-aware translations linked to from the top of the bar [originally French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Spanish, with Dutch, Russian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese added recently] we have now been able to add in links to Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Polish, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish and Welsh.

Because of the complexities of explaining that *one* of the translation services is not "always free" we have linked the last 13 to our "Home 11" page which clarifies how the different translation options work, to enable visitors who don't speak English at all to find their way through the translation options. Similarly, with the Russian, Chinese and Japanese links we have attempted a visual representation of how to use the free Systran translation facilities.

SCHOOLS INTERCHANGE: Our thanks to Bernadine whose recent e-mail about possible penfriends for her son, in schools in Egypt, alerted us to the fact that both school and university link pages from our Schools Egypt page had moved during the recent Egyptian Universities Network site upgrade. We've updated the link for Universities in Egypt but were unable to locate the schools' page anywhere on their site, so have written to EUN requesting further info.

Meanwhile we've been successful in locating a listing for Sacred Heart schools in Egypt which has now been added to the Schools Egypt page.

BRICKS AND MORTAR: Special thanks to Sam in Cumbria for writing to us about her 6-year-old daughter's experience of our free-to-print reading system, Bricks and Mortar - " ... I have to say that I am astonished by the way she has responded ..." We've added the full text of Sam's e-mail to our Bricks & Mortar index page - click here.

FREE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES: Thanks are due also to Tony Warren for advising us that a number of the links for West European Resources had changed - these have now been updated on our one-page index to free educational resources worldwide.

And finally ..... LANDMINES: Our thanks to the British Army - particularly Captain James Webster, UK Mine Information and Training Centre, Camberley, Staff Sergeant Nick Du Val (Gibraltar Barracks), and Sgt Layard Soulsby, Webmaster, Directorate of Corporate Communication (Army) - for enabling us to update our Landmines in Bosnia page - site visitors had written to us after having packages returned by the Gornji Vakuf post office.

We've now added a postal address for DZ at the Mine Information Coordination Cell in Sarajevo, and we'll add more information when we hear back from her - click here for the Appeal page and here for our page commemorating Princess Diana's work helping raise awareness of the whole landmines problem.

We're very pleased to have got this one sorted, as the Landmines appeal was the very first international appeal that went up on the Project HappyChild site, back in 1998 :)

As you can see, it's been non-stop here these last weeks, and given the crammed pagebuilding schedule ahead, likely to remain that way for some time. The visit counter hit eight million at around 9.45am today, slightly less than three months since we passed seven million ... which maybe gives some idea of our ongoing traffic levels.

If we're to have any chance of meeting the pagebuilding targets by September, this probably means there won't be time for newsletters as well .... Currently there are over 7000 pages on the site but if the Sounds Database pagebuilding stays on schedule, we could be looking at 18,000 pages by the start of September. Awesome! (but a lot of work ahead) so we can't guarantee to generate any Newsletters between now and then.

The Latest News page will continue to be updated periodically (so please check it out now and again, even if only a couple of times a month!) - however once the mass of database-related pages is completed, things should be much easier all round.

Have an excellent summer :)

Best regards,

Penny.

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