Arianna Huffington: She Was Right

Arianna Huffington: She Was Right

“By helping young children know and relate to the soul-making aspects of the natural world, we connect them to enduring sources of strength, wonder and joy”
Rachel Carson, 1956, “Help your child to wonder”

The full article can be read from the link above

"Fifty years ago, a marine biologist named Rachel Carson began publishing a series of articles in The New Yorker, sounding the alarm about the dangers of exposure to chemicals and the failure of the chemical industry and government regulators to protect people from those dangers. Later collected in the book Silent Spring, Carson's prescient insights are the subject of an anniversary feature this week by HuffPost's environmental reporter Lynne Peeples. She delivers not only a tribute to Carson but a reminder that her work is more relevant than ever.

Despite Carson's warnings, our leaders are still not doing nearly enough to regulate the potentially harmful chemicals we're exposed to every day. As Lynne notes, more than 80,000 chemicals currently used in our country have never been fully tested, so we don't even know how damaging they might be to humans or to the environment. And as Harvard Medical School's Eric Chivian explains, when it comes to determining if a chemical is dangerous, the U.S. does not put the burden of proof on those who introduce it; that burden is on the watchdogs to prove the danger, after the substance has already been introduced. Which is to say, we have it backward. We'd rather perform autopsies than biopsies. And it's yet another instance in which we're failing to keep up with the rest of the world.

Our low level of concern and urgency is especially shocking when you consider the high level of potential to harm our most precious resource, our children. Decades after Carson wrote in Silent Spring that harm from chemical exposures begins in the womb, scientists learned she was right. We now know that early exposure to toxic chemicals can impact a child for his entire life, even if the effects take decades to manifest. Even though Carson's key points have been widely affirmed by the scientific community, the pace of progress has been remarkably -- unacceptably -- slow, in large part because, as one expert tells Lynne Peeples, "things are far more complicated chemically than they were in Carson's time." And thus, harder to regulate.

Meanwhile, we are playing a dangerous game of catch-up. Just this year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that any level of lead in a child's bloodstream is dangerous and can cause brain damage, no matter how small the amount. Today, "more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease" -- yet another quote from Carson that remains tragically true today.

For some, the signature image that shows how real the threat is to our environment is the disappearing snowcap atop Mt. Kilimanjaro. For me, it's the image of millions of kids suffering from asthma caused by the explosion of toxins in our environment, kids who are afraid to go out and play without bringing along their inhalers. But instead of a hair-on-fire response, our approach has been more like wait-and-see.

By highlighting Carson's work, Lynne Peeples reminds us that when it comes to the explosion of chemicals in our world, tomorrow is today. And what we do today will deeply affect our tomorrows -- and the tomorrows of our children.

What’s Black and Blue and Happy All Over? Ask Your Child’s Doctor « FreeRangeKids

What’s Black and Blue and Happy All Over? Ask Your Child’s Doctor « FreeRangeKids

Love this piece from Lenore at Free Range Kids. It has a direct correlation to the type of, and venue for, childrens' play currently, i.e. sitting in front of a screen inside. Regardless of the fact that I know recent trends have taken a toll on childrens' play I was still shocked? at how such changes have flow on effects even for large multinational chemical companies. If you like this piece, I would recommend you subscribe to Free Range Kids.

"Hi Folks — I love this exchange on Facebook about kids and bruises! Wrote one mom:

I brought my 5 year old son to the dentist yesterday and she was amazed to

see that he has scratches and bruises. She said she never really sees those kinds of small injuries on kids nowadays because they play inside all day. What is happening to childhood in this country that seeing a scratch or small bruise on a 5 year olds shins is something out of the ordinary? When I was a kid my knees were always scraped and my shins were always bruised because that was just part of playing outside.

Wrote another:
I hate to admit this, making myself look neurotic, but when my son was 2, when he really started getting brave, his little legs were covered in bruises/knots/you name it. He had a few on his arms, but his legs looked (to me) awful, and I obsessed myself into thinking something must be terribly wrong–surely he had some kind of bleeding issue! A blood disorder! I finally got up the nerve to take him to the pediatrician (had to steel myself for the inevitable bad news, of course), and she looked at him, and looked at me, and said, “He has busy little two-year-old boy legs, and if he’s lucky you’re going to let them stay that way.” She also advised that I chill out before I drive us both (all?) crazy. Best advice I’ve ever gotten–and he is, to this day, covered in bruises and scratches and who knows what, because he rides his bike and jumps off everything he sees, and thank goodness he can. – Paula Kiihnl King

Wrote me:

This reminds me of the time I spoke to an advertising exec at Tide and he said kids’ clothes aren’t getting that dirty anymore. Bad for laundry detergent, bad for kids! – L

PlayPumps Provide Water and Fun -- National Geographic Kids

PlayPumps Provide Water and Fun -- National Geographic Kids


I came across this article whilst researching water pumps and thought what a novel idea. Then I read the article and gained additional insight from those websites and blogs linked below. I can't speak for anyone other than myself, but in Australia we really have it good. Water is literally on tap, available to anyone, anywhere for free.

If you want further information try Playpumps or Water for the People. If you want to know how hard it is to create and maintain a humanitarian project like this try Aidwatcher and Owen in Malawi and State of the planet.

 

The full article can be read from the link above

"For kids in many rural parts of Africa, the colorful PlayPump is the first playground equipment they’ve ever seen. When they give a push and jump onboard for their first ride, smiles of wonder break out on their faces.

The fun of whirling in a circle is just part of the amazement. This incredible invention doesn’t just change their playtime, it changes their lives.As the merry-go-round spins, it pumps clean water up from deep underground and stores it in a huge tank. People are welcome to come and help themselves to the water.

In rural Africa, clean water is a luxury. Most people don’t have plumbing in their homes. Instead, they often must walk long distances to wells and haul heavy containers of water back.

Patricia Molope, 17, explains that before her South African village got a PlayPump, people would pay a taxi driver to take them to a far-off well. “Sometimes the taxi drivers were busy, and we would have to go without bathing in order to save our water. It was too far to walk there. But now we have our own clean water in our village, and life is better.”

The exhausting chore of carrying water traditionally falls to women and girls. Hauling water for miles—and hours—each day is such a big job, it sometimes prevents girls from being able to attend school.

Thanks to the PlayPump, getting water is quick and easy—and even boys join in. The pumps have become a center of social activity where kids and adults gather to visit while collecting water.

Two sides of each tank carry educational messages that remind people about good health practices like battling germs through hand-washing. The other two sides carry advertisements, which help pay for the pump's upkeep.

So far, more than 800 PlayPumps are operating in schools and communities in four African countries, providing water for almost two million people. The pumps are made by a South African company called Outdoor Fabrication and Steelworks. Another company, Roundabout Outdoor, trains local teams who maintain the pumps. Each system costs U.S. $14,000.

Twelve-year-old Siyabulisiwe Khumalo lives in a South African community called Diepsloot. She says, “I have seen many kinds of water pumps where I grew up in the farmlands, but never one that stores the water. When I grow up, I want to be an inventor so I can invent clever things like the PlayPump that will help my community.”

Fast Facts:
* Many toilets use more water in one flush than most rural families in Africa have for one day of cleaning, cooking, drinking, and bathing.
* The average distance an African villager must walk to a water source is five miles (eight kilometers).
*A five-gallon (19-liter) container can weigh about 40 pounds (18 kilograms), and many women and girls suffer injuries carrying so much weight every day.
* A child dies somewhere in the world every 15 seconds from a water-borne illness."

Peru's ambitious laptop program gets mixed grades

Peru's ambitious laptop program gets mixed grades - Technology & science - Tech and gadgets - Back to School - msnbc.com

Really sad.  If you've read my prior postings you would realise that I'm really dubious about the blind utilisation of tech for tech's sake in Australian schools. However in this instance, with this Project, I did hope (I was still dubious about the research and reasoning behind the project ) that it would be of benefit to a generation who may be able to utilise it to elevate themselves and their country out of the poverty cycle. How strange that nearly the exact problems are also being suffered in Australian schools because of the similar,"introduce the technology and be damned attitude". If your only reason for doing something is to appear to be doing something  -DON'T DO IT! ". Stop, plan, consult, don't allow panicked political imperative create greater problems.   

The full article can be read from the link above

"Peru's equipping of more than 800,000 public schoolchildren in this rugged Andean nation with low-cost laptops ranks among the world's most ambitious efforts to leverage digital technology in the fight against poverty.

Yet five years in, there are serious doubts about whether the largest single deployment in the One Laptop Per Child ......was worth the more than $200 million that Peru's government spent.

Ill-prepared rural teachers and administrators were too often unable to fathom much less teach with the machines, software bugs didn't get fixed, Internet access was almost universally absent and cultural disconnects kept kids from benefitting from the machines.

"In essence, what we did was deliver the computers without preparing the teachers," said Sandro Marcone, the Peruvian education official who now runs the program.

He believes the missteps may have actually widened the gap between children able to benefit from the computers and those ill-equipped to do so, he says, in a country whose public education system is rated among the world's most deficient.

....OLPC laptops, which are rugged and energy efficient and run an open-source variant of the Linux operating system, are in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Mongolia and Haiti, and even in the United States and Australia. Uruguay, a compact South American nation of 3.5 million people, is the only country that has fully embraced the concept and given every elementary school child and teacher an XO laptop, as the machines are called. No country, however, bought nearly as many as Peru.

"It's a really great idea," said Jeff Patzer, a software engineer with a degree from the University of California at Berkeley ....... "It's just seems like there was some stuff that wasn't thought through quite enough."

...."There is little solid evidence regarding the effectiveness of this program," they said in a study sharply critical of the overall OLPC initiative that was based on a 15-month study at 319 schools in small, rural Peruvian communities that got laptops......"The magical thinking that mere technology is enough to spur change, to improve learning, is what this study categorically disproves," co-author Eugenio Severin of Chile told The Associated Press.....The study found no increased math or language skills, no improvement in classroom instruction quality, no boost in time spent on homework, no improvement in reading habits.
.....On the positive side, the "dramatic increase in access to computers" accelerated by about six months students' abstract reasoning, verbal fluency and speed in processing information, the report said.

...A study in Ethiopian schools by Dutch researchers from the University of Groningen, published last year in the journal Computers and Education, similarly found that OLPC laptops improved abstract reasoning.
The teachers in those schools had received extensive training in the laptops, which the researchers said introduced an "information-rich novelty" into an environment previously starved for learning material.....

What Gives You Hope These Days?

What Gives You Hope These Days?

A fantastic and hopeful article by Eric Utne, the founder of Utne Reader. I have included my highlights below.

The full article can be read from the link above

"As I’ve said in this column before, I’m afraid it may be too late to avoid the devastating effects of global climate change......This makes me rather morose from time to time. Seeing the chatty moms and bouncy kids gathered at the foot of my driveway every morning, waiting for the school bus, hits me hard—will they be able to do this a few years from now? Will anybody? Or will the cascading effects of climate disruption turn such touching scenes into distant memories?

Fortunately, just when I get the bleakest, I tend to remember the Chinese proverb, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

So I ask myself, who’s planting the world of tomorrow today? Then I start noticing that there are a lot of people doing very positive things to help us make it through the Great Disruption...

Image by Anuradha Sengupta, 

licensed under Creative Commons.

At the top of my list is Richard Louv, the longtime San Diego newspaperman and author who wrote the best-selling book, The Last Child in the Woods. I recently met Louv while he was on tour promoting his latest and possibly best book, The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age. In the book Louv argues that, “the time has come for us all to re-envision a future that puts aside scenarios of environmental and social apocalypse and instead taps into the restorative powers of the natural world.” ..... Louv offers his vision of what he calls a “new nature movement.” He writes:

Imagine a world in which all children grow up with a deep understanding of the life around them, where all of us know the animals and plants in our own backyards ... where we feel more alive. We seek a newer world where we not only conserve nature but create it where we live, work, learn, and play. Where yards and open spaces are alive with native species. Where bird migration routes are healed by human care ... where not only public land but private property, voluntarily, garden to garden to garden, is transformed, by us, into butterfly zones and then, across the country, into a homegrown, (coast to coast) national park ... where cities become incubators of bio-diversity ... where pediatricians prescribe nature ... where hospitals and prisons offer gardens that heal ... where cities produce their own energy and much of their own food. Where empty lots become community gardens ... where developers [transform] aging shopping malls into ecovillages ... where streams in cities and countryside are restored—unearthed to the daylight—their natural curves and life restored. A newer world where the point of education is not rote and drill, but wonder and awe ... where teachers take their students on field trips to nearby woods and canyons and streams and shores ... where natural history becomes as important as human history to who we are ... where children experience the joy of being in nature before they learn of its loss ... where, as a species, we no longer feel so all alone. Imagine a world in which our days are lived in the arms of mother nature, of the land and sky, water and soil, wind and sea; a newer world we seek and to which we return.

Sign me up."

What are these tablets good for?

What are these tablets good for?

Are you frickin' serious. Now after all the hoopla, Now after after all the funds have been spent, Now after all the seriously heavily laden with small print contracts have been signed with the corporations (rhymes with Snapple), Now after all the parents have scrimped and saved to get their children the latest electronic 

doodads (which they've been told are essential for their child's future learning)....... Someone in government says..... maybe they're not so essential, maybe teaching face to face doesn't alienate and isolate the children, maybe we're introducing them to computers to early.......maybe now we've altered the syllabus and committed our schools and children and economics to the introduction of these devices to children of this age and younger....maybe we should give it some...any....even a little bit of thought! 

The full article can be read from the link above

"Parents are pressuring schools into buying iPads for the classroom, despite a lack of evidence about their educational benefit, no guidelines for teaching with them, and confusion about the best apps to use.

Schools across the state are purchasing ''significant'' numbers of iPads without any real idea of their true value in the classroom, a NSW Department of Education study has found. The department is now playing catch-up, conducting research trials in public schools to better understand the educational benefits of the devices.

''This is uncharted territory and we've gone in like a bull at a gate,'' said Kristy Goodwin, who is evaluating the trials for the department. In many cases, parents are raising thousands of dollars to buy the devices for schools. The department does not have any data on how many schools have implemented iPads, and has not supplied guidelines for their use.

''Parent bodies are fund-raising to provide these resources and the research is trying to keep up,'' Dr Goodwin said. ''Parents are really driving the technology use in schools; they obviously see what their children are capable of doing [with iPads].''  REALLY? My experience is that parents generally defer to the educators opinion (or in this case the opinion forced on the educators by the Dept of ED).

Three Sydney primary schools involving 90 children and five teachers participated in the first trial last year. Teachers found the iPads enhanced learning, as students were more engaged, more motivated, better able to collaborate and could personalise their learning.

However, serious concerns emerged about the quality of educational apps available. Three-quarters of the top 100-selling educational apps on iTunes are ''drill and skill'', encouraging rote memorisation of facts, which is useful for spelling and maths.

But teachers involved in the trial found ''content creation'' apps had much greater educational benefits, because they fostered ''higher order thinking'' in students and enabled them to demonstrate what they had learnt.

''The department has concerns about the quality of some of the resources and apps currently available for students to use,'' a department spokesman said. ''Schools are currently using iPad technology to assess their educational relevance.''  That's like saying we're going to get these children to smoke so we can assess what what effect it will have on their future health. There are strict protocols for the introduction of any product to the market. Why should the idea of introducing the product to a tender age group be any different.

Dr Goodwin recommended the department establish criteria to help teachers select the best educational apps, and said there was a ''great, dire need'' for apps that were not ''drill and skill'' or games.

The department is conducting a second iPad trial to assess how different apps affect learning, what impact iPads have on teaching, and how iPads can assist special needs students. One high school, two primary schools and a special needs class are participating in this trial.

Parents will continue to have to pay out of their own pockets if they want their children using iPads at school, because the department has ''no current plans'' to introduce the devices.

In contrast, the Catholic Education Office estimates at least 60 per cent of its Sydney primary schools are using the devices, partly funded from school budgets and partly from parent fund-raising. It has just released a Mobile Learning Course for its teachers to inform their use of iPads.

The director of knowledge management and information and communications technology for the Sydney archdiocese, Doug Ashleigh, said he was ''a little bit concerned'' that the rapid uptake of iPads had outpaced understanding of how to best use them in the classroom.

''Many students have these devices at home, but when they bring them into the classroom, unless the leader in the classroom thinks about how they're going to use these … in the learning pedagogy, they won't be used as effectively.''
Parents at Banksmeadow primary were so impressed by the results of the initial iPad trial last year that they raised $15,000 to purchase 24 iPads for the school. But the principal, Cathy Lucantonio, warned the technology was not for every school.

''You really do have to be clear about what you're using them in teaching and learning, otherwise it's a waste of money,'' she said.

InsideToronto Article: Students learn ABCs of gardening - literally

InsideToronto Article: Students learn ABCs of gardening - literally

The full article can be read from the link above

Students at Clinton Street Public School will get an education on a wide variety of plant life - from aster to zebragrass - with the official opening of the school's ABC Learning Garden.

The garden consists of 26 plants, one for each letter of the alphabet, and will give youngsters a chance to reconnect with nature and learn about flora.

The plants were selected by students from Grades 4 to 6, who researched a variety of native plant species and chose the ones they wanted to see in the garden.

With help from Ryerson University nursing students, students from OISE and community garden volunteer Marjorie Shu, they have spent this year planting and tending to the garden, marking its official opening with the planting of the garlic bulbs - the last of the 26 plants to take root - on Tuesday, May 22.

Clinton Street vice-principal Danielle Hyles-Rainford said the garden was made possible through a $500 Evergreen Foundation grant, donations from the parent council through Clinton's School Council Wish List Fund and help from others in the community.

"It's part of Clinton being an eco school and part of the vibrant community initiative," she said. "What we want is an enrichment in kids' knowledge of how to garden and we have one class that's keen on vermiculture and how worms help as a natural composter."

While the school's Grade 4 gifted class helped lead the planting, Clinton Street student Sabbrina Husn Ortiz said the planting of the garden was a total school effort. "All the classes pitched in to clean outside of the garden and it was hard work," she said.

The school's enthusiasm for the garden has not waned over the course of the school year. Students remain excited about maintenance and upkeep, due in part to the fact they were given a chance to take ownership of the site from the very beginning. The school has even appointed eco-monitors, volunteers who will monitor the garden and plant new plants when necessary.

"They got to vote on (the plants) after learning about a bunch of different ones, so they know more about plants than what's in the garden," said OISE student Jennifer Thomas, who offered support throughout the process. "They're excited to see the plants they picked."

Shu said the garden will help the students overcome 'nature deficit disorder' by getting them to connect with the outdoors instead of spending all their time in front of computer screens. "We want to teach them there's a living energy in nature and they need to honour it, work with it and connect with it," she said.

The garden, located in the front of the school, promises to serve as a valuable teaching tool for years to come.
"The kids have been working on this since the start of the year and they're still really enjoying it," Hyles-Rainford said.