Project HappyChild NEWS

Summer 2014

[for ongoing updates, see Latest Site News]

Hello again from Project HappyChild in England - we'd like to extend a welcome to all our new subscribers and to say thanks to all of you who have stayed with us since as long ago as 1998.

Because of the significant issues with Newsletter sends in recent years - especially as Newsletters often haven't reached everyone who had signed up - we'd like to flag up a few resources on the site, or linked from it, that not all of you may be aware of.

Just click on whatever interests you - we recognise that there are many different reasons why people have signed up for this Newsletter over the last 16 years - one or more of these should be below.

DUAL-LANGUAGE WORKSHEETS

Self-testing vocabulary worksheets for everyone from absolute beginners up to about A Level standard, all in carefully-structured blocks with about 10 words to learn at a time.
... so far including French-English, German-English, Bulgarian-English, Romanian-English, Urdu-English, Russian-English, Arabic-English, Chinese-English (with Mandarin, Cantonese and Pinyin), Turkish English, Dutch-English and Polish-English - we still need volunteer help from a Castilian-Spanish language professional to complete the checking of the Spanish-English (already translated), likewise for checking Italian-English vocabulary and Malaysian-English vocabulary, also both already translated.

These worksheet sets (each 400+ pages) all have the *same* English content - so children of different nationalities can learn English side-by-side in classrooms - eg see "food and drink", "creatures" or "human body".

Many of the languages currently on line (French, Russian, Polish, Urdu, Dutch, Arabic, Spanish, German, Romanian, Spanish, Italian) have a "verbs" worksheets set (each set 390+ worksheets), already on line. We're still awaiting final confirmations on Hungarian-English verbs and Chinese-English verbs (Mandarin, Cantonese and Pinyin), but hope that these new sets may be able to go on line soon.

Volunteer help from language professionals across the world has made possible the 10,000+ dual-language worksheets already on line - see our "Roll of Honour" page. We would like to add more languages - all that's needed is for two language professionals to offer to translate and check (we provide the Excel files with the English content already in place) and we can add a whole new language set of 800+ verbs and vocabulary worksheets usually within days of receiving the translated and checked databases. As far as we know this would be possible for any html-compatible language ... so all that's needed is more volunteers. Please help if you can.

The other recent addition to the language area, that many of our longer-standing visitors might not be aware of, is our "Guide to Basic French Grammar", a unique but straightforward summary ranging from 'irregular verb spellings' and 'verbs that take etre' to 'the nine whiches'.

ANDY'S GUIDE TO POKÉMON

Many of you will know that the huge cheats backlog finally got cleared - and the best of everything received has now gone on line - Andy came back to help with the final page of cheats here. Sorry we couldn't include everybody's input - there were lots of duplicate messages as well as masses that looked highly unlikely :) we do appreciate you all writing though and we're really sorry if anyone sent in good info in the early days that didn't go up on line. As many of you will know, there were endless mail problems as well as one big computer crash (hard drive) so it's possible that some valid entries also got lost along the way, and the demands of building the rest of the Project HappyChild site often meant that the Pokémon pagebuilding got delayed much longer than intended.

We're delighted to say the database entries also - eventually - got done. All the main areas of Andy's guide are now dovetailed in with the cheats/help messages sent in by visitors over a period of nearly eleven years. You can see the results from the main pokédex pages - eg see the red-blue-yellow pokédex (you can move from one pokédex to another by clicking on pokémon outside the block that includes cheats links) - and the colour version index pages (eg see firered/leafgreen cheats) - there's a phenomenal amount of info on line now - worth taking a wander around if you haven't been back here for a while :)

We'd just like to thank all of you that have supported this site with your visits and the huge volumes of help messages you have sent. Every single message in Andy's guide to Pokémon has come in from one of our visitors, from countries across the world. What you have created together is quite extraordinary ... take a look around and see what has been created by all of you. An awesome achievement :)

SCHOOLS INTERCHANGE

Schools Interchange was created as long ago as 1999, to allow schools in any part of the world to link up with schools in other countries. The "Credits" page lists some of the many people who helped us, when Schools Interchange first started, to find school-nets when other internet listings were minimal at best. Eventually it became necessary to standardise the format for all areas, to make it easier for site visitors to find schools in any given geographical location, though it was a sad day here when all the original highly-detailed set-ups had to be replaced with a more broad-brush approach, to simplify the listings overall.

We now have in place a network of links to around 400,000 schools, via links to country governments, education ministries, schools, school-nets and universities right across the planet. From huge continents to tiny islands. All the links from here were updated when site traffic was approaching 100 million visits (reached on 3rd April 2011, Mother's Day in England that year).

Some of the areas have thousands of schools on line; others are just beginning and looking for help in bringing the internet to schools across their countries. Please select any of the areas below for listings of all the school-nets currently available, that lead onwards to schools' websites.

SCHOOLS AFRICA A-L	SCHOOLS USA A-I	SCHOOLS USA J-N	SCHOOLS USA O-Z	SCHOOLS ENGLAND A-D	SCHOOLS ENGLAND E-L	SCHOOLS ENGLAND M-R	SCHOOLS ENGLAND S-Z	EUROPE + ASIA A-E	EUROPE + ASIA F-K	AUSTRALIA + NEW ZEALAND
SCHOOLS AFRICA M-Z	CANADA + MEXICO	CARIBBEAN ISLANDS	CENTRAL + SOUTH AMERICA	SCHOOLS LONDON	SCHOOLS SCOTLAND	SCHOOLS WALES	ISLANDS + N/IRELAND	EUROPE + ASIA L-R	EUROPE + ASIA S-Z	PACIFIC ISLANDS

LEARNING TIMES TABLES

The Times Tables Multiplication Worksheets went on line in the early days of the site, and had a lot to do with our original traffic levels rising from zero to four million in just four years. The worksheets are specially constructed in logical steps to make it easier for a child to figure out how the numbers fit together - if your child has struggled with "conventional methods" you might find this works altogether differently.

It's usually recommended to start with "10", then "2", then "5", then "11" then the 3 times table - more info on the page here.

1 TIMES TABLE	Worksheet 1	Worksheet 2	Worksheet 3	Worksheet 4
2 TIMES TABLE	Worksheet 5	Worksheet 6	Worksheet 7	Worksheet 8

3 TIMES TABLE	Worksheet 9	Worksheet 10	Worksheet 11	Worksheet 12
4 TIMES TABLE	Worksheet 13	Worksheet 14	Worksheet 15	Worksheet 16

5 TIMES TABLE	Worksheet 17	Worksheet 18	Worksheet 19	Worksheet 20
6 TIMES TABLE	Worksheet 21	Worksheet 22	Worksheet 23	Worksheet 24

7 TIMES TABLE	Worksheet 25	Worksheet 26	Worksheet 27	Worksheet 28
8 TIMES TABLE	Worksheet 29	Worksheet 30	Worksheet 31	Worksheet 32

9 TIMES TABLE	Worksheet 33	Worksheet 34	Worksheet 35	Worksheet 36
10 TIMES TABLE	Worksheet 37	Worksheet 38	Worksheet 39	Worksheet 40

11 TIMES TABLE	Worksheet 41	Worksheet 42	Worksheet 43	Worksheet 44
12 TIMES TABLE	Worksheet 45	Worksheet 46	Worksheet 47	Worksheet 48

records of tables learned and multiples learned

Worksheet 49

Worksheet 50

SOL'S GUIDE TO HARRY POTTER

Sol's guide to Harry Potter was started in the heady days when the stories of an eleven-year-old wizard were sweeping the world. An incredible amount of work went into creating this area of the site, perhaps most easily depicted by this link to King's Cross Station which in many ways is where everything really began.

all 7 books

JKR

Carefully-constructed over a period of several years, and with advertising excluded from its pages, Sol's guide was created to link together the extraordinary range of themes that run through the series of seven main books - the last of which, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", was published worldwide on Saturday 21st July 2007.

In order to ensure that people didn't accidentally find out elements of the story "in advance" (for any of the seven books) the web pages were subdivided into separate areas for the many individual categories [eg Diagon Alley, spells, creatures, events, Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Slytherin, Ravenclaw, magical books, Quidditch, wizards, characters, Ministry of Magic, Hogwarts staff, etc.], and then further divided into separate areas for each of the seven scheduled "main books" in the series, each area being colour-coded so it would be easier for visitors to identify information that related to books they had previously read.

The massive amount of set-up work to engineer the interlinking of tens of thousands of keywords (characters, magic and spells, locations, items, creatures) across all seven books was completed in early 2008. However in the light of ongoing uncertainties at that time about 'Harry Potter copyrights' (affecting all websites or site areas with Harry-Potter-related themes), the decision was eventually - and very sadly - taken, to create the Special Note of 1st July 2008, which remains on line on the site here.

BRICKS + MORTAR - a new approach to learning-to-read

This reading system may be found useful for parents, if "conventional methods" just aren't working. If a child has learned a whole language in a couple of years, then he or she should be able to grasp the basics of reading in about three months - probably less. If s/he has been "struggling" for rather longer than this, it's probably because some of the "basic building bricks" of reading are missing from what has been absorbed. "Bricks and Mortar" re-presents all the bricks in a holistic structure which is easy for children to take in and use.

Very early on in this reading system, children find they have to look carefully at the individual letters of words on the Disks, to differentiate between some very similar-looking words. This gets them out of the habit of "guessing" at every word, which a lot of children may do if they've been faced with a wide variety of reading books. "Bricks and Mortar" starts them back at the centre of learning by linking shape, sound and overall structure.

The whole system ("notes" for helpers) can be read aloud in under two hours, and there are over 100 disks in the series, but for most children, absorbing the first 40 will be enough to allow them to progress to simple structured reading books like Ladybird or the Biff, Chip and Kipper series on the Oxford Reading Tree.

Bart and Miss Walker stories

AN INTRODUCTION TO FRACTIONS ...

"Hello, Bart," said Miss Walker. How much do you know about fractions?" "Not much," said Bart. "Okay," said Miss Walker. "Let's suppose you have eight apples. If I take one apple, do you know what fraction that represents? A quarter, a half, an eighth, a third?" Bart thought for a moment. "An eighth," he said confidently. "Excellent," said Miss Walker. "Now, do you know how that is written? I'll show you. The figure one with a line underneath, and the figure eight, underneath that, like this:" She wrote at the top of a large piece of paper: 1 - 8 ... continued here

Also in this series: Addition of Fractions and Fractions and Percentages.

THE POLICE LETTERS ALPHABET

This page was one of the original cornerstones of the Infinite Facts Series and was put in place by Martin Lockey, who built the first pages of this website for free, back in early 1998. The Police Letters Alphabet still consistently ranks as one of the top 5 most-visited pages of all the 31,000+ now on line.

We've made a start on the linked Keywords for Learning wordsearch puzzles (150+ puzzles already on line), but some way to go with these, still.

SPELLINGS, SOUNDS AND MEANINGS

This area of the site expands on many of the themes first touched on in "Bricks and Mortar". As many of you will know, SSM was under construction a very long time! Eventually it was decided to streamline the resource to provide the best-possible examples within each sound sub-group, and sound files were also created to demonstrate the use of the sound in each set of 10 words - all files now accessible via the Sounds Database along with worksheets for each set - writing/spelling practice, dictionary meanings, crossword clues, wordsearch puzzle and use of each word in a sentence (an example of a single sound sub-group is shown below).

AY SOUNDS: AY "ay" words: words where the stress falls on the "ay" sound (vowel sound as in "day") AY ay 01 writing / spelling word search meaning use in sentence crossword clues AY ay 02 writing / spelling word search meaning use in sentence crossword clues Sample words in this group are given below (you can print the page to write in more "same-sound" words in the blank boxes). stay they today delay day crayon sleigh weigh way away dray drey bouquet nay neigh pray prey mosaic chaos kaolin SOUND FILE 01 Sound files for the words shown are now in place - please see the intro page. SOUND FILE 02

The template worksheets for poems, mc lyrics, lateral thinking etc. are also on line and can be used for any type of sound in the Sounds Database.

Poem Writing

Word Base 1

Word Base 2

Making Crosswords

Lateral Thinking 1

Lateral Thinking 2

MC Lyrics

FREE MATHS RESOURCES - ages 5-18

The Maths area on the site here is quite large, and many of you will already have used the free worksheets on line here for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, along with numbers 1-1000 (can be enlarged to A3 for the classroom wall) and numbers 1-100 (both these two suprisingly popular).

We have links throughout the Maths area (in the index pages for the various Key Stages) to the NRICH resources provided by Cambridge University (these were notified to us in the very early days of building this area) and these look to have been massively expanded in recent years, with extensive Early Years Foundation Activities as well as the Primary and Secondary resources.

Part of the reason for including Maths resources in this Newsletter was to flag up the extraordinary "Maths Practice Books and Lesson Plans" - a free resource created through a collaboration between the Peto Institute in Budapest, Hungary, and the Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching at Exeter University, England. The "Primary" set covers the whole year's work for years 1 to 6 - copymasters, practice books and lesson plans (175 lessons for *each* year from Year 1 to Year 6) - beautifully-constructed worksheets - there are also 60 lessons for the Reception year.

KEY STAGE 1 *** ages 4-7

KEY STAGE 2 *** ages 7-11

KEY STAGE 3 *** ages 11-14

GCSE *** ages 14-16

ADVANCED *** ages 16-18

This is quite the most comprehensive and practical guide to learning Maths we have ever seen on the Internet - and it's free (for non-profit-making purposes anyway, see the more specific information on our Key Stage index pages and on the CIMT site). There are extensive resources from ages 11-16 (including GCSE) and the A Level resources appear to cover the full spectrum of Pure Mathematics, Statistics, Mechanics, Further Pure Mathematics, Further Statistics and Discrete Mathematics. Just awesome. Links to all these free resources (subdivided by Key Stage and/or Yeargroup) are available from the Key Stage index pages above.

COUNTRIES A-Z

*

Afghanistan

Akrotiri

Ĺland Islands

Albania

Algeria

American Samoa

Andorra

Angola

Anguilla

Antarctica

Antigua and Barbuda

Argentina

Armenia

Aruba

Ascension Island

The huge "Countries A-Z" area was created to link together the two main wings of the site, schools and free-educational-resources, and Children's Charities and projects-helping-children worldwide. To begin with we created a huge alphabetical map (brief excerpt above), its colours chosen to help children easily locate countries and territories in the same geographical region (eg Eurasia has different greens for countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East; different shades of orange are used for Central, North and South America, etc.)

Below is shown Russia as a random sample of how the countries linked-to from the map have links out to different areas of the site - primarily schools and projects, but also to factors like Statistics from the CIA World Factbook.

country code dial language/s currency education help overview maps capital Russia RU 7 Russian + others banknotes schools projects statistics * Moscow

Many of the original "map" links were dispensed with when the site linked to, randomly changed its structure - accordingly we have compromised with the regional map links to the left of each country on the "schools" pages - maps located at the ever-dependable Perry-Castańeda Library Map Collection at The University of Texas at Austin - they've gained a "donate" button since we last visited and are hoping to put many more of their maps on line, if donations help enable this.

ACCELERATED LEARNING

Michael Tipper started writing monthly articles for the "Memory Improvement and Learning Information" area of the site as long ago as 1998, winning a Silver Medal in the World Memory Championships later that year.

In February 2000 the Mind Sports Olympiad awarded Michael's webpages here the "GrandMaster Link Award", with the description: "the most popular link in our entire database" ..... "written by one of the real experts in the field".

BOOK REVIEWS

MNEMONICS

AMAZING BRAIN

GREAT MINDS

MEMORY TRAINING

Links are shown above to the five main areas - a *huge* resource of information - you'll also find areas on Mind Mapping, Speed Reading and more, as well as a selection of Feature Articles on everything from "How to memorise long pieces of text" to "The Top Ten Study Tips Of All Time".

Over 70,000 people have been present at his live presentations and training, and more than half a million children and young people have benefited from programmes he has developed for schools and colleges. Michael does a lot of work with high-level businesses and institutions and is a founder member of the Professional Speakers Association.

STATE COUNTIES OF THE USA

When we were first building Schools Interchange, we had great difficulties locating schools' websites in Alaska and Kentucky, and eventually discovered more about "school boards" and "counties". The Alaska schools page here shows the original listings that were made.

We were intrigued by the sheer volume of USA counties - England with just 50-100 ish counties (governments here are forever changing boundaries) for around 50 million people, whereas the USA has over 3000 counties for 300 million people (so an average of about 10,000 people per county). Exploring became a fascinating journey across the real fabric of America.

AL

AK

AZ

AR

CA

CO

CT

DE

DC

FL

GA

HI

ID

IL

IN

IA

KS

KY

LA

ME

MD

MA

MI

MN

MS

MO

MT

NE

NV

NH

NJ

NM

NY

NC

ND

OH

OK

OR

PA

RI

SC

SD

TN

TX

UT

VT

VA

WA

WV

WI

WY

ix

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

At the top of the counties page for each individual state is a link to the State administration, and near the foot are links to Mayors and City websites, and to background info about the state (capital, motto, flower, flag, stuff for kids, etc.).

Not all USA state counties have websites (though most do, now) and we have created a separate area on the South Dakota page for the reservations of The Great Sioux Nation which, according to Wikipedia, collectively cover 55,700,000 acres (87,000 square miles, or 225,000 km²), representing just 2.3% of the total area of the United States.

AESOP'S FABLES

Aesop's Fables are said to have been created by a slave called Aesop as long ago as the 6th Century BC - over 2500 *years* ago. Yet many of them hold just as true today as they did all that time ago.

We've created an area on the site here for these wonderful moral tales and 220 stories are now on line. One man's store of wisdom that has echoed down the years.

Among the most popular stories are "The Fox and the Goat", "The Slave and the Lion", "The Fox and the Crow" and "The Miser".

CRISIS APPEALS

With so much upheaval in today's world and with millions of families uprooted from their homes, let alone the ongoing sequences of natural disasters, the agencies providing help to displaced families and children require ever-increasing levels of support.

We have now added to the CRISIS APPEALS area a link to Shelterbox, which provides disaster relief tents, thermal blankets and groundsheets, water storage and purification equipment, solar lamps, cooking utensils, a basic tool kit, mosquito nets and children's activity pack.

The Crisis Appeals area includes links to a number of organizations including volunteer Search-and-Rescue Teams, Relief Personnel for Humanitarian Aid Agencies and Emergency Airlifts - if you're looking to support organizations already working on the ground in a specific country there are likely to be further links from the relevant country in the projects helping children area of the site here.

INSTANT CLEAN WATER

We have also now added to the Crisis Appeals area the "LIFESAVER®", which is described as "the world's first water filter to remove all bacteria, viruses, cysts, parasites and waterborne pathogens from water".

LIFESAVER® Systems, a British company, was founded in 2007 by Michael Pritchard, who was inspired to invent the company's first product, the LIFESAVER® bottle, after seeing the tragic waste of life and serious problems caused by the lack of safe drinking water in the wake of the tsunami in December 2004.

The best page we found on the LIFESAVER® Systems website that illustrates their products is here - however their site is one of the hardest-to-navigate that we have ever encountered, so the best way to contact them for detailed information is probably by phone (their site shows a Colchester-based phone number [01206]). The site also features the Lifesaver C2 - "up to 2 million litres of clean, sterile water".

The Project HappyChild Directory

Many of you will know that the main reason for building this website originally was to publicise the Children's Charities in the Project HappyChild Directory.

As a growing number of free educational resources became added to this site we asked visitors who found the resources useful, to support the featured charities, if they were in a financial position to do so. Sixteen years later the educational resources have expanded more than we would ever have thought possible, and we are grateful for any continuing support any of you are able to offer to the Charities in the Directory and/or those that appear in the international pages for "Projects helping Children".

Donations from individuals or fundraising by schools or organizations help to make possible the wide range of help for children that these invaluable Charities provide, and your support for the many fundraising events and activities they organise is also much welcomed :) the main ongoing Events Calendar is here.

HOW TO RUN A SUCCESSFUL CAR WASH FUNDRAISER

Our enduring thanks to Lance Winslow III, "The Car Wash Guy", who wrote the book "How to Run a Successful Car Wash Fundraiser". Lance contacted Project HappyChild and gave us permission to serialise this book (free) on our site, back in the early days - it is still one of our most popular pages, particularly in the summer :)

Whatever you're able to raise money for, you know it will make a difference - children need to be helped and protected in so many different ways, and whether you raise money for an organization featured on the site here, or a crisis appeal, or simply for a local organization or initiative that benefits children - that's fine by us. We probably won't ever hear about many of the ways people help but it's good to know that something is being given back, somewhere.

And finally ...

This is probably the longest Newsletter that has ever been written, here :)   but hopefully it will reach everyone on our mailing list this time and bring all of you up to date on what's been happening here.

As many of you will know, the priority now has to be finding some way to forward-fund this website indefinitely, so that it can stay on line "in perpetuity". We have always run "on a shoestring" (pagebuilding is done free) but we do need to make some sort of practical provision for the future, ongoing. We had hoped that the "referrals" link would bring in enough income to cover Internet costs but this hasn't happened (a huge proportion of our visitors are from outside the UK), so I need to go away and focus on rescuing the finances :)

All e-mails sent here will be read :D   but probably the only ones that will be replied to will be those offering help with translating or checking new languages, or offering "elements" content for the science (3D Gridbuilding). We're still hopeful of getting the rest of the wordsearch puzzles finally generated and on line, but again this may have to wait until a future date.

I'd just like to thank all of you for your support and for publicising the Project HappyChild website over the last 16 years :D   all this could never have happened without you.

Best regards,

Penny.

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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.