TAMARIKI ORA - Sounds of Hope

Over the weekend Sounds of Hope aired on Maori Television. Sounds of Hope is a compilation of stories and songs collected from Kiwi musicians. The artist shared their thoughts addressing the issue of Child Abuse in New Zealand. A truly inspirational documentary that is a must-see for all New Zealanders.

Sounds of Hope screened alongside another 5-hour landmark documentary entitled Tamariki Ora. The content of this series was much more hard-hitting and heart wrenching and incredibly moving. Showing families who have overcome family violence in their lives and profiling their inspiring stories. While some of the content is hard hitting its a call for all New Zealanders to stand up for the children of Aotearoa.

Often when I am confronted with inspiring and confronting messages such as those outlined in these documentaries I ask myself - So What does this mean for me? It's alright to be inspired but the real proof of inspiration is action. So some of the things I hope to action include; spending more time with my own children - enjoy them, listen to them, hear them, love them. Learn more about the children that live on my street - try and encourage a real sense of community in my own street. And instead of saying 'tut tut' when I witness any form of abuse I'm going to say something and do something.

What will you do?

Ulearn10 - Come on down!

CORE Education Scholarships

Any ideas about what I should do to fill in the long quiet hours over the school holidays?

Here's a thought - give yourself time to pull together your application for the CORE Education Travel Scholarship – it’s been set up to encourage and celebrate a teacher's or leader's thought leadership in education and the prize is up to $5,000 towards travel, accommodation, event registration & expenses for a teacher to attend an international education event. To enter, you need to submit a perspective piece relating to CORE’s Ten Trends.

Or perhaps work on putting yourself forward for the Professional Learning & Reflective Practice 2010 Awards recognising best practice in action. Winners get $3,000 (for an individual) or $5,000 (for a school or centre) to put towards professional learning. To apply, individuals, schools and early childhood centres have to submit proof of the impact of professional learning activities they have completed.

Both the Scholarship and the Awards are now open to teachers and leaders in all NZ early childhood centres, primary and secondary schools. Go to the CORE website for more information, selection criteria and application forms.

Art and Creativity Blog

I stumbled across this fantastic blog this evening - Art and Creativity in Early Childhood.

I'm totally impressed with the visual aesthetics of the blog and the detail of the experiences written in the post. There are lots of resources that can be downloaded and relevant readings.

KidRex - Safe searching for Kids

This afternoon I came across a link to KidRex.org. It's a website designed for kids, by kids! Its a customised Google search engine that promotes safe searching for young children. I thought I would give the search engine a go to see if it really was safe! I typed in a range of search words including popular shows for kids and common phrases and was impressed with the search results. Most of the results were official sites, lend themselves to being child friendly or educational.

When I typed in some inappropriate words, this is the message I received. There were a few searches that fielded Google Ads - many of them not overly explicit but inappropriate. I have emailed KidRex.org to let them know about this, so hopefully as time goes by some of these bugs can be ironed out. However, overall I think this site and search function has potential.

Book Scavenger Hunt with Manukau Libraries.

My children and I enjoyed a great day out with Manukau Libraries. Thank you for hosting The Great Garden Scavenger Hunt at Botanical Gardens yesterday. We've never participated in such an event but we totally enjoyed the day out. It was great fun for our oldest son (10 years) right through to our youngest (4 years). Although, our youngest got pretty tired towards the end.

We started the Scavenger Hunt with a registration form each. On the registration map were clues in the form of stars on a map that lead us around the gardens finding book characters, once we found a character the task was to match up the character with a book and a fact about the book. All together there were 10 characters ranging from fiction to non-fiction. See below some of the characters we found. The kids were pretty pleased with themselves for finding all of the clues and the characters. Watch this space for a link to Lee's post about the event.

The Pig from Piggity Wiggity Jiggity Jig written by Diana Nield.

The boy from The boy with green hair by D.R. Evans

I Can Animate

I have a 10-year old son. He has the attention span of a fly (usually). He's incredibly creative, inquisitive and articulate and is awesome with ICT. This afternoon we asked him to teach his younger brother and sisters how to create an animation. All four of them set out on their first animation creation. They watched this several times on completion and when asked what things they might like to improve on here is what they came up with:

*No hands

*Too many shadows

*Stay in one place

Watch this space for more animations over the coming months.

NB: Excuse the storyline. We don't condone violence in our family but when you see children engaged (all 4 of our kids spent at least 2 hours exploring I Can Animate this afternoon) you kind of have to roll with it. See for yourself :)