Area 6 : News & Views

LATEST SITE NEWS

DECEMBER 2002

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17^th December 2002: SCAM ALERT: We have just received a wad of e-mails from an organization called WELT LOTTO FIRMA, each e-mail saying we have won a share of US$22,500,000. All e-mails, as far as we can see, contain identical information including: "Your company, attached to ticket number 013-2316-2002-477, with serial number A025-09 drew the lucky numbers 37-13-34-85-56-42, and consequently won in category C." Just thought we'd quote the details here in case any of you receive anything similar.

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15^th December 2002: Project HappyChild News for December 2002 is now on line - please click here.

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14^th December 2002: DIRECTORY CHARITIES - A direct e-mail address has been added for CLIMB (Children Living with Inherited Metabolic Diseases) and we have made a link to POD's website from their Directory entry.

POD has been entertaining children in hospital for an astonishing 25 years now, and just £600pa enables a new children's ward to be added to their list of monthly shows (there are still *many* hospitals on their waiting list). Fundraising and corporate donations are always greatly appreciated and POD's ultimate aim is "to provide shows at all hospitals and hospices which admit children".

The entry for the Elisabeth Svendsen Trust (riding therapy for children with special needs and disabilities) has also been updated, with a link to their appeals page requesting funds towards the provision of a Sensory Room for special needs children at their Birmingham location [also added to the UK Appeals page].

14^th December 2002: REYE'S SYNDROME - A link has been added to the website of the National Reye's Syndrome Foundation of the UK, along with a direct e-mail address - click here for their Directory entry.

Reye's Syndrome is less in the news these days, with more parents aware of the possible dangers of aspirin for children, but the NRSF page quoting the most recent advice of the Medicine Control Agency [April 2002, at time of writing this] will be a sobering read for many parents.

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14^th December 2002: DEAFBLIND CHILDREN - "Last hour's salary of 2002" Appeal

With Christmas approaching, spare a thought for deafblind children who don't see the sparkling decorations on the Christmas tree nor hear the Christmas carols on radio and TV. If you'd like to make a difference, why not donate your last hour's salary of 2002? Whatever you earn, just one hour's salary can help towards the cost of a sensory toy for a deafblind child.

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13^th December 2002: ACCELERATED LEARNING: Michael Tipper's latest feature article is now on line: A Teacher's View on Education. An interesting and thought-provoking read, especially in view of recent press coverage of Government criticism of the ineffectiveness of current teaching methods in many classrooms.

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13^th December 2002: KEYWORDS FOR LEARNING: Many more free-to-print word searches are now on line, including invertebrates, insects, reptiles, water vehicles (ships etc.), and the remainder of books on line (with links to on-line texts) including titles such as "A Christmas Carol", "Hound of the Baskervilles", "The Wind in the Willows", "The Jungle Book", "Frankenstein", "Moby Dick", "The Happy Prince", "The War of the Worlds" ... and many more. Click here for the index.

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13^th December 2002: SURPLUS RESOURCES: Our thanks to Natasha for advising us that all items have now been successfully allocated.

11^th December 2002: CHILD FISH WORKERS: Rayan at East Coast RDT has sent us some photos of the child labourers in Tamilnadu. Click here to see the pictures - any help anyone can offer will, we know, be much appreciated.

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9^th December 2002: FREE OFFICE FURNITURE: Thanks go to Natasha McEwen at Caps Solutions Ltd., for the kind offer of a large quantity of surplus desks, bookcases and cupboards - click here if you could make use of some of these items.

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9^th December 2002: SCHOOLS INTERCHANGE: Our thanks to Rik who wrote in with details of North Yorkshire schools listings. These have been added to Schools England N-Z - click here for details.

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6^th December 2002: KEYWORDS FOR LEARNING: Over 100 of the free-to-print word search pages are now on line, new ones include the Human Body (12 pages), Kings and Queens of England, football (16 pages!), insects (9 pages) and worldwide Countries & Dependencies (13 pages). Click here for the index.

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3^rd December 2002: KEYWORDS FOR LEARNING: We're continuing to upload the new Word Search pages, those so far on line include: Pokémon (25 pages), Shakespeare's Plays [histories, comedies and tragedies], The Bible (9 pages), rodents, cattle (4 pages), vegetables, fruits, fish, dogs, wild animals, horses, and Books (wide range of books with links to the online texts for each title, including Frankenstein, Tarzan of the Apes, Aesop's Fables, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Pride and Prejudice, and Wuthering Heights - nb please see the Conditions of Use for online access to these texts]. More wordsearch pages will be linked in shortly - click here to reach the wordsearch index page with links to all wordsearches available so far.

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1^st December 2002: KEYWORDS FOR LEARNING: We're delighted to say that around 140 WordSearch pages have now been received from Mario Becroft in New Zealand and we're beginning to link them in from the Wordsearch Index page; all things being equal, we're aiming to have all the pages uploaded and accessible within the next few days. New lists for further categories will, as always, be much appreciated.

NOVEMBER 2002

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30^th November 2002: VISITOR COUNTERS: Many of you will have noticed the wildly varying counts across the site in recent days. Traffic is *so* high just now [around 12,000 visits per day] that the cgi stats aren't coping with the massive number of visible displays that often need to be updated simultaneously, with the results that counts have been zero-ing as often as once every five minutes.

After experimenting with various different compromises to avoid removing visitor counts from the site altogether, we've updated the "about us" page to include visit levels for various areas of the site, and linked the visible counts to that page, so that whenever the counts *do* crash, there is some permanent record of the last recorded accurate figures.

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19^th November 2002: SPONSORED EVENTS: We've just been advised that the "Zip Slide" 375 feet from HMS Belfast to the banks of the River Thames, scheduled to take place on Sunday 27th October 2002 (and cancelled due to the awesome wind levels on that day!) has been re-scheduled for Sunday 24th November. If you'd like to be part of this thrilling event raising money for SENSE, helping deafblind children and young adults, see the Sponsored Events calendar for a link to their site with more details and a registration form - due to the nearness of this event, a telephone call to book your place is also recommended (select "contact the events team", on the page about the Zip Slide, for phone numbers).

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10^th November 2002: KEYWORDS FOR LEARNING: We're delighted to say that all lists received so far for the "Central Framework of Reference" have now been added to the database, and that we've re-designed the main Index page for the new wordsearches (click here).

Once the final programming refinements are in place, we'll be able to start uploading the pages (any day now) - categories in gold (with reference numbers) on the Index page have already been prepared; items in black are those we still need lists for. If visitors have *any* areas of specialist knowledge (academic, trades, crafts, hobbies, sports, music etc.) please let us have your lists as soon as possible, because once the programming's complete we will be able to generate new wordsearches very swiftly whenever new lists are received.

We've added an entry to our "Sponsors" page to express our thanks to Mario for his extraordinary level of help over the past four months, both in connection with the Central Frame of Reference and the new area for "Spellings, Sounds and Meanings".

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1^st November 2002: Project HappyChild News for November 2002 is now on line, includes details of this year's preparations for Operation Christmas Child (shoebox deadlines now very close) - see the Newsletter for more details.

OCTOBER 2002

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29^th October 2002: ACCELERATED LEARNING: Michael's Feature Article for October has just gone on line, "My Top Ten Tips for Exam Success". Due to the massive demand for Michael's book and tapes on "The 77 Habits of Highly Effective Students", this title is currently out of stock, so we've included an e-mail link at the foot of the article to enable visitors to let Michael know if they want an e-mail notification when more tapes, booklets and E-book versions of "The 77 Habits" become available.

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20^th October 2002: ENGLISH RESOURCES: As many of our visitors will know, some while back we set up the beginnings of an area for "Spellings, Sounds and Meanings". Progress on this area has been intermittent because there's always so much else going on across the site, but we're very happy to say that the "template" pages are now on line for poem writing, mc lyrics, making crosswords, and lateral thinking (a total of seven worksheet masters in all).

The first prototype worksheets have also been designed, for writing/spelling, wordsearches, dictionary meanings, sentence construction and making crossword clues, all available for viewing so you can begin to see how this huge resource is going to fit together. We're more than half way through building the database of 10,000 English words and, with the help of Mario Becroft in New Zealand who is tackling the programming requirements, we're hoping to have the full resource of *5000* free worksheets on line within the next few months.

You'll find some basic background info on the English index page, a detailed overview of all that's planned for this resource on the SSM Intro page, and the prototypes and templates on the Sounds Database index page.

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18^th October 2002: WILDFOWL & WETLANDS TRUST - Our thanks to Mark Austin for writing to us about this new educational website which offers (free!) a comprehensive range of National Curriculum-linked, cross-curricular materials about water, wetlands and wetland life.

The site includes lesson plans, factfiles, data sets, images and online games, and has been designed for use at both home and school - click here for more details. An ongoing project at the site is following the migration of the Brent Geese to Canada from Iceland, and their return journey to WWT Castle Espie later this year.

A delightful site which we plan to add to the "FOCUS" area at Project HappyChild when the pagebuilding schedule eases up a little here.

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15^th October 2002: The scheduled massive overhaul of the resources of Schools Interchange has now begun. We've started with Schools in Africa, where resources have been updated or added for Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Malawi and South Africa.

As well as access to university and schools' websites, there are links in place now to Government Education departments and linked items such as the Malawi Millennium Project (Strathclyde University) and the ground-breaking "African Virtual University" project.

Updating and expanding Schools Interchange is likely to take some considerable time, but we've identified many new resources and will be adding these whenever the ongoing pagebuilding schedule allows.

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15^th October 2002: PUBLICITY: Our thanks to CARE IN PRACTICE which featured Project HappyChild in their Autumn 2002 edition, just received here today, and to Maria Brunt who arranged this.

11^th October 2002: Project HappyChild News for October 2002 is now on line.

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10^th October 2002: SPONSORED EVENTS: Late addition! (just received here) - SENSE are running the 15th SENSE City Speed Skate on Thursday 24th October 2002. Not much time left so if you work for a City company and want to get a team of four together for this power-packed event, click here for more details.

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9^th October 2002: SPONSORED EVENTS: Two highly unusual events have just been added to the Sponsored Events page - a "Zip Slide" 375 feet from HMS Belfast to the banks of the River Thames, on Sunday 27th October 2002, and Abseiling from the Tyne Bridge, Newcastle, on Sunday 3rd November 2002, both events in aid of SENSE, helping deafblind children and young adults. See the Sponsored Events calendar for a link to their site with more details and a registration form - early booking of places is recommended!

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9^th October 2002: Project HappyChild Directory: We're delighted to say there is now a link to the website of TAMBA, the Twins and Multiple Births Association, from their Directory entry which has now been updated. The TAMBA website has a range of links to twins clubs in the UK and overseas, as well as multiple births associations in a number of countries, a very comprehensive related booklist for parents and professionals alike - see our booklist page - and a very broad range of twins- and multiples-related resources on their site. If you have a cached or printed-out version of the Directory, you may wish to update this.

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8^th October 2002: SCHOOLS INTERCHANGE: Our thanks to Alan Scott, parent and editor of Holmston Primary School web pages, for sending in an updated URL for South Ayrshire schools' websites. It's always much appreciated when visitors or LEAs write in with new or updated information, as the resources of Schools Interchange benefit greatly from active input by visitors. You'll find the new South Ayrshire schools listing on our Schools Scotland page.

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2^nd October 2002: VIRUSES - A new virus worm is spreading rapidly, called "BUGBEAR", just upgraded by Norton (Symantec) to a "Category 4" threat - click here for further information on how to protect your computer and detailed instructions for removing this virus worm if required. If you don't have virus protection on your computer you may wish to print the Norton page *now* in case you can't access it later; interim measures include disabling attachments from downloading in your mail program, or disabling the preview pane until you can get your virus definitions updated.

SEPTEMBER 2002

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25^th September 2002: ACCELERATED LEARNING: Our thanks to Lynn, Brian and Mimi who sent in different versions of the poem "The Parts of Speech" - the full text of the poem has now been added to the "Language and Grammar" page in the Mnemonics section of the Accelerated Learning area.

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24^th September 2002: Interesting Conference on Playgrounds scheduled for 1st October, opening up an exchange of working ideas between designers and planners and those with responsibility for, or interest in, play services and playgrounds - price includes lunch and refereshments (non-profit event organised by PLAYLINK and Portsmouth City Council). Click here for more details - people attending are likely to include local authorities, planners, landscape architects, playgroups, voluntary groups, private individuals, etc.

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16^th September 2002: Much still going on here in the background to the new pagebuilding and database set-ups. Our sincere thanks to all visitors sending in information for the new Central Framework of Reference area.

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16^th September 2002: The "SHOP" - we're delighted to say we have now created an entry for our newest advertiser, "The Dolphin Man", on the Shop pages. Please do have a browse around the Project HappyChild Shop - it's small but select and the advertisers who help fund the ongoing costs of this website have some very interesting products that you're not likely to find anywhere else.

We've also updated the Advertising page - as we're non-profit our advertising rates are very minimal (from £8 per week), just enough to help fund our computer and internet costs etc., but due to our increasingly-high traffic levels we may be facing additional bandwidth costs shortly - new advertisers are always welcomed!

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9^th September 2002: Project HappyChild News for September 2002 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.