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conuly
One on how a little girl, who is nominally Catholic, came to decide that her toy giraffe is Jewish.
One about teaching kids traditional games, which I'm sure I've posted before
Putting the Skinned Knees Back Into Playtime
By ALEX WILLIAMS
JOSEPH GALLO, 10, of Santa Cruz, Calif., is well armed in the battle against childhood boredom, with a bedroom arsenal that includes a computer hooked to the Internet, a DVD player, two Game Boys, as well as an Xbox and a GameCube.
But in recent weeks, the hum of that war room of machinery has quieted because Joseph has acquired a new playtime obsession that would have seemed quaint even in his parents' day: marbles.
He can thank Michael Cohill, a toy designer and enthusiast, whose marble seminar Joseph attended at a youth fair a few weeks ago. Mr. Cohill considers himself something of a pied piper of the game, having taught it to thousands of children at schools, parks and scout meetings. ''They have the exact same experience kids did with marbles a hundred years ago,'' said Mr. Cohill, 52.
Well, not exactly. Back then, children didn't need to take seminars to learn to play a no-tech, simple game. In the era of micromanaged play dates, overstuffed after-school schedules, cuts to recess and parents terrified of injuries, lawsuits and predators, many traditional childhood games have become lost arts, as antique as the concept of idle time itself.
But lately, a number of educators like Mr. Cohill, as well as parents and child-development specialists are trying to spur a revival of traditional outdoor pastimes, including marbles, hopscotch, red rover and kickball. They are attending play conferences, teaching courses on how to play, and starting leagues for the kinds of activities that didn't used to need leagues -- just, say, a stick and a ball. They are spurred by concerns that a decline in traditional play robs the imagination and inhibits social interaction, by personal nostalgia, and by a desire to create a new bridge to connect generations -- a bridge across both sides of the Nintendo gap.
Although their efforts have mostly yielded modest results, a hint that they may be on to something comes with the success of an unlikely best seller, ''The Dangerous Book for Boys'' (Collins), a sepia-toned celebration of the lost arts of childhood, complete with information on how to make a tree house, fold paper airplanes and skip stones. Within days of its publication earlier this month, the book had soared to No. 2 on Amazon's sales ranking, right behind the latest Harry Potter installment. The book, by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, sells for $24.95 in hardcover and may be appealing as much to fathers who are nostalgic for a youth they never quite had as to children.
Conn Iggulden said in an e-mail message that he routinely received correspondence from parents who yearn for a ''return to simple pleasures,'' which seems to stem from ''potent forces, like the realisation that keeping your kids locked up in the house on PlayStations isn't actually that good for them; or the appalled reaction of many parents to a health-and-safety culture that prevents half the activities they took for granted as kids -- and that they know were important to their growth and confidence.''
Nevertheless, such simple pleasures have not always been conspicuous in the lives of children over the last two decades. ''These kind of games, including tag, have practically died out,'' said Joan Almon, who is coordinator for the United States affiliate of the Alliance for Childhood, a play advocacy group in College Park, Md.
Ms. Almon bemoaned the fact that she often drives through leafy suburban streets on a sunny afternoon and sees no children playing, adding, ''We should be paying more attention to these classical children's games, which are almost lost now.''
Joseph, in fact, compared the experience of indulging in this centuries-old activity to ''being inside a video game.''
Jill Gallo, Joseph's mother, is thrilled to see her son turn away from violent video games and she thinks other parents should actively work to spread the outdated pastime among children. ''It won't come back naturally,'' said Ms. Gallo, 40. ''We have to introduce it. We have to support it.''
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One on how some schools in the city are putting an environmental focus into the curriculum.
Teaching Green, Beyond Recycling
By MIREYA NAVARRO and SINDYA N. BHANOO
Jose Chirino, a 10th grader in Brooklyn with shoulder-length hair and a thin mustache, says flatly that his high school was his last choice.
“They’re experimenting on us,” he said, recalling his first impression of the Green School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which laces an environmental theme into most of its coursework.
Jennifer Auceda, 17, was similarly wary, given that she wanted to be a singer and never saw herself as a “science person.”
“I thought it was going to be about the inside of trees,” she said.
But the two reluctant recruits, who had both failed to get into the high schools they favored, said they were won over after realizing that the school casts a wide net.
Rather than simply covering predictable topics like recycling and tree planting, they say, it has alerted them to problems like sooty air and negative media representations of their neighborhoods.
“Green is not just the environment,” Jennifer said. “It’s politics, government, social justice.”
“We do a lot of things other schools are not doing,” said Jose, 15. “I feel like we’re doing something important.”
While plenty of city schools, from elementary to secondary, teach students about environmental issues like endangered species or global warming, places like the Green School put an overwhelming emphasis on civic involvement.
The students are encouraged to delve into local issues that may affect them and their families, like contamination in waterways like the Gowanus Canal, water quality or the razing of low-scale housing.
“You can’t have a kid in a violent neighborhood and say, ‘Let’s talk about the polar bear,’ ” said Karali Pitzele, one of the school’s two co-directors.
Across the nation, the range of green schools form a fledgling network, with some of them benefiting from state grants and mandates to incorporate environmental education into the curriculum.
They have found eager partners in groups like the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation, which provide lesson plans or money for field trips, and in private and government agencies that are making concerted environmental efforts in communities and cities.
Alison Suffet Diaz, founder of the Environmental Charter High School in Los Angeles, says the focus on environment hits particularly close to home in poor communities that she says are disproportionately affected by problems like contamination from industrial sites.
If grass-roots change is needed to address those issues, she said, “it can’t just be a rich person’s desire to be green.”
Still, Randall E. Solomon, executive director of the New Jersey Sustainable State Institute at Rutgers University, which guides New Jersey towns on environmental efforts, said that green schools were not just a niche phenomenon for the poor or for the wealthy. “It’s also mainstream public schools that are taking this on,” he said.
It is hard to pin down how many private, and charter and traditional public schools nationwide have adopted an environmental theme. Many are new; some have a low profile. They do not share uniform standards that define them as green.
The Green Charter Schools Network, based in Madison, Wis., says it has counted about 200 green charter schools nationwide.
In New York, the green school phenomenon feeds into an effort to break up the city’s enormous high schools into smaller learning settings, a centerpiece of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s overhaul of the school system.
At least 11 traditional and charter green schools at varying grade levels have opened in the last six years, officials at the city’s Department of Education say, while cautioning that they were counting only those that identified themselves by name as “green” or “environmental.”
Many of the schools have yet to graduate their first class, and their progress reports show grades from A to D, school officials said.
The Growing Up Green Charter School, an elementary school in Long Island City, Queens, opened in September with one kindergarten and one first grade class. It plans to expand gradually through grade five.
On a recent afternoon, in a classroom that is also home to an army of compost bin worms and a bearded dragon named Daphne, two dozen first-grade students thrust their hands into bags of potting soil while taking turns planting squash seeds, beans and corn kernels in plastic containers.
The task at hand was to answer the question of the day, posed by a sign in the back of the classroom: “How do we get our food?”
But the real point, said the children’s teacher, Michelle Robles, was to help them understand how the local environment affects food choices, and the need to tend to the soil, air, water and plants.
“If you take care of plants, they can grow and grow so we can cook them,” Alayla Mack, 6, said after the lesson.
Some green schools in New York chiefly emphasize the environmental sciences or teach skills that will prepare students for careers in renewable energy or other pillars of a greener economy.
The Urban Assembly School for Green Careers, a high school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, opened this year with a ninth-grade class and a focus on job skills needed for the design and operation of energy-efficient buildings.
Gregg Betheil, who heads the Office of Postsecondary Pathways and Planning in the city’s Department of Education, said the school sprang out of specific efforts to match secondary education to labor trends and to the city’s own goal of attracting more green industry.
Students learn hands-on skills like installing insulation and solar panels in preparation for entering the work force after graduation or pursuing college degrees in fields like engineering.
“We’ve got some schools investing in the skills kids need to compete,” Mr. Betheil said. “No way is this a fad.”
At the more civic-oriented Green School in Brooklyn, teachers send the students out into their neighborhoods to record public service announcements and videos about smoking and air pollution. They also walk the streets to map trees and trash cans, then incorporate their findings into mural sketches for geometry class.
In a recent class, students watched trailers for the films “2012,” about humans struggling to survive a global apocalypse, and “Precious,” about an abused teenager who finds a form of salvation in learning to read and write. The goal was to analyze the media messages telegraphed by the trailers before starting on their own videos.
At elementary schools, teachers in the lower grades emphasize hands-on projects like building habitats for specific environments, like teepees, or mapping the path of trash from their classroom bin to a landfill.
“It helps them learn early how their choices make an impact,” said Barbara Weber, 43, whose 6-year-old son, Lawless Morse, is in first grade at Growing Up Green in Long Island City.
Ms. Weber, a textile designer from Jackson Heights, Queens, said she had already noticed some changes in Lawless. After a week of studying habitats, she said, he asked why many homes in their neighborhood were made of brick. He also peppers her with questions about how and where various animals live.
Lawless, wearing neatly pressed khakis and a polo shirt with an embroidered “Growing Up Green” logo on a recent morning, said he really liked school.
But as it turns out, a movie — “Wall-E,” about a garbage-collecting robot on an Earth bereft of inhabitants — seems to have made an even bigger impression on him.
“All the people were gone because they littered so much,” he said. “That’s why we reduce, reuse and recycle.”
~~~~~~~~~~~
One on a new Nick Jr. show that focuses on math, a subject that is sorely neglected in "educational TV"
In a Series, Nickelodeon Will Focus on Math
By ELIZABETH JENSEN
Nickelodeon, whose preschool shows focus on teaching social skills as much as letters and numbers, will move squarely into the academic realm, with the introduction of “Team Umizoomi,” which it said is the only preschool series centered entirely on teaching math to children.
The half-hour show, a mix of animation and live action that has been in development since late 2005, will go on the air on Jan. 25 in the network’s midday lineup.
Cyma Zarghami, Nickelodeon’s president, said that the network saw an opening and took it. “Everybody’s trying to teach preschoolers how to read and nobody is trying to teach them how to do math,” she said.
The move puts Nickelodeon more squarely in competition with “Sesame Street” on PBS, which has math skills as a major component. “We’re not deliberately trying to get into their space, but I do believe the opportunity in this space has been left wide open,” said Ms. Zarghami.
“ ‘Sesame Street’ is iconic and will live on forever,” she added. “Besides them there’s just a smattering of others” that incorporate teaching math skills to the age group. PBS’s “Cyberchase” is math-focused, but is aimed at older children, ages 8 to 12.
Nickelodeon has ordered 20 episodes of “Team Umizoomi.” If it catches on, it could also open a new revenue source for the company, in ancillary educational products. Ms. Zarghami said that Nickelodeon is exploring introducing teaching videos, workbooks and “learning tools that go with the show, as opposed to the more traditional toys and plush.”
Currently the company licenses some of its properties, including “Dora the Explorer” and “Go, Diego, Go!” for tie-in math and reading games made by others, but it has no shows whose product lines are specifically education-oriented.
In some ways the new program is standard children’s fare. The main characters are miniature superheroes — a boy, a girl and a break-dancing robot — who zoom about fixing simple crises in their city, whether a shortage of milk, a lost kite or a subway system stalled by a dropped mitten. But the show is infused in all aspects — down to character Milli’s pony tails that turn into a ruler — with concepts from an interactive math curriculum that the characters tap to solve their problems, including shape-matching, counting, simple computation and measurement.
The Nick Jr. Web site, nickjr.com, will have a learning section for parents, including the curriculum and activities to help preschoolers master the concepts, as well as games and videos.
Soo Kim, who worked on “Blue’s Clues” and is one of “Team Umizoomi’s” creators and writers and its design director, said the show was built on the idea that “preschoolers naturally encounter their world by using their math,” matching buttons to holes or counting out pancakes for breakfast.
The message to children, she said, is “you’re already great at math.” Pop songs, like one with the refrain “Shapes all over the place” in the first episode, are modeled after ABC’s “Schoolhouse Rock” ditties, which endured long after they left the air.
Nickelodeon’s programming has become “increasingly more educational as time has passed,” Ms. Zarghami said. “Blue’s Clues” promotes interactivity, with its pauses for children to find the clues, and “Dora The Explorer” teaches short Spanish phrases while the character is on her adventures. With “Team Umizoomi,” she said, there is “no disguising that it’s math.”
The show does not signal a major shift in the network’s shows. “I believe we have enough equity with moms based on our track record to take on more educational stuff head-on, and they would trust us to do it well,” said Ms. Zarghami, but “social skills are still really important.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One from a few months ago about Sesame Street's 40th birthday and how the show has changed (and, if you ask me, not for the better)
One about teaching kids traditional games, which I'm sure I've posted before
Putting the Skinned Knees Back Into Playtime
By ALEX WILLIAMS
JOSEPH GALLO, 10, of Santa Cruz, Calif., is well armed in the battle against childhood boredom, with a bedroom arsenal that includes a computer hooked to the Internet, a DVD player, two Game Boys, as well as an Xbox and a GameCube.
But in recent weeks, the hum of that war room of machinery has quieted because Joseph has acquired a new playtime obsession that would have seemed quaint even in his parents' day: marbles.
He can thank Michael Cohill, a toy designer and enthusiast, whose marble seminar Joseph attended at a youth fair a few weeks ago. Mr. Cohill considers himself something of a pied piper of the game, having taught it to thousands of children at schools, parks and scout meetings. ''They have the exact same experience kids did with marbles a hundred years ago,'' said Mr. Cohill, 52.
Well, not exactly. Back then, children didn't need to take seminars to learn to play a no-tech, simple game. In the era of micromanaged play dates, overstuffed after-school schedules, cuts to recess and parents terrified of injuries, lawsuits and predators, many traditional childhood games have become lost arts, as antique as the concept of idle time itself.
But lately, a number of educators like Mr. Cohill, as well as parents and child-development specialists are trying to spur a revival of traditional outdoor pastimes, including marbles, hopscotch, red rover and kickball. They are attending play conferences, teaching courses on how to play, and starting leagues for the kinds of activities that didn't used to need leagues -- just, say, a stick and a ball. They are spurred by concerns that a decline in traditional play robs the imagination and inhibits social interaction, by personal nostalgia, and by a desire to create a new bridge to connect generations -- a bridge across both sides of the Nintendo gap.
Although their efforts have mostly yielded modest results, a hint that they may be on to something comes with the success of an unlikely best seller, ''The Dangerous Book for Boys'' (Collins), a sepia-toned celebration of the lost arts of childhood, complete with information on how to make a tree house, fold paper airplanes and skip stones. Within days of its publication earlier this month, the book had soared to No. 2 on Amazon's sales ranking, right behind the latest Harry Potter installment. The book, by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, sells for $24.95 in hardcover and may be appealing as much to fathers who are nostalgic for a youth they never quite had as to children.
Conn Iggulden said in an e-mail message that he routinely received correspondence from parents who yearn for a ''return to simple pleasures,'' which seems to stem from ''potent forces, like the realisation that keeping your kids locked up in the house on PlayStations isn't actually that good for them; or the appalled reaction of many parents to a health-and-safety culture that prevents half the activities they took for granted as kids -- and that they know were important to their growth and confidence.''
Nevertheless, such simple pleasures have not always been conspicuous in the lives of children over the last two decades. ''These kind of games, including tag, have practically died out,'' said Joan Almon, who is coordinator for the United States affiliate of the Alliance for Childhood, a play advocacy group in College Park, Md.
Ms. Almon bemoaned the fact that she often drives through leafy suburban streets on a sunny afternoon and sees no children playing, adding, ''We should be paying more attention to these classical children's games, which are almost lost now.''
Joseph, in fact, compared the experience of indulging in this centuries-old activity to ''being inside a video game.''
Jill Gallo, Joseph's mother, is thrilled to see her son turn away from violent video games and she thinks other parents should actively work to spread the outdated pastime among children. ''It won't come back naturally,'' said Ms. Gallo, 40. ''We have to introduce it. We have to support it.''
One on how some schools in the city are putting an environmental focus into the curriculum.
Teaching Green, Beyond Recycling
By MIREYA NAVARRO and SINDYA N. BHANOO
Jose Chirino, a 10th grader in Brooklyn with shoulder-length hair and a thin mustache, says flatly that his high school was his last choice.
“They’re experimenting on us,” he said, recalling his first impression of the Green School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which laces an environmental theme into most of its coursework.
Jennifer Auceda, 17, was similarly wary, given that she wanted to be a singer and never saw herself as a “science person.”
“I thought it was going to be about the inside of trees,” she said.
But the two reluctant recruits, who had both failed to get into the high schools they favored, said they were won over after realizing that the school casts a wide net.
Rather than simply covering predictable topics like recycling and tree planting, they say, it has alerted them to problems like sooty air and negative media representations of their neighborhoods.
“Green is not just the environment,” Jennifer said. “It’s politics, government, social justice.”
“We do a lot of things other schools are not doing,” said Jose, 15. “I feel like we’re doing something important.”
While plenty of city schools, from elementary to secondary, teach students about environmental issues like endangered species or global warming, places like the Green School put an overwhelming emphasis on civic involvement.
The students are encouraged to delve into local issues that may affect them and their families, like contamination in waterways like the Gowanus Canal, water quality or the razing of low-scale housing.
“You can’t have a kid in a violent neighborhood and say, ‘Let’s talk about the polar bear,’ ” said Karali Pitzele, one of the school’s two co-directors.
Across the nation, the range of green schools form a fledgling network, with some of them benefiting from state grants and mandates to incorporate environmental education into the curriculum.
They have found eager partners in groups like the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation, which provide lesson plans or money for field trips, and in private and government agencies that are making concerted environmental efforts in communities and cities.
Alison Suffet Diaz, founder of the Environmental Charter High School in Los Angeles, says the focus on environment hits particularly close to home in poor communities that she says are disproportionately affected by problems like contamination from industrial sites.
If grass-roots change is needed to address those issues, she said, “it can’t just be a rich person’s desire to be green.”
Still, Randall E. Solomon, executive director of the New Jersey Sustainable State Institute at Rutgers University, which guides New Jersey towns on environmental efforts, said that green schools were not just a niche phenomenon for the poor or for the wealthy. “It’s also mainstream public schools that are taking this on,” he said.
It is hard to pin down how many private, and charter and traditional public schools nationwide have adopted an environmental theme. Many are new; some have a low profile. They do not share uniform standards that define them as green.
The Green Charter Schools Network, based in Madison, Wis., says it has counted about 200 green charter schools nationwide.
In New York, the green school phenomenon feeds into an effort to break up the city’s enormous high schools into smaller learning settings, a centerpiece of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s overhaul of the school system.
At least 11 traditional and charter green schools at varying grade levels have opened in the last six years, officials at the city’s Department of Education say, while cautioning that they were counting only those that identified themselves by name as “green” or “environmental.”
Many of the schools have yet to graduate their first class, and their progress reports show grades from A to D, school officials said.
The Growing Up Green Charter School, an elementary school in Long Island City, Queens, opened in September with one kindergarten and one first grade class. It plans to expand gradually through grade five.
On a recent afternoon, in a classroom that is also home to an army of compost bin worms and a bearded dragon named Daphne, two dozen first-grade students thrust their hands into bags of potting soil while taking turns planting squash seeds, beans and corn kernels in plastic containers.
The task at hand was to answer the question of the day, posed by a sign in the back of the classroom: “How do we get our food?”
But the real point, said the children’s teacher, Michelle Robles, was to help them understand how the local environment affects food choices, and the need to tend to the soil, air, water and plants.
“If you take care of plants, they can grow and grow so we can cook them,” Alayla Mack, 6, said after the lesson.
Some green schools in New York chiefly emphasize the environmental sciences or teach skills that will prepare students for careers in renewable energy or other pillars of a greener economy.
The Urban Assembly School for Green Careers, a high school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, opened this year with a ninth-grade class and a focus on job skills needed for the design and operation of energy-efficient buildings.
Gregg Betheil, who heads the Office of Postsecondary Pathways and Planning in the city’s Department of Education, said the school sprang out of specific efforts to match secondary education to labor trends and to the city’s own goal of attracting more green industry.
Students learn hands-on skills like installing insulation and solar panels in preparation for entering the work force after graduation or pursuing college degrees in fields like engineering.
“We’ve got some schools investing in the skills kids need to compete,” Mr. Betheil said. “No way is this a fad.”
At the more civic-oriented Green School in Brooklyn, teachers send the students out into their neighborhoods to record public service announcements and videos about smoking and air pollution. They also walk the streets to map trees and trash cans, then incorporate their findings into mural sketches for geometry class.
In a recent class, students watched trailers for the films “2012,” about humans struggling to survive a global apocalypse, and “Precious,” about an abused teenager who finds a form of salvation in learning to read and write. The goal was to analyze the media messages telegraphed by the trailers before starting on their own videos.
At elementary schools, teachers in the lower grades emphasize hands-on projects like building habitats for specific environments, like teepees, or mapping the path of trash from their classroom bin to a landfill.
“It helps them learn early how their choices make an impact,” said Barbara Weber, 43, whose 6-year-old son, Lawless Morse, is in first grade at Growing Up Green in Long Island City.
Ms. Weber, a textile designer from Jackson Heights, Queens, said she had already noticed some changes in Lawless. After a week of studying habitats, she said, he asked why many homes in their neighborhood were made of brick. He also peppers her with questions about how and where various animals live.
Lawless, wearing neatly pressed khakis and a polo shirt with an embroidered “Growing Up Green” logo on a recent morning, said he really liked school.
But as it turns out, a movie — “Wall-E,” about a garbage-collecting robot on an Earth bereft of inhabitants — seems to have made an even bigger impression on him.
“All the people were gone because they littered so much,” he said. “That’s why we reduce, reuse and recycle.”
One on a new Nick Jr. show that focuses on math, a subject that is sorely neglected in "educational TV"
In a Series, Nickelodeon Will Focus on Math
By ELIZABETH JENSEN
Nickelodeon, whose preschool shows focus on teaching social skills as much as letters and numbers, will move squarely into the academic realm, with the introduction of “Team Umizoomi,” which it said is the only preschool series centered entirely on teaching math to children.
The half-hour show, a mix of animation and live action that has been in development since late 2005, will go on the air on Jan. 25 in the network’s midday lineup.
Cyma Zarghami, Nickelodeon’s president, said that the network saw an opening and took it. “Everybody’s trying to teach preschoolers how to read and nobody is trying to teach them how to do math,” she said.
The move puts Nickelodeon more squarely in competition with “Sesame Street” on PBS, which has math skills as a major component. “We’re not deliberately trying to get into their space, but I do believe the opportunity in this space has been left wide open,” said Ms. Zarghami.
“ ‘Sesame Street’ is iconic and will live on forever,” she added. “Besides them there’s just a smattering of others” that incorporate teaching math skills to the age group. PBS’s “Cyberchase” is math-focused, but is aimed at older children, ages 8 to 12.
Nickelodeon has ordered 20 episodes of “Team Umizoomi.” If it catches on, it could also open a new revenue source for the company, in ancillary educational products. Ms. Zarghami said that Nickelodeon is exploring introducing teaching videos, workbooks and “learning tools that go with the show, as opposed to the more traditional toys and plush.”
Currently the company licenses some of its properties, including “Dora the Explorer” and “Go, Diego, Go!” for tie-in math and reading games made by others, but it has no shows whose product lines are specifically education-oriented.
In some ways the new program is standard children’s fare. The main characters are miniature superheroes — a boy, a girl and a break-dancing robot — who zoom about fixing simple crises in their city, whether a shortage of milk, a lost kite or a subway system stalled by a dropped mitten. But the show is infused in all aspects — down to character Milli’s pony tails that turn into a ruler — with concepts from an interactive math curriculum that the characters tap to solve their problems, including shape-matching, counting, simple computation and measurement.
The Nick Jr. Web site, nickjr.com, will have a learning section for parents, including the curriculum and activities to help preschoolers master the concepts, as well as games and videos.
Soo Kim, who worked on “Blue’s Clues” and is one of “Team Umizoomi’s” creators and writers and its design director, said the show was built on the idea that “preschoolers naturally encounter their world by using their math,” matching buttons to holes or counting out pancakes for breakfast.
The message to children, she said, is “you’re already great at math.” Pop songs, like one with the refrain “Shapes all over the place” in the first episode, are modeled after ABC’s “Schoolhouse Rock” ditties, which endured long after they left the air.
Nickelodeon’s programming has become “increasingly more educational as time has passed,” Ms. Zarghami said. “Blue’s Clues” promotes interactivity, with its pauses for children to find the clues, and “Dora The Explorer” teaches short Spanish phrases while the character is on her adventures. With “Team Umizoomi,” she said, there is “no disguising that it’s math.”
The show does not signal a major shift in the network’s shows. “I believe we have enough equity with moms based on our track record to take on more educational stuff head-on, and they would trust us to do it well,” said Ms. Zarghami, but “social skills are still really important.”
One from a few months ago about Sesame Street's 40th birthday and how the show has changed (and, if you ask me, not for the better)
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<a href="http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/choosing-religion-for-a-stuffed-giraffe/">One on how a little girl, who is nominally Catholic, came to decide that her toy giraffe is Jewish.</a>
<a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04EEDA1131F933A15756C0A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all">One about teaching kids traditional games, which I'm sure I've posted before</a>
<lj-cut> Putting the Skinned Knees Back Into Playtime
By ALEX WILLIAMS
JOSEPH GALLO, 10, of Santa Cruz, Calif., is well armed in the battle against childhood boredom, with a bedroom arsenal that includes a computer hooked to the Internet, a DVD player, two Game Boys, as well as an Xbox and a GameCube.
But in recent weeks, the hum of that war room of machinery has quieted because Joseph has acquired a new playtime obsession that would have seemed quaint even in his parents' day: marbles.
He can thank Michael Cohill, a toy designer and enthusiast, whose marble seminar Joseph attended at a youth fair a few weeks ago. Mr. Cohill considers himself something of a pied piper of the game, having taught it to thousands of children at schools, parks and scout meetings. ''They have the exact same experience kids did with marbles a hundred years ago,'' said Mr. Cohill, 52.
Well, not exactly. Back then, children didn't need to take seminars to learn to play a no-tech, simple game. In the era of micromanaged play dates, overstuffed after-school schedules, cuts to recess and parents terrified of injuries, lawsuits and predators, many traditional childhood games have become lost arts, as antique as the concept of idle time itself.
But lately, a number of educators like Mr. Cohill, as well as parents and child-development specialists are trying to spur a revival of traditional outdoor pastimes, including marbles, hopscotch, red rover and kickball. They are attending play conferences, teaching courses on how to play, and starting leagues for the kinds of activities that didn't used to need leagues -- just, say, a stick and a ball. They are spurred by concerns that a decline in traditional play robs the imagination and inhibits social interaction, by personal nostalgia, and by a desire to create a new bridge to connect generations -- a bridge across both sides of the Nintendo gap.
Although their efforts have mostly yielded modest results, a hint that they may be on to something comes with the success of an unlikely best seller, ''The Dangerous Book for Boys'' (Collins), a sepia-toned celebration of the lost arts of childhood, complete with information on how to make a tree house, fold paper airplanes and skip stones. Within days of its publication earlier this month, the book had soared to No. 2 on Amazon's sales ranking, right behind the latest Harry Potter installment. The book, by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, sells for $24.95 in hardcover and may be appealing as much to fathers who are nostalgic for a youth they never quite had as to children.
Conn Iggulden said in an e-mail message that he routinely received correspondence from parents who yearn for a ''return to simple pleasures,'' which seems to stem from ''potent forces, like the realisation that keeping your kids locked up in the house on PlayStations isn't actually that good for them; or the appalled reaction of many parents to a health-and-safety culture that prevents half the activities they took for granted as kids -- and that they know were important to their growth and confidence.''
Nevertheless, such simple pleasures have not always been conspicuous in the lives of children over the last two decades. ''These kind of games, including tag, have practically died out,'' said Joan Almon, who is coordinator for the United States affiliate of the Alliance for Childhood, a play advocacy group in College Park, Md.
Ms. Almon bemoaned the fact that she often drives through leafy suburban streets on a sunny afternoon and sees no children playing, adding, ''We should be paying more attention to these classical children's games, which are almost lost now.''
Joseph, in fact, compared the experience of indulging in this centuries-old activity to ''being inside a video game.''
Jill Gallo, Joseph's mother, is thrilled to see her son turn away from violent video games and she thinks other parents should actively work to spread the outdated pastime among children. ''It won't come back naturally,'' said Ms. Gallo, 40. ''We have to introduce it. We have to support it.''
<center>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</center></lj-cut>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/nyregion/11green.html">One on how some schools in the city are putting an environmental focus into the curriculum.</a>
<lj-cut>Teaching Green, Beyond Recycling
By MIREYA NAVARRO and SINDYA N. BHANOO
Jose Chirino, a 10th grader in Brooklyn with shoulder-length hair and a thin mustache, says flatly that his high school was his last choice.
“They’re experimenting on us,” he said, recalling his first impression of the Green School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which laces an environmental theme into most of its coursework.
Jennifer Auceda, 17, was similarly wary, given that she wanted to be a singer and never saw herself as a “science person.”
“I thought it was going to be about the inside of trees,” she said.
But the two reluctant recruits, who had both failed to get into the high schools they favored, said they were won over after realizing that the school casts a wide net.
Rather than simply covering predictable topics like recycling and tree planting, they say, it has alerted them to problems like sooty air and negative media representations of their neighborhoods.
“Green is not just the environment,” Jennifer said. “It’s politics, government, social justice.”
“We do a lot of things other schools are not doing,” said Jose, 15. “I feel like we’re doing something important.”
While plenty of city schools, from elementary to secondary, teach students about environmental issues like endangered species or global warming, places like the Green School put an overwhelming emphasis on civic involvement.
The students are encouraged to delve into local issues that may affect them and their families, like contamination in waterways like the Gowanus Canal, water quality or the razing of low-scale housing.
“You can’t have a kid in a violent neighborhood and say, ‘Let’s talk about the polar bear,’ ” said Karali Pitzele, one of the school’s two co-directors.
Across the nation, the range of green schools form a fledgling network, with some of them benefiting from state grants and mandates to incorporate environmental education into the curriculum.
They have found eager partners in groups like the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation, which provide lesson plans or money for field trips, and in private and government agencies that are making concerted environmental efforts in communities and cities.
Alison Suffet Diaz, founder of the Environmental Charter High School in Los Angeles, says the focus on environment hits particularly close to home in poor communities that she says are disproportionately affected by problems like contamination from industrial sites.
If grass-roots change is needed to address those issues, she said, “it can’t just be a rich person’s desire to be green.”
Still, Randall E. Solomon, executive director of the New Jersey Sustainable State Institute at Rutgers University, which guides New Jersey towns on environmental efforts, said that green schools were not just a niche phenomenon for the poor or for the wealthy. “It’s also mainstream public schools that are taking this on,” he said.
It is hard to pin down how many private, and charter and traditional public schools nationwide have adopted an environmental theme. Many are new; some have a low profile. They do not share uniform standards that define them as green.
The Green Charter Schools Network, based in Madison, Wis., says it has counted about 200 green charter schools nationwide.
In New York, the green school phenomenon feeds into an effort to break up the city’s enormous high schools into smaller learning settings, a centerpiece of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s overhaul of the school system.
At least 11 traditional and charter green schools at varying grade levels have opened in the last six years, officials at the city’s Department of Education say, while cautioning that they were counting only those that identified themselves by name as “green” or “environmental.”
Many of the schools have yet to graduate their first class, and their progress reports show grades from A to D, school officials said.
The Growing Up Green Charter School, an elementary school in Long Island City, Queens, opened in September with one kindergarten and one first grade class. It plans to expand gradually through grade five.
On a recent afternoon, in a classroom that is also home to an army of compost bin worms and a bearded dragon named Daphne, two dozen first-grade students thrust their hands into bags of potting soil while taking turns planting squash seeds, beans and corn kernels in plastic containers.
The task at hand was to answer the question of the day, posed by a sign in the back of the classroom: “How do we get our food?”
But the real point, said the children’s teacher, Michelle Robles, was to help them understand how the local environment affects food choices, and the need to tend to the soil, air, water and plants.
“If you take care of plants, they can grow and grow so we can cook them,” Alayla Mack, 6, said after the lesson.
Some green schools in New York chiefly emphasize the environmental sciences or teach skills that will prepare students for careers in renewable energy or other pillars of a greener economy.
The Urban Assembly School for Green Careers, a high school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, opened this year with a ninth-grade class and a focus on job skills needed for the design and operation of energy-efficient buildings.
Gregg Betheil, who heads the Office of Postsecondary Pathways and Planning in the city’s Department of Education, said the school sprang out of specific efforts to match secondary education to labor trends and to the city’s own goal of attracting more green industry.
Students learn hands-on skills like installing insulation and solar panels in preparation for entering the work force after graduation or pursuing college degrees in fields like engineering.
“We’ve got some schools investing in the skills kids need to compete,” Mr. Betheil said. “No way is this a fad.”
At the more civic-oriented Green School in Brooklyn, teachers send the students out into their neighborhoods to record public service announcements and videos about smoking and air pollution. They also walk the streets to map trees and trash cans, then incorporate their findings into mural sketches for geometry class.
In a recent class, students watched trailers for the films “2012,” about humans struggling to survive a global apocalypse, and “Precious,” about an abused teenager who finds a form of salvation in learning to read and write. The goal was to analyze the media messages telegraphed by the trailers before starting on their own videos.
At elementary schools, teachers in the lower grades emphasize hands-on projects like building habitats for specific environments, like teepees, or mapping the path of trash from their classroom bin to a landfill.
“It helps them learn early how their choices make an impact,” said Barbara Weber, 43, whose 6-year-old son, Lawless Morse, is in first grade at Growing Up Green in Long Island City.
Ms. Weber, a textile designer from Jackson Heights, Queens, said she had already noticed some changes in Lawless. After a week of studying habitats, she said, he asked why many homes in their neighborhood were made of brick. He also peppers her with questions about how and where various animals live.
Lawless, wearing neatly pressed khakis and a polo shirt with an embroidered “Growing Up Green” logo on a recent morning, said he really liked school.
But as it turns out, a movie — “Wall-E,” about a garbage-collecting robot on an Earth bereft of inhabitants — seems to have made an even bigger impression on him.
“All the people were gone because they littered so much,” he said. “That’s why we reduce, reuse and recycle.”
<center>~~~~~~~~~~~</center></lj-cut>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/media/11math.html">One on a new Nick Jr. show that focuses on math, a subject that is sorely neglected in "educational TV"</a>
<lj-cut>In a Series, Nickelodeon Will Focus on Math
By ELIZABETH JENSEN
Nickelodeon, whose preschool shows focus on teaching social skills as much as letters and numbers, will move squarely into the academic realm, with the introduction of “Team Umizoomi,” which it said is the only preschool series centered entirely on teaching math to children.
The half-hour show, a mix of animation and live action that has been in development since late 2005, will go on the air on Jan. 25 in the network’s midday lineup.
Cyma Zarghami, Nickelodeon’s president, said that the network saw an opening and took it. “Everybody’s trying to teach preschoolers how to read and nobody is trying to teach them how to do math,” she said.
The move puts Nickelodeon more squarely in competition with “Sesame Street” on PBS, which has math skills as a major component. “We’re not deliberately trying to get into their space, but I do believe the opportunity in this space has been left wide open,” said Ms. Zarghami.
“ ‘Sesame Street’ is iconic and will live on forever,” she added. “Besides them there’s just a smattering of others” that incorporate teaching math skills to the age group. PBS’s “Cyberchase” is math-focused, but is aimed at older children, ages 8 to 12.
Nickelodeon has ordered 20 episodes of “Team Umizoomi.” If it catches on, it could also open a new revenue source for the company, in ancillary educational products. Ms. Zarghami said that Nickelodeon is exploring introducing teaching videos, workbooks and “learning tools that go with the show, as opposed to the more traditional toys and plush.”
Currently the company licenses some of its properties, including “Dora the Explorer” and “Go, Diego, Go!” for tie-in math and reading games made by others, but it has no shows whose product lines are specifically education-oriented.
In some ways the new program is standard children’s fare. The main characters are miniature superheroes — a boy, a girl and a break-dancing robot — who zoom about fixing simple crises in their city, whether a shortage of milk, a lost kite or a subway system stalled by a dropped mitten. But the show is infused in all aspects — down to character Milli’s pony tails that turn into a ruler — with concepts from an interactive math curriculum that the characters tap to solve their problems, including shape-matching, counting, simple computation and measurement.
The Nick Jr. Web site, nickjr.com, will have a learning section for parents, including the curriculum and activities to help preschoolers master the concepts, as well as games and videos.
Soo Kim, who worked on “Blue’s Clues” and is one of “Team Umizoomi’s” creators and writers and its design director, said the show was built on the idea that “preschoolers naturally encounter their world by using their math,” matching buttons to holes or counting out pancakes for breakfast.
The message to children, she said, is “you’re already great at math.” Pop songs, like one with the refrain “Shapes all over the place” in the first episode, are modeled after ABC’s “Schoolhouse Rock” ditties, which endured long after they left the air.
Nickelodeon’s programming has become “increasingly more educational as time has passed,” Ms. Zarghami said. “Blue’s Clues” promotes interactivity, with its pauses for children to find the clues, and “Dora The Explorer” teaches short Spanish phrases while the character is on her adventures. With “Team Umizoomi,” she said, there is “no disguising that it’s math.”
The show does not signal a major shift in the network’s shows. “I believe we have enough equity with moms based on our track record to take on more educational stuff head-on, and they would trust us to do it well,” said Ms. Zarghami, but “social skills are still really important.”
<center>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</center></lj-cut>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/arts/television/08stan.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&fta=y">One from a few months ago about Sesame Street's 40th birthday and how the show has changed (and, if you ask me, not for the better)</a>
<a href="Same Street, Different World: ‘Sesame’ Turns 40
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
IT is almost too perfect that the first African-American president of the United States was elected in time for the 40th anniversary of “Sesame Street.” The world is finally beginning to look the way that the PBS show always made it out to be.
So it is to the credit of this daunting cultural landmark — a program that has taught generations of children to count and countless parents to teach, and is seen in 125 countries around the world — that Tuesday’s anniversary is not a frenzy of preening self-celebration. Episode No. 4187 is as child-centric and respectful of routine as any other.
The special guest — the first lady, Michelle Obama — doesn’t make her appearance alongside Big Bird until midway into a show crammed with the usual preschool didactics. The letter of the day comes first — H, as in help and hug and healthy.
The only real difference is that on this day, viewers have to count to 40.
The pedagogy hasn’t changed, but the look and tone of “Sesame Street” have evolved. Forty years on, this is your mother’s “Sesame Street,” only better dressed and gentrified: Sesame Street by way of Park Slope. The opening is no longer a realistic rendition of an urban skyline but an animated, candy-colored chalk drawing of a preschool Arcadia, with flowers and butterflies and stars. The famous set, brownstones and garbage bins, has lost the messy graffiti and gritty smudges of city life over the years. Now there are green spaces, tofu and yoga.
It’s still a messianic show, but the mission has shifted to the more immediate concerns of pediatricians and progressive parents, especially when it comes to childhood obesity. “Sesame Street” takes the Muppets, rhymes and visual verve that were developed to instill tolerance, racial pride and equality, to preach exercise and healthy eating.
Put it this way, Mrs. Obama’s message on the anniversary episode isn’t an exhortation to future soldiers, scientists and presidents to be all that they can be, but to tiny consumers to eat the freshest food they can find. “Veggies taste so good when they come fresh from the garden, don’t they?” Mrs. Obama tells a rainbow coalition of children gathered around a soil tray, an echo of her White House kitchen garden. “If you eat all these healthy foods, you are going to grow up to be big and strong,” Mrs. Obama says, flexing her fists. “Just like me.”
That foodie focus is a reflection of the times and current fads, but also of a tension in the mandate of “Sesame Street,” as it straddles the two imperatives of being a public service in the broadest sense of the word — serving the underserved — while also competing with all the other shows and satisfying the public television donor base.
It is an urban myth that Cookie Monster was turned into Veggie Monster to appease nutrition Nazis, however — that was a blogosphere rumor in the Paul-Is-Dead school of whispering campaigns. But Cookie Monster’s palate was refined during Season 36 as part of the show’s “healthy habits for life” campaign. He now also gobbles fruits and vegetables, which are labeled by the show as “anytime” foods while cookies are held in reserve as “sometime” food. And almost every episode has a subliminal message about exercise and nutrition, along with a fruit bowl.
So much carb consciousness raising makes it all the more incongruous that McDonald’s is a “Sesame Street” corporate sponsor — perhaps the most overt sign of changing mores. It was a financially driven decision, made in 2003 after public television loosened its restrictions on sponsors’ promotional efforts.
“Sesame Street” no longer has a monopoly on growing minds; if anything, it is an endangered species. There are now scores of preschool shows, and some of them also are shown without ads, like “Playhouse Disney.” Not surprisingly, fewer children are watching “Sesame Street,” but most children are watching more television than ever: a recent Nielsen Company study showed that on average children ages 2 to 5 now spend nearly 25 hours a week watching TV and an additional 7 hours either watching taped shows and DVDs or sitting in front of a computer. The top-rated show in that age group in the month of September, according to Nielsen, was “Go, Diego, Go!” on Nickelodeon. “Sesame Street” trailed far behind.
To help cover costs “Sesame Street” reached out to family-friendly sponsors like Beaches resorts and Earth’s Best organic baby foods.
The inclusion of McDonald’s, however, horrified some, including Commercial Alert, a nonprofit group founded by Ralph Nader, which couldn’t reconcile healthy content with fast-food promotions and weren’t lovin’ it. It should be noted that unlike many fast-food ads aimed at children, these spots do not entice children with displays of a happy meal or an M&M McFlurry. Instead they showcase a child doing an art project — a little boy tracing the golden arches.
Oddly enough McDonald’s presented that distinctive trademark in 1969, the year that “Sesame Street” made its premiere on public television. It was a tumultuous time. The Children’s Television Workshop, the nonprofit production company that is now known as the Sesame Workshop, was introduced to the public in 1968, when “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” referred to Technicolor cartoons, not race. The top-rated series on television was “The Andy Griffith Show.”
By 1969 mass culture had swerved: “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” was the No. 1 show in the nation; “Mod Squad” was a hit, and so was “Julia,” the first network series to star an African-American actress in a nonstereotypical role. “Sesame Street” took its breezy magazine format and sock-it-to-me comic style from “Laugh-In,” but its commitment to “relevance,” in the parlance of the times, was in tune with the most serious social issues of the era.
The show’s original intent was to present enjoyable and beguiling preschool education to poor children who did not have access to decent preschools while bringing diversity to children’s programming. “Sesame Street” wasn’t the only children’s show with a social message. (Rocky and Bullwinkle are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year. Some of the earliest cartoons, back when the show was still known as “Rocky and His Friends,” were way ahead of the times; a 1962 retelling of “The Ugly Duckling” on “Fractured Fairy Tales” is a screed against cosmetic surgery.)
But it was the mixture of whimsy, pop music and didactic rigor that distinguished “Sesame Street” from everything else. It has arguably had an even greater impact overseas, especially in places like Kosovo and South Africa, where the show is made in partnership with local television producers and tailored to local concerns. Kami, the world’s first H.I.V.-positive Muppet, made her debut on the South African version in 2002 when the government of Thabo Mbeki was still questioning the value of anti-viral drugs.
Peace in the Middle East can be measured by the status of “Sesame Street.” For a while, in the more hopeful 1990s, there was an adaptation that catered jointly to Israeli and Palestinian preschoolers — in Hebrew and Arabic. That entente died in the first Intifada, and now Israelis have one version, Palestinians another.
Even in this country the smallest innovations on “Sesame Street” resound as cultural markers. The addition in 2006 of Abby Cadabby, a pink and sparkly fairy with a button nose and long eyelashes was taken as yet another sign of the ascent of third wave feminism — or a concession to the commercial appeal of Disney-style princess paraphernalia. New technologies abound: this year, for the first time “Abby’s Flying Fairy School” will be in CGI.
Past episodes on the anniversary DVD boxed set serve as a kind of time tunnel to lost eras: In 1971 the Rev. Jesse Jackson, natty in an afro and a gold medallion, prompted little children to recite “I Am Somebody.” In 1998 Tony Bennett serenaded a worm who yearned for outer space with the song, “Slimey to the Moon.” Disco, rap and hip-hop have all had their “Sesame Street” moment.
This season has an Om sensibility. “My mom takes me to yoga class, I love doing yoga,” a little girl in pigtails says in an episode that ran in October. She is narrating a short film that shows a pixieish teacher and her pupils folding into the downward dog position. After class her mother arrives with a plastic water bottle. “She says it’s important to drink water when you exercise,” the girl explains. “When I grow up I want to be a yoga teacher.”
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<a href="http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/turning-into-your-mother/">One on those things you say that your own parents said.</a>
<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1233164/Because-I-said-Eight-mothers-admit-repeating-old-adages-parents-used-them.html">They took it from this article</a>
<a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04EEDA1131F933A15756C0A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all">One about teaching kids traditional games, which I'm sure I've posted before</a>
<lj-cut> Putting the Skinned Knees Back Into Playtime
By ALEX WILLIAMS
JOSEPH GALLO, 10, of Santa Cruz, Calif., is well armed in the battle against childhood boredom, with a bedroom arsenal that includes a computer hooked to the Internet, a DVD player, two Game Boys, as well as an Xbox and a GameCube.
But in recent weeks, the hum of that war room of machinery has quieted because Joseph has acquired a new playtime obsession that would have seemed quaint even in his parents' day: marbles.
He can thank Michael Cohill, a toy designer and enthusiast, whose marble seminar Joseph attended at a youth fair a few weeks ago. Mr. Cohill considers himself something of a pied piper of the game, having taught it to thousands of children at schools, parks and scout meetings. ''They have the exact same experience kids did with marbles a hundred years ago,'' said Mr. Cohill, 52.
Well, not exactly. Back then, children didn't need to take seminars to learn to play a no-tech, simple game. In the era of micromanaged play dates, overstuffed after-school schedules, cuts to recess and parents terrified of injuries, lawsuits and predators, many traditional childhood games have become lost arts, as antique as the concept of idle time itself.
But lately, a number of educators like Mr. Cohill, as well as parents and child-development specialists are trying to spur a revival of traditional outdoor pastimes, including marbles, hopscotch, red rover and kickball. They are attending play conferences, teaching courses on how to play, and starting leagues for the kinds of activities that didn't used to need leagues -- just, say, a stick and a ball. They are spurred by concerns that a decline in traditional play robs the imagination and inhibits social interaction, by personal nostalgia, and by a desire to create a new bridge to connect generations -- a bridge across both sides of the Nintendo gap.
Although their efforts have mostly yielded modest results, a hint that they may be on to something comes with the success of an unlikely best seller, ''The Dangerous Book for Boys'' (Collins), a sepia-toned celebration of the lost arts of childhood, complete with information on how to make a tree house, fold paper airplanes and skip stones. Within days of its publication earlier this month, the book had soared to No. 2 on Amazon's sales ranking, right behind the latest Harry Potter installment. The book, by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, sells for $24.95 in hardcover and may be appealing as much to fathers who are nostalgic for a youth they never quite had as to children.
Conn Iggulden said in an e-mail message that he routinely received correspondence from parents who yearn for a ''return to simple pleasures,'' which seems to stem from ''potent forces, like the realisation that keeping your kids locked up in the house on PlayStations isn't actually that good for them; or the appalled reaction of many parents to a health-and-safety culture that prevents half the activities they took for granted as kids -- and that they know were important to their growth and confidence.''
Nevertheless, such simple pleasures have not always been conspicuous in the lives of children over the last two decades. ''These kind of games, including tag, have practically died out,'' said Joan Almon, who is coordinator for the United States affiliate of the Alliance for Childhood, a play advocacy group in College Park, Md.
Ms. Almon bemoaned the fact that she often drives through leafy suburban streets on a sunny afternoon and sees no children playing, adding, ''We should be paying more attention to these classical children's games, which are almost lost now.''
Joseph, in fact, compared the experience of indulging in this centuries-old activity to ''being inside a video game.''
Jill Gallo, Joseph's mother, is thrilled to see her son turn away from violent video games and she thinks other parents should actively work to spread the outdated pastime among children. ''It won't come back naturally,'' said Ms. Gallo, 40. ''We have to introduce it. We have to support it.''
<center>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</center></lj-cut>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/nyregion/11green.html">One on how some schools in the city are putting an environmental focus into the curriculum.</a>
<lj-cut>Teaching Green, Beyond Recycling
By MIREYA NAVARRO and SINDYA N. BHANOO
Jose Chirino, a 10th grader in Brooklyn with shoulder-length hair and a thin mustache, says flatly that his high school was his last choice.
“They’re experimenting on us,” he said, recalling his first impression of the Green School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which laces an environmental theme into most of its coursework.
Jennifer Auceda, 17, was similarly wary, given that she wanted to be a singer and never saw herself as a “science person.”
“I thought it was going to be about the inside of trees,” she said.
But the two reluctant recruits, who had both failed to get into the high schools they favored, said they were won over after realizing that the school casts a wide net.
Rather than simply covering predictable topics like recycling and tree planting, they say, it has alerted them to problems like sooty air and negative media representations of their neighborhoods.
“Green is not just the environment,” Jennifer said. “It’s politics, government, social justice.”
“We do a lot of things other schools are not doing,” said Jose, 15. “I feel like we’re doing something important.”
While plenty of city schools, from elementary to secondary, teach students about environmental issues like endangered species or global warming, places like the Green School put an overwhelming emphasis on civic involvement.
The students are encouraged to delve into local issues that may affect them and their families, like contamination in waterways like the Gowanus Canal, water quality or the razing of low-scale housing.
“You can’t have a kid in a violent neighborhood and say, ‘Let’s talk about the polar bear,’ ” said Karali Pitzele, one of the school’s two co-directors.
Across the nation, the range of green schools form a fledgling network, with some of them benefiting from state grants and mandates to incorporate environmental education into the curriculum.
They have found eager partners in groups like the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation, which provide lesson plans or money for field trips, and in private and government agencies that are making concerted environmental efforts in communities and cities.
Alison Suffet Diaz, founder of the Environmental Charter High School in Los Angeles, says the focus on environment hits particularly close to home in poor communities that she says are disproportionately affected by problems like contamination from industrial sites.
If grass-roots change is needed to address those issues, she said, “it can’t just be a rich person’s desire to be green.”
Still, Randall E. Solomon, executive director of the New Jersey Sustainable State Institute at Rutgers University, which guides New Jersey towns on environmental efforts, said that green schools were not just a niche phenomenon for the poor or for the wealthy. “It’s also mainstream public schools that are taking this on,” he said.
It is hard to pin down how many private, and charter and traditional public schools nationwide have adopted an environmental theme. Many are new; some have a low profile. They do not share uniform standards that define them as green.
The Green Charter Schools Network, based in Madison, Wis., says it has counted about 200 green charter schools nationwide.
In New York, the green school phenomenon feeds into an effort to break up the city’s enormous high schools into smaller learning settings, a centerpiece of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s overhaul of the school system.
At least 11 traditional and charter green schools at varying grade levels have opened in the last six years, officials at the city’s Department of Education say, while cautioning that they were counting only those that identified themselves by name as “green” or “environmental.”
Many of the schools have yet to graduate their first class, and their progress reports show grades from A to D, school officials said.
The Growing Up Green Charter School, an elementary school in Long Island City, Queens, opened in September with one kindergarten and one first grade class. It plans to expand gradually through grade five.
On a recent afternoon, in a classroom that is also home to an army of compost bin worms and a bearded dragon named Daphne, two dozen first-grade students thrust their hands into bags of potting soil while taking turns planting squash seeds, beans and corn kernels in plastic containers.
The task at hand was to answer the question of the day, posed by a sign in the back of the classroom: “How do we get our food?”
But the real point, said the children’s teacher, Michelle Robles, was to help them understand how the local environment affects food choices, and the need to tend to the soil, air, water and plants.
“If you take care of plants, they can grow and grow so we can cook them,” Alayla Mack, 6, said after the lesson.
Some green schools in New York chiefly emphasize the environmental sciences or teach skills that will prepare students for careers in renewable energy or other pillars of a greener economy.
The Urban Assembly School for Green Careers, a high school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, opened this year with a ninth-grade class and a focus on job skills needed for the design and operation of energy-efficient buildings.
Gregg Betheil, who heads the Office of Postsecondary Pathways and Planning in the city’s Department of Education, said the school sprang out of specific efforts to match secondary education to labor trends and to the city’s own goal of attracting more green industry.
Students learn hands-on skills like installing insulation and solar panels in preparation for entering the work force after graduation or pursuing college degrees in fields like engineering.
“We’ve got some schools investing in the skills kids need to compete,” Mr. Betheil said. “No way is this a fad.”
At the more civic-oriented Green School in Brooklyn, teachers send the students out into their neighborhoods to record public service announcements and videos about smoking and air pollution. They also walk the streets to map trees and trash cans, then incorporate their findings into mural sketches for geometry class.
In a recent class, students watched trailers for the films “2012,” about humans struggling to survive a global apocalypse, and “Precious,” about an abused teenager who finds a form of salvation in learning to read and write. The goal was to analyze the media messages telegraphed by the trailers before starting on their own videos.
At elementary schools, teachers in the lower grades emphasize hands-on projects like building habitats for specific environments, like teepees, or mapping the path of trash from their classroom bin to a landfill.
“It helps them learn early how their choices make an impact,” said Barbara Weber, 43, whose 6-year-old son, Lawless Morse, is in first grade at Growing Up Green in Long Island City.
Ms. Weber, a textile designer from Jackson Heights, Queens, said she had already noticed some changes in Lawless. After a week of studying habitats, she said, he asked why many homes in their neighborhood were made of brick. He also peppers her with questions about how and where various animals live.
Lawless, wearing neatly pressed khakis and a polo shirt with an embroidered “Growing Up Green” logo on a recent morning, said he really liked school.
But as it turns out, a movie — “Wall-E,” about a garbage-collecting robot on an Earth bereft of inhabitants — seems to have made an even bigger impression on him.
“All the people were gone because they littered so much,” he said. “That’s why we reduce, reuse and recycle.”
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/media/11math.html">One on a new Nick Jr. show that focuses on math, a subject that is sorely neglected in "educational TV"</a>
<lj-cut>In a Series, Nickelodeon Will Focus on Math
By ELIZABETH JENSEN
Nickelodeon, whose preschool shows focus on teaching social skills as much as letters and numbers, will move squarely into the academic realm, with the introduction of “Team Umizoomi,” which it said is the only preschool series centered entirely on teaching math to children.
The half-hour show, a mix of animation and live action that has been in development since late 2005, will go on the air on Jan. 25 in the network’s midday lineup.
Cyma Zarghami, Nickelodeon’s president, said that the network saw an opening and took it. “Everybody’s trying to teach preschoolers how to read and nobody is trying to teach them how to do math,” she said.
The move puts Nickelodeon more squarely in competition with “Sesame Street” on PBS, which has math skills as a major component. “We’re not deliberately trying to get into their space, but I do believe the opportunity in this space has been left wide open,” said Ms. Zarghami.
“ ‘Sesame Street’ is iconic and will live on forever,” she added. “Besides them there’s just a smattering of others” that incorporate teaching math skills to the age group. PBS’s “Cyberchase” is math-focused, but is aimed at older children, ages 8 to 12.
Nickelodeon has ordered 20 episodes of “Team Umizoomi.” If it catches on, it could also open a new revenue source for the company, in ancillary educational products. Ms. Zarghami said that Nickelodeon is exploring introducing teaching videos, workbooks and “learning tools that go with the show, as opposed to the more traditional toys and plush.”
Currently the company licenses some of its properties, including “Dora the Explorer” and “Go, Diego, Go!” for tie-in math and reading games made by others, but it has no shows whose product lines are specifically education-oriented.
In some ways the new program is standard children’s fare. The main characters are miniature superheroes — a boy, a girl and a break-dancing robot — who zoom about fixing simple crises in their city, whether a shortage of milk, a lost kite or a subway system stalled by a dropped mitten. But the show is infused in all aspects — down to character Milli’s pony tails that turn into a ruler — with concepts from an interactive math curriculum that the characters tap to solve their problems, including shape-matching, counting, simple computation and measurement.
The Nick Jr. Web site, nickjr.com, will have a learning section for parents, including the curriculum and activities to help preschoolers master the concepts, as well as games and videos.
Soo Kim, who worked on “Blue’s Clues” and is one of “Team Umizoomi’s” creators and writers and its design director, said the show was built on the idea that “preschoolers naturally encounter their world by using their math,” matching buttons to holes or counting out pancakes for breakfast.
The message to children, she said, is “you’re already great at math.” Pop songs, like one with the refrain “Shapes all over the place” in the first episode, are modeled after ABC’s “Schoolhouse Rock” ditties, which endured long after they left the air.
Nickelodeon’s programming has become “increasingly more educational as time has passed,” Ms. Zarghami said. “Blue’s Clues” promotes interactivity, with its pauses for children to find the clues, and “Dora The Explorer” teaches short Spanish phrases while the character is on her adventures. With “Team Umizoomi,” she said, there is “no disguising that it’s math.”
The show does not signal a major shift in the network’s shows. “I believe we have enough equity with moms based on our track record to take on more educational stuff head-on, and they would trust us to do it well,” said Ms. Zarghami, but “social skills are still really important.”
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/arts/television/08stan.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&fta=y">One from a few months ago about Sesame Street's 40th birthday and how the show has changed (and, if you ask me, not for the better)</a>
<a href="Same Street, Different World: ‘Sesame’ Turns 40
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
IT is almost too perfect that the first African-American president of the United States was elected in time for the 40th anniversary of “Sesame Street.” The world is finally beginning to look the way that the PBS show always made it out to be.
So it is to the credit of this daunting cultural landmark — a program that has taught generations of children to count and countless parents to teach, and is seen in 125 countries around the world — that Tuesday’s anniversary is not a frenzy of preening self-celebration. Episode No. 4187 is as child-centric and respectful of routine as any other.
The special guest — the first lady, Michelle Obama — doesn’t make her appearance alongside Big Bird until midway into a show crammed with the usual preschool didactics. The letter of the day comes first — H, as in help and hug and healthy.
The only real difference is that on this day, viewers have to count to 40.
The pedagogy hasn’t changed, but the look and tone of “Sesame Street” have evolved. Forty years on, this is your mother’s “Sesame Street,” only better dressed and gentrified: Sesame Street by way of Park Slope. The opening is no longer a realistic rendition of an urban skyline but an animated, candy-colored chalk drawing of a preschool Arcadia, with flowers and butterflies and stars. The famous set, brownstones and garbage bins, has lost the messy graffiti and gritty smudges of city life over the years. Now there are green spaces, tofu and yoga.
It’s still a messianic show, but the mission has shifted to the more immediate concerns of pediatricians and progressive parents, especially when it comes to childhood obesity. “Sesame Street” takes the Muppets, rhymes and visual verve that were developed to instill tolerance, racial pride and equality, to preach exercise and healthy eating.
Put it this way, Mrs. Obama’s message on the anniversary episode isn’t an exhortation to future soldiers, scientists and presidents to be all that they can be, but to tiny consumers to eat the freshest food they can find. “Veggies taste so good when they come fresh from the garden, don’t they?” Mrs. Obama tells a rainbow coalition of children gathered around a soil tray, an echo of her White House kitchen garden. “If you eat all these healthy foods, you are going to grow up to be big and strong,” Mrs. Obama says, flexing her fists. “Just like me.”
That foodie focus is a reflection of the times and current fads, but also of a tension in the mandate of “Sesame Street,” as it straddles the two imperatives of being a public service in the broadest sense of the word — serving the underserved — while also competing with all the other shows and satisfying the public television donor base.
It is an urban myth that Cookie Monster was turned into Veggie Monster to appease nutrition Nazis, however — that was a blogosphere rumor in the Paul-Is-Dead school of whispering campaigns. But Cookie Monster’s palate was refined during Season 36 as part of the show’s “healthy habits for life” campaign. He now also gobbles fruits and vegetables, which are labeled by the show as “anytime” foods while cookies are held in reserve as “sometime” food. And almost every episode has a subliminal message about exercise and nutrition, along with a fruit bowl.
So much carb consciousness raising makes it all the more incongruous that McDonald’s is a “Sesame Street” corporate sponsor — perhaps the most overt sign of changing mores. It was a financially driven decision, made in 2003 after public television loosened its restrictions on sponsors’ promotional efforts.
“Sesame Street” no longer has a monopoly on growing minds; if anything, it is an endangered species. There are now scores of preschool shows, and some of them also are shown without ads, like “Playhouse Disney.” Not surprisingly, fewer children are watching “Sesame Street,” but most children are watching more television than ever: a recent Nielsen Company study showed that on average children ages 2 to 5 now spend nearly 25 hours a week watching TV and an additional 7 hours either watching taped shows and DVDs or sitting in front of a computer. The top-rated show in that age group in the month of September, according to Nielsen, was “Go, Diego, Go!” on Nickelodeon. “Sesame Street” trailed far behind.
To help cover costs “Sesame Street” reached out to family-friendly sponsors like Beaches resorts and Earth’s Best organic baby foods.
The inclusion of McDonald’s, however, horrified some, including Commercial Alert, a nonprofit group founded by Ralph Nader, which couldn’t reconcile healthy content with fast-food promotions and weren’t lovin’ it. It should be noted that unlike many fast-food ads aimed at children, these spots do not entice children with displays of a happy meal or an M&M McFlurry. Instead they showcase a child doing an art project — a little boy tracing the golden arches.
Oddly enough McDonald’s presented that distinctive trademark in 1969, the year that “Sesame Street” made its premiere on public television. It was a tumultuous time. The Children’s Television Workshop, the nonprofit production company that is now known as the Sesame Workshop, was introduced to the public in 1968, when “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” referred to Technicolor cartoons, not race. The top-rated series on television was “The Andy Griffith Show.”
By 1969 mass culture had swerved: “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” was the No. 1 show in the nation; “Mod Squad” was a hit, and so was “Julia,” the first network series to star an African-American actress in a nonstereotypical role. “Sesame Street” took its breezy magazine format and sock-it-to-me comic style from “Laugh-In,” but its commitment to “relevance,” in the parlance of the times, was in tune with the most serious social issues of the era.
The show’s original intent was to present enjoyable and beguiling preschool education to poor children who did not have access to decent preschools while bringing diversity to children’s programming. “Sesame Street” wasn’t the only children’s show with a social message. (Rocky and Bullwinkle are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year. Some of the earliest cartoons, back when the show was still known as “Rocky and His Friends,” were way ahead of the times; a 1962 retelling of “The Ugly Duckling” on “Fractured Fairy Tales” is a screed against cosmetic surgery.)
But it was the mixture of whimsy, pop music and didactic rigor that distinguished “Sesame Street” from everything else. It has arguably had an even greater impact overseas, especially in places like Kosovo and South Africa, where the show is made in partnership with local television producers and tailored to local concerns. Kami, the world’s first H.I.V.-positive Muppet, made her debut on the South African version in 2002 when the government of Thabo Mbeki was still questioning the value of anti-viral drugs.
Peace in the Middle East can be measured by the status of “Sesame Street.” For a while, in the more hopeful 1990s, there was an adaptation that catered jointly to Israeli and Palestinian preschoolers — in Hebrew and Arabic. That entente died in the first Intifada, and now Israelis have one version, Palestinians another.
Even in this country the smallest innovations on “Sesame Street” resound as cultural markers. The addition in 2006 of Abby Cadabby, a pink and sparkly fairy with a button nose and long eyelashes was taken as yet another sign of the ascent of third wave feminism — or a concession to the commercial appeal of Disney-style princess paraphernalia. New technologies abound: this year, for the first time “Abby’s Flying Fairy School” will be in CGI.
Past episodes on the anniversary DVD boxed set serve as a kind of time tunnel to lost eras: In 1971 the Rev. Jesse Jackson, natty in an afro and a gold medallion, prompted little children to recite “I Am Somebody.” In 1998 Tony Bennett serenaded a worm who yearned for outer space with the song, “Slimey to the Moon.” Disco, rap and hip-hop have all had their “Sesame Street” moment.
This season has an Om sensibility. “My mom takes me to yoga class, I love doing yoga,” a little girl in pigtails says in an episode that ran in October. She is narrating a short film that shows a pixieish teacher and her pupils folding into the downward dog position. After class her mother arrives with a plastic water bottle. “She says it’s important to drink water when you exercise,” the girl explains. “When I grow up I want to be a yoga teacher.”
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<a href="http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/turning-into-your-mother/">One on those things you say that your own parents said.</a>
<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1233164/Because-I-said-Eight-mothers-admit-repeating-old-adages-parents-used-them.html">They took it from this article</a>
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