Area 6 : News & Views

NEWS ARCHIVE - Sept-Dec 2001

30th December 2001: Trust everyone has enjoyed a peaceful and happy Christmas! Whilst there's been some "time off" here, the traffic levels dipped only briefly (to a low of just over 2000 on Christmas Day itself) and there has, as usual, been a lot going on in the background, much of which never reaches this page.

Admin-wise things are pretty clear now, and we're just in the process of scheduling the pagebuilding for the next six months. Being that we really have to get the supplementary resources completed! - we'll be focussing almost entirely on these until the end of June. The whole site is currently at 1955 pages - total finished size should be around 3000 pages, so we have some distance to travel, if 1000+ new pages are to be built over a six-month period.

We've made something of a start on Sol's Guide to Harry Potter with the pages now on line for Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, Slytherin and Hogwarts Staff, and when the new themed areas for Notable Witches & Wizards and Magical Books & Authors are in place, this will enable pagebuilding for the hundreds of characters to progress at a much swifter rate. There is so much more depth in the books than the basic storyline - many of our visitors have read all four books countless times but we guarantee there'll be some character pages on line soon that will have you racking your brains as to whether you've ever heard of them before!

The other three areas of scheduled pagebuilding January-June 2002 are Andy's Guide to Pokémon, the free-to-print French pages at Freeway, and the Spellings, Sounds & Meanings worksheets (also at Freeway). All four areas are incredibly popular and whilst everyone has been very patient waiting for these resources to be completed, realistically from a pagebuilding point of view we have to build them *now* if we're actually going to get everything in place.

Traffic levels are getting so high (average 9000/day in early December) that it's becoming more and more difficult to fit in resource pagebuilding as well as the ongoing admin - so we have to focus primarily on the remaining new pages, just for six months, to safeguard the long-term effectiveness of the site as a whole. Accordingly we ask all of you to bear with us if e-mails take a little longer than usual to be answered! - and any non-scheduled pagebuilding will probably need a two-week lead time rather than the usual 2-3 days. Charities in the Directory will have priority for General Events and Sponsored Events for 2002, but other than that the 2-week upload factor will have to apply fairly consistently.

In case this page doesn't get updated again before the New Year - our very best wishes for 2002 to all our visitors! And thank you all for your support thus far. It's appreciated more than you know.

11th December 2001: Child Advocacy International is now able to accept computer ink cartridges - for details please see the Resources Required page.

CAI has opened a mobile clinic and mini-hospital for seriously-ill children and mothers giving birth in the Afghan refugee camps. Funded for just 6 months at present, money is urgently needed for extra drugs and supplies.

7th December 2001: The Guestbook at Sol's Guide to Harry Potter has now been updated. Many thanks for all the e-mails that have been arriving recently; not possible to include all of them but a good selection of those received have been uploaded.

6th December 2001: Our thanks to all visitors to Project HappyChild who responded to the Appeal (on site from December 1999) from Scott McDonald, Task Force Falcon, USA, for supplies, such as pens, pencils, crayons, paper for the school sponsored by the 709th MP Battalion in Kosovo. Scott's letter of 6th December 2001 is included on the previous Appeal page.

6th December 2001: PROJECT HAPPYCHILD DIRECTORY - Our thanks to Karen Simkins at Child Poverty Action Group for advising us that the CPAG contact details have now changed - if you have a cached or printed-out version of the Directory you may wish to update this.

3rd December 2001: Last month, Jonathan Hare at Scott-Grant in Manchester made the offer of a second hand telephone system - GPT DXE2470 switch with 17 standard and 3 executive handsets, extra extension cards and memory, 10 years old but fully maintained (posted on the Surplus Resources page).

This generous offer was taken up by Child Advocacy International and the telephone system has now been forwarded to a hospital in Cameroon. Judith Flacke at CAI wrote with some details: "It's in Bamenda, 400 miles from the capital, and has never had any NGO input. Facilities are basic - even getting drugs is difficult. Phones will improve communications. We were also given (from another source) a couple of microscopes which will improve diagnosis."

Other enquiries have now been received re the telephone system - if there are any more surplus telephone systems out there (eg pre-digital), microscopes or indeed anything else of a medical or communications nature, please drop us a line at Project HappyChild, so that we can put details up on the Surplus Resources page.

If you're involved with an organization that could use any similar items for the benefit of children, just let us know so we can add them to the Resources Required page, as appropriate - thanks.

1^st December 2001: ACCELERATED LEARNING: Michael Tipper's Feature Article for December, Encouraging Positive Thinking, Self Confidence and Self-Belief in Children and Young People, has just been set and uploaded - a thought-provoking and absorbing read.

1^st December 2001: Project HappyChild News for December 2001 is now on line.

1st December 2001: We're delighted to say that Chapter 2 details - characters, spells, items, creatures, locations etc. - are now on line at Solomon's Guide to The Magical World of Harry Potter. Pagebuilding this area is highly complex because of all the interlinking themes, but we're starting to make some headway now that the overall site layout is in place. Many thanks for all the very positive e-mails coming in to Sol!

17th November 2001: GALA THEATRE PREVIEW - On Thursday 29th November there will be the chance to see 'Rita, Sue and Bob Too' and 'A State Affair' at the Soho Theatre, London. An unusual double bill which the critics have described as "heartbreaking and hilarious" .... tickets are £20 each (over-18s only) and the proceeds benefit Addaction who are well known for their work in helping individuals and communities to manage the effects of drug and alcohol misuse, and undertake drug education and prevention work in schools and colleges as part of the National Curriculum.

15th November 2001: SCHOOLS INTERCHANGE - our thanks to Lesley Duff and Alistair Mackenzie at NGFL Scotland for advising us of a broken SCET link and that Scottish Schools Online, a database directory of Scottish schools, is due to be launched in December 2001, including contact details for every school and, where appropriate, website and e-mail addresses and information about the availability of videoconferencing - details and link on the Schools Scotland page.

15th November 2001: REFERRAL SCHEME - Over the last few days, since the visitor count hit three million on 5th November, we've had a link across the top of all main site pages to our ISP, Force9/PlusNet. PlusNet have recently launched a new scheme where you can sign up for as little as £6.99 per month [up to 20 hours weekly access] and just by doing so, you can reduce Project HappyChild's internet costs *every month*.

If you then refer PlusNet to friends and colleagues, you can reduce your own Internet costs in the same way - referral benefits range from 50p per month to as much as £6 per month, depending on the type of account your referrals sign up for.

Project HappyChild is non-profit and this scheme benefits you as well as us! - click here for more details.

10th November 2001: SURPLUS RESOURCES - our thanks to Jonathan Hare at Scott-Grant (Manchester, England) for the offer of a telephone system to a worthy cause - see the main Surplus Resources page.

10th November 2001: RESOURCES REQUIRED - our thanks to Jenny Zienau at the National Childbirth Trust for advising us that their recycling centre can now accept mobile phones, printer, toner and inkjet cartridges - full details including freepost address and free UK collection are given on our Resources Required page.

10th November 2001: CHRISTMAS CARDS - The Children's Trust now has Christmas cards available, linked directly from our Charity Catalogues page. The entry for Children In Crisis cards has now been updated and cards benefitting a number of charities in the Project HappyChild Directory are now listed at the Shop area of this site.

1^st November 2001: Project HappyChild News for November 2001 is now on line, as is Michael Tipper's latest Feature Article for November, "Parental Anxieties about Young Children's Learning".

18th October 2001: The new "Bart and Miss Walker" story is now on line - Addition of Fractions. One of the major criteria for the Project HappyChild site is "teaching for understanding" in the free educational resources we put on line here; with the volume of material to be "got through" in the classroom with the National Curriculum, children may not always fully grasp the important blocks of learning which they will need in place to build on later.

Fractions is one of those key blocks - so it was felt appropriate to include a story on line here, spelling out the basic principles of how fractions can be added together. This single webpage - which prints onto around 18 sheets of A4 - is the natural follow-up to "An Introduction to Fractions" and reveals some of the logic underlying the means by which fractions are added, in a way that most 9-11-year-olds will easily understand and be able to read for themselves.

Free-to-print worksheets for fractions will be on line in due course, via the Fractions index page.

18th October 2001: Due to the increasingly-high volume of visits to the whole website [often around 7000 per day] we are in the process of centralising all free educational resources on line here in the FREEWAY area of the site (Area 14), as this area has a separate mirror at http://www.freeway.plus.com to which we can divert higher-level traffic as required, to spread the overall bandwidth load.

10th October 2001: Worksheets AY02, AY03 and AY04 are now on line in "Spellings, Sounds & Meanings".

8th October 2001: With concerted world action now under way against Osama Bin Laden's terrorist forces and the Taliban, our thoughts are with the repressed people of Afghanistan and the many refugees heading for its borders with Iran and Pakistan. Ockenden International are the only British charity working in all three countries - click here for their Chief Executive's message and appeal for help at this very difficult time - and here for the page on line at Project HappyChild about the Terrorist Attacks on the USA.

2nd October 2001: ACCELERATED LEARNING - Michael Tipper's feature article for October - "So What Is Mind Mapping?" - is now on line.

1^st October 2001: Project HappyChild News for October 2001 is now on line.

30th September 2001: FRENCH WORKSHEETS - We're very glad to say that the new pages for vocabulary for "Classroom" and "Medical" have now been uploaded. Our thanks for everyone's patience whilst we slowly build this area - it really is a mammoth task but will be well worth it in the longer term. Click here for the main index.

30th September 2001: FRACTIONS - We've had a number of enquiries about "fractions" - primarily from parents whose kids haven't quite grasped these at school but aren't quite certain of the best way to explain them. After some degree of thought we've put the basic info into a "Bart and Miss Walker" story called "An Introduction to Fractions" ..... we'll do another one in due course about "Addition of Fractions" (far more complex!) and maybe some fraction worksheets if time and other commitments allow for this.

We've updated the main "Freeway" page to include both the Fractions page and the new "English" area which includes "Spellings, Sounds & Meanings" as well as the free-to-print system for teaching reading, already on line at Project HappyChild. SSM will be a Freeway resource but for the time being we're building it in the free educational resources" area of Project HappyChild, to avoid having to set up three different sets of mirrored pages. This new resource will be linked in from the main index later, when more of the planned 300 free worksheets are on line.

30th September: Final task for the month has been to update the main "mirror sites" for the supplementary resources - Freeway, Andy's Guide to Pokemon and Sol's Guide to Harry Potter. This needed to be done at some stage! - and ensures that all pages across the site and mirrors are now fully integrated.

This should give us a "level playing field" for the final major stage of pagebuilding for the site as a whole. How long this will take is anyone's guess - but the pagebuilding schedule has been updated with a view to completing all the supplementary resources currently under construction, by the end of next year. Sooner if possible!

Pauline is the new contact for Academic versions (for schools and charities) of Corel WordPerfect Suite 8, with which this website has primarily been built - we've updated the contact details on the relevant pages in the Shop and web-page-building-guide areas of the site, for schools and charities who would like to obtain a low-cost copy of WordPerfect Suite 8, and included today's delightful gifts from Corel on our "Sponsors" page.

26th September 2001: Two new stories are now on line in the "Creativity" area of the site. A "Stories" index page has been created, the original story being "Glaxibel The Avenger" - the new items on line are "The Daffodil Principle" and "A Sandpiper to bring you joy". Worth a read.

Also new on line is the text of an extraordinary e-mail we received, one passenger's experience of a Denver - Dulles flight a few days after the terrorist attacks - see "We The People". We've also added a few more photos to the "Faith and Freedom" page about the events of 11th September 2001.

We've also taken this opportunity to upgrade the remainder of Area 6, including the pages for Kathryn Watts, who wrote some articles for Project HappyChild as a "Roving Reporter" when this website first went on line back in 1998. We'd like to thank Kathryn for all her hard work - these pages offer a unique insight into life in a number of countries and have drawn notable responses from visitors, particularly the Vietnam veteran who wrote to her after reading Article 8. Such letters make a world of difference, and we'd like to thank all the people who have been in touch after reading her writings.

And finally - we've received an appeal for help from the Betesda Foundation in Galati, Romania. They're in the midst of an unexpected financial crisis - if any of you out there are in a position to help, we'd appreciate it. We've seen this project go from strength to strength and there are a lot of former street children who have a wholly better life because of it - things are pretty constrained just now and help of any kind would be greatly valued.

23rd September: Links have been added from our page about the Terrorist Attack on America and from the main Crisis Appeals page, to the American Red Cross resource of help, advice and practical info for children at times of disaster, dealing with everything from terrorist attacks to hurricanes, fire, floods, mudslides and volcanoes.

23rd September: A new area has today been added to the site - "Spellings, Sounds & Meanings", to supplement the free-to-print reading system, "Bricks and Mortar", already on line at Project HappyChild. Whilst the pagebuilding schedule is unbelievably crammed already, free spelling worksheets will fulfil an ongoing need for many parents and schools and we plan to complete and upload around 300 free SSM worksheets by next summer.

As an addendum to this, we had problems deleting the virus-carrying e-mail itself, as we found it closed the mail program every time it was highlighted. The solution to this turned out to be to enter Outlook Express using "read news", then click on any mail folder other than the one where the virus-e-mail was situated, and use "find message" to bring that particular e-mail into the "find message" folder. Straightforward to delete from there, as no "preview pane" is used in that format, and the message isn't actually being accessed. I might comment that it actually took us some considerable time to figure this one out ....

16th September 2001: With the growing seriousness of this world crisis, we have put a separate page on line about the Terrorist Attack on the USA - please click here.

11th September 2001: Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of the United States of America. If you wish to donate funds online for the World Trade Centre / Pentagon tragedy you can do so via Mercy Corps International - see the Crisis Appeals page.

See also the President's latest bulletin, here.

Many of these kids have had no choice but to run away, to escape untenable home environments - and find themselves trapped on the streets with seemingly no way back to a normal way of life.

Rick (a retired US Navy Officer) founded STANDUP FOR KIDS in 1990, three years after watching a CBS broadcast, 48 Hours, about street kids in San Diego, California. Rick was so concerned by this report that when the Navy sent him to San Diego the following year, he immediately became involved in walking the streets to identify homeless teens and get them into shelters.

This amazing project has developed since that time, across several US states, and now helps many thousands of kids - mostly teenagers just like those you'll find in every family. Click here for Rick's Guestbook entry.

6th September 2001: In response to many requests we have made a major new addition to the site today - Times Tables Division worksheets. This new area has 50 free-to-print worksheets for children who have learned the basic times tables and are ready to progress to learning division, using the same basic framework as for the times tables themselves.

5th September 2001: Our thanks to one of our visitors for forwarding details of The Travelers Protective Association of America and of their special fund to assist children and others with hearing loss or difficulty. "TPA has provided hundreds of children with scholarships for education and special equipment" - details and a website link have now been added to the Syndromes Links Index.

1^st September 2001: Project HappyChild News for September 2001 is now on line.

NEWSLETTERS - this website has been on line since 1998 - there have been a lot of Newsletters! The archive is here and the very last Newsletter is here.