This delightful heartwarming book tells the story of Sidney and Harry, two Groks who live in the land of Binnee-Boo-Bok. Harry is big and strong and the best at Grok games. Sidney is small and no good at all. But when an accident befalls Harry, the Groks soon discover being small can be a good thing! The entire story rhymes and the striking illustrations ensure children will want to read its positive message over and over again!
Friday, May 13, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
The Bully Project: A Year in the Life of America's Bullying Crisis
This year, over 18 million American kids will be bullied, making it the most common form of violence young people in the U.S. experience. Directed by Sundance- and Emmy-award winning filmmaker, Lee Hirsch, The Bully Project is a beautifully cinematic, character-driven documentary—at its heart are those with the most at stake and whose stories each represent a different facet of this bullying crisis.
Following five kids and families over the course of a school year, the film confronts bullying's most tragic outcomes, including the stories of two families who've lost children to suicide and a mother who waits to learn the fate of her 14 --year-old daughter, incarcerated after bringing a gun on her school bus. With rare access to the Sioux City Community School District, the film also gives an intimate glimpse into school busses, classrooms, cafeterias and even principles offices, offering insight into the often-cruel world of children, as teachers, administrators and parents struggle to find answers.
While the stories examine the dire consequences of bullying, they also give testimony to the courage and strength of the victims of bullying and seek to inspire real changes in the way we deal with bullying as parents, teachers, children, and in society as a whole. Through the power of these stories, The Bully Project aims to be a catalyst for change and to turn the tide on an epidemic of violence that has touched every community in the United States—and far beyond.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Friday, May 6, 2011
Puppy Love and Bullies and a Bow-Tied Teacher
Ed Harris, center, plays a middle-school teacher in 1965 in “That's What I Am,” written and directed by Mike Pavone.
You can trust Ed Harris to locate the essence of every character he portrays. And in “That’s What I Am,” Mike Pavone’s righteous reflection on bullying and tolerance, Mr. Harris’s depiction of a saintly, soft-spoken, bow-tie-wearing middle-school teacher lends the movie a moral weight it probably couldn’t have summoned had another actor played the role.
Set in 1965 in a small Southern California town, “That’s What I Am” is a sentimental Hallmark-style movie (part after-school special, part “Wonder Years” offshoot) whose narrator, Andy Nichol (voiced by an uncredited actor who sounds like Greg Kinnear), looks back on his middle-school experience. His beloved teacher, Mr. Simon (Mr. Harris), is first seen reading to a class from Mark Twain’s “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.” This choice of literature sets him up as a martyrlike figure.
Later in the movie, when a bully retaliates against Mr. Simon’s discipline by spreading unfounded rumors about his sexuality, the teacher, a widower, refuses out of principle to deny the rumors. At this point you wonder if “That’s What I Am” will turn into a movie about a vicious, small-town witch hunt, but it is too timid to go there. It is more interested in the buildup to Andy’s first kiss with Mary Clear (Mia Rose Frampton), a kindhearted, more experienced classmate.
The movie’s depiction of the savage pecking order of school is mild; the children, obsessed with “cooties,” seem naïve even by 1965 standards. The principal outcast, Stanley (Alexander Walters), a k a Big G (for the ginger hue of his hair), is a tall, gawky boy with big ears who comports himself with unshakable dignity when faced with peer-group persecution. The 12-year-old Andy (Chase Ellison) learns to respect Big G after Mr. Simon assigns them to collaborate on a project.
Because “That’s What I Am” is a production of WWE Studios, it slips in a wrestling star, Randy Orton, as the lying bully’s rabidly homophobic father.
At heart “That’s What I Am” is really a gentle, earnest illustration of a slogan that Mr. Simon submits in a contest to come up with a solution to world peace in 25 words or less. His entry, which he scrawls on the blackboard, reads “Human dignity + compassion = peace.” It wins him a flashy car.
“That’s What I Am” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). Its cursory discussion of homosexuality may offend certain viewers.THAT’S WHAT I AM
Written and directed by Mike Pavone; director of photography, Kenneth Zunder; edited by Marc Pollon; music by James Raymond; production design by Raymond Pumilia; costumes by Claire Breaux; produced by Denise Chamian; released by Samuel Goldwyn Films and WWE Studios. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
WITH: Ed Harris (Mr. Simon), Chase Ellison (Andy Nichol), Molly Parker (Sherri), Daniel Roebuck (Jim), Randy Orton (Ed Freel), Daniel Yelsky (Norman), Alexander Walters (Big G), Mia Rose Frampton (Mary Clear) and Amy Madigan (Principal Kelner).
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Don’t let what you can’t do stop you from doing what you can do. - John Wooden
... the first person ever enshrined as the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player (1961) and as a coach (1973).
Monday, May 2, 2011
Troye Sivan’s FOR THEM Project
Troye is talented singer and actor who you may have seen in the movie X-MEN Origins Wolverine that hit theaters in May 2009, he played the young Hue Jackman’s character Wolverine. He also recently starred in Spud with John Cleese which is due to hit theaters this winter.
The purpose of creating this project is to raise awareness that there are over 100 million homeless children living on the streets around the world.
You can make a difference right now to help these kids who can't help themselves anymore, then share this video with your friends and family.
http://www.troyesivan.com
http://www.kidzhelpingkids.org/projects.html
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Teachers worried as girls go top of the class for cyber-bullying
http://www.independent.co.ukTeachers will today call for an investigation into rising levels of poor behaviour among girls in the
classroom. The girls, they argue, are more likely to resort to cyber-bullying – the form of bullying utilising the internet and mobile phones that is worrying school leaders.
A survey by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) reveals that half the teachers believed girls' behaviour had got worse during the past two years. One in five thought it was now more challenging than boys.
Teachers interviewed for the survey accused girls of being "sneakier" than boys in the way they misbehaved.They were also more adept at using modern social media such as Facebook to bully their fellow pupils.
The survey of 859 teachers in both primary and secondary schools and further education colleges said girls' misbehaviour centred around isolating fellow pupils from a friendship group, spreading rumours and making snide comments.
"Girls spread rumours and fallouts last a long time," a 34-year-old teacher from Reading told researchers. "Boys tend to sort it out fairly quickly."
Another teacher drew attention to a rise in the use of social media to bully pupils. "There is a lot of cyber bullying particularly via MSN and Facebook – this is mainly girls," said the teacher, who is a member of the senior management team of an English secondary school.
The finding follows a one-day strike by teachers at a high school in Lancashire – Darwen High School – earlier this month over pupil behaviour.
Teachers complained that pupils were making videos and taking photographs in class with their smartphones and then posting them on websites such as YouTube.
The teachers were particularly unhappy that senior management did not back them up when they confiscated pupils' phones.
Today's motion at the ATL conference calls for more support for teachers in instilling discipline.
One teacher from Weston-super-Mare told researchers that girls were also becoming more violent. "Girls are definitely getting more violent with gangs of girls in school who are getting worse than gangs of boys,"she said.
However, a primary school teacher from Bedfordshire added: "Boys are generally more physical and their behaviour is more noticeable.
"Girls are often sneakier about misbehaving, they often say nasty things which end up disrupting the lesson just as much as the boys as other children get upset and can't focus on their work."
The teacher added. "They [the girls] are usually the ones who refuse to comply with instructions."
The feeling was, though – despite rising levels of aggressive behaviour among girls – that boys were still more likely to show physical aggression. "Staff get ground down daily by the chatting and messing around, which disrupts lessons for other pupils and takes the pleasure out of teaching," said Mary Bousted, general secretary of ATL.
"Even more worrying is the physical aggression – most often among boys but also among some girls – which puts other pupils and staff at risk."
The union's annual conference in Liverpool will today hear calls to carry out an investigation into the number of girls being excluded from school. Delegates will be told it is an increasing problem.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Support Candle Light Books
Accepting children's books for elementary schools in the philippines, where colored books are scarce.Please email ettonim@yahoo.com for your queries and book donations.
Aklatan Pambata is a reading center in the heart of Quezon City. Operated by volunteers, it opens its doors to the neighborhood children every Saturday mornings.
Here are the pictures of the books donated by Gigi Bermejo-Lacson and Susan Sy-Cua.
Visit: http://candlelightbooks.blogspot.com
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Roc On: Gussie Roc, Renaissance Woman, 16
By Laura Adibe
She is a published writer, an accomplished musician, the recipient of a Golden Gavel Award from the Princeton Model Congress, and she's only 16 years old.
Gussie Roc is not only quickly establishing herself as a young writer to watch, but she is also a model ambassador of goodwill who devotes her time to important social causes.
BlackVoices.com recently caught up with Roc, who spoke about what motivates her and why other teens should never give up on their dreams.
BV: You were named one of the Best Teen Writers in 2010 by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. If you had to name your top three favorite writers, who would they be?
BV: Favorite books?
BV: You write, publish, play the viola and you participate in humanitarian work. When you're not doing all this, what other things do you like to do for fun?
BV: The work that you do around AIDS is extremely important. How did you get involved with Ubuntu?
They support these children who are often times really alone in the world. I was really inspired by this cause and just started volunteering at the office. Me and one of my friends started raising money for AIDS Walk at school, and we raised thousands of dollars.
We realized it was successful and so we went back and we did it again. It was just really rewarding. We met one of the kids who was helped by this organization, and toured her through our school. Just the feeling of being able to give back and see your work being successful is quite amazing.
BV: You're 16 years old and have done so much already. What advice do you have for other teens who might feel limited in what they can do because of their age?
BV: Do you have any (s)heroes?
BV: Where do you see yourself 10 years from now?
GR: Hopefully, writing for a magazine or newspaper. Journalism is a good sum of everything that I like to do.
BV: Anything you haven't tackled yet that you feel you want to tackle?
GR: My ultimate goal is to win an Academy Award for a documentary.
http://www.bvblackspin.com
Friday, April 22, 2011
Demi Lovato: "I Was Bullied Because I Was Fat"
http://www.usmagazine.com
Demi Lovato continues to open up about the "emotional issues" that landed her in rehab last November.
VIDEO: Demi opens up about the "darkest time" of her life
In an interview with ABC's Robin Roberts, the 18-year-old singer-actress said childhood bullying contributed to her eating disorder.
"I literally didn't know why they were being so mean to me," she said of her childhood tormentors. "And when I would ask them why, they would just say, 'Well, you're fat.' I was bullied because I was fat. And then a few months later I developed an eating disorder, and that's kind of what I've been dealing with every since."
Lovato was "compulsively overeating when [she] was 8 years old," and said for the past 10 years, she's "had a really unhealthy relationship with food."The star addressed one of her lowest points: when she physically struck Alex Welch, one of her backup dancers, in November 2010. (After the incident, Lovato pulled out of the Camp Rock 2 Tour with the Jonas Brothers and checked into rehab.)
"I take 100 percent full responsibility for that. I feel horrible. [She] was my friend," she said. Lovato's behavior caused her family and management team to hold an intervention. "They sat me down and said, 'You can't live like this.' And the only way that you're going to get the help that you need is to go in-patient to a treatment center. And that's exactly what I did."Photo credit: Jordan Strauss Wireimage.com
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Foster kids tell their stories in their own words.
Posted by: Scott Coppersmith
http://www.myfoxla.com/
Change a Child's Life: Michael: MyFoxLA.com
(myFOXla.com) - This video of Michael, created by Children's Action Network, is part of a series called "This is Me" which is devoted to telling the stories of foster youth waiting for adoptive homes in their own words.
There are more than 129,000 foster children in the United States who need a place to call home. It is our hope that by raising awareness about the youth and sharing their hopes and dreams, we can help them find permanent loving families.
Children's Action Network
Children's Action Network used the power of the entertainment community to increase awareness about children's issues and to make them a top priority in everyday life. CAN is currently dedicated to finding homes for the children in the United States who are waiting for an adoptive family and improving outcomes for children in foster care.
We invite you to watch the videos and find out more about foster care adoption by calling Children's Action Network at 800-525-6789.
Visit Children's Action Network on the Web at www.childrensactionnetwork.org.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Teens rally against bullying
http://www.wcsh6.com
PORTLAND, Maine (NEWS CENTER) -- A group of teenagers, educators, advocates and lawmakers took a stand against bullying Saturday.Friday was the National Day of Silence, when teens across the country took an oath of silence to honor their fellow students who are bullied because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The next day, they broke that silence with an anti-bullying rally in Monument Square.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Girl Talk
Patrik Jonsson for The Christian Science Monitor
Once a week, the middle-schoolers at the private Atlanta Girls School go to a unique homeroom session where chatter trumps study.
The get-together is Girl Talk, part of a nonprofit movement where teens besieged daily by the trappings of consumer culture, high-tech gossip gizmos, and "mean girl" mentalities talk to older girls about how to get beyond what seems to them to be a life-and-death drama buzzing around them.
"We mainly talk about cliques and how to deal with mean people," says Jessica Johnson, who joined the Girl Talk program as a middle-schooler and is now one of the leaders at the school. "It's so much better that we talk to them because we're people they can relate to, and they say, 'Oh, you're not centuries older than me; you understand cyberbullying and Facebook.' "
The chat session at the school is one incarnation of a national peer-to-peer mentoring program led by a 23-year-old from Atlanta, Haley Kilpatrick. She has turned a high school revelation and $13,000 of her own cash into a groundbreaking nonprofit group that now reaches 34,000 girls in 43 states and four countries.
The program aims to foster leadership qualities among high school girls at the same time they wield a positive influence on younger, middle school girls.
News reports of the sometimes tragic outcomes of cyberbullying have reinforced the need for answers. Some girls (and boys) live a lonely and unhappy existence in middle school, between the safety of childhood and the freedom of adulthood.
That dynamic became all too clear to Ms. Kilpatrick at age 15, when she was teased and bullied after moving from a public school to the tony Deerfield-Windsor School in Albany, Ga. She started Girl Talk at Deerfield-Windsor in 2002 after watching her younger sister go through many of the same vexations she had faced.
"For middle school girls, everything is an immediate crisis," Kilpatrick says. "So my thought was, if we could help these girls find a meaning and a purpose in middle school, then maybe they wouldn't make bad choices later on."
Since then, Girl Talk has become one of the fastest-growing nonprofits in the country. Girl Talk has received coverage in CosmoGIRL!, Glamour, and Self magazines, and Kilpatrick has appeared on national morning TV shows.
In 2007, Kilpatrick channeled her sense of mission – and, her friends say, her prodigious multitasking skills – into making Girl Talk a full-time nonprofit effort.
Along the way, she turned down corporate sponsorships from clothing and cosmetic firms. If Girl Talk had accepted the sponsorships, she says, "I realized that we'd be sending a mixed message, as we're talking about body image to these girls."
Her stick-to-your-guns strategy paid off. Shortly after that, Atlanta investment fund manager Ron Bell met with Kilpatrick and put an envelope on the table: It had a donation check for $50,000, enough to kick-start a major expansion of Girl Talk.
Named in 2010 as one of Atlanta's "Power 30 Under 30," Kilpatrick – with her straight blond hair and high boots – looks every bit a prep school alumna.
But that image is deceiving, her friends say. She still spends enough time with girls to throw around teen phrases like "I love your guts" that befuddle fellow adults.
"Haley was born to help others, and she devotes her entire life to helping others, not for the credit, not for money, clearly, but because it is all that is acceptable to her," says Kara Friedman, a middle school adviser at Holy Innocents Episcopal School in north Atlanta.
Girl Talk succeeds, Kilpatrick says, by giving younger girls a chance to hang out with their idols a few grades ahead of them. And because it's free. Curriculum, promotion, and salary costs come to about $4 per girl, money raised by Kilpatrick and a small team of co-workers.
Girl Talk provides a curriculum of 100 lesson plans, but it is its approach – talking about a relevant topic each week while imposing a strict no-names, no-mean-talk policy – that tripled the size of the program at Holy Innocents, where about a third of the girls participate, Ms. Friedman says.
Research shows that mentors, even those who are just a few years older, can have a powerful impact on girls. Teenagers who have active mentors in their lives, for example, are 46 percent less likely to use drugs and 52 percent less likely to skip school, according to one recent study.
"[A]t this age peers become so much more important than parents, and I think that's probably why [Girl Talk] is successful," says Pat Wolfe, an expert on adolescent brain development in Napa, Calif.
"When you're moving from middle school to high school, you're going into a situation where you're not sure what the rules are: You're not sure whether you'll have friends, or if you look OK, or if you'll fit in," Ms. Wolfe says. "Anything you can do to help the girls feel less threatened" benefits them, she says.
That includes talking face to face, not just phone texting.
It's all about "shaping these young women into being the leaders of tomorrow, and being the women who will ultimately change the world," Kilpatrick says.
Copyright © 2010 The Christian Science Monitor (www.CSMonitor.com). All rights reserved.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
CNN Heroes: Yohannes Gebregeorgis
Ethiopia native brings free public libraries and literacy programs to thousands of children in his homeland.
CNN link, HERE, and the for the video, click here
Friday, April 8, 2011
Take The Pledge!
This anti-bullying pledge was created collaboratively between Bullying.org and Family Channel.
bullying.org
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
Facts About Bullying
-only one in four children report that teachers intervene in bullying situations, while seven in ten teachers believe they always intervene most bullying occurs close to adults.
-bullying is reduced in a school if the principal is committed to reducing bullying. -(Charach et al., 1995)
-85% of bullying episodes occur in the context of a peer group -(Atlas and Pepler, 1997, Craig and Pepler, 1997)
-83% of students indicate that watching bullying makes them feel uncomfortable. -(Pepler et al., 1997)
-bullying stops in less than 10 seconds, most of the time when peers intervene on behalf of the victim. -(Pepler et al., 1997)
-by age 24, 60 percent of identified bullies have a criminal conviction. Young children who were labeled by their peers as bullies required more support form adults from government agencies, had more court convictions, more alcoholism, more anti-social personality disorders and used more mental health services.
bullying.org