Readable, teachable news.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Lots of people wear glasses to make their vision better, or even just for fashion.
But when Noah, 4, found out he needed glasses, he wasn’t happy about it.
In fact, he was downright sad.
His mother asked him why he was so sad about having to wear glasses.
Noah told her he was worried that everyone would laugh at him.
Noah’s mother started a Facebook page to show Noah that wearing glasses is cool.
She asked people to post pictures of themselves and their kids wearing glasses.
The good people of San Francisco, California can sleep a little more soundly.
Last Friday, their city was been made safer by a very special superhero.
Batman and a special Batkid spent the day patrolling the streets and battling crime.
Batkid’s real identity (ssssh, don’t tell anyone!) is five-year-old Miles.
Miles has been winning his own battle, ever since he was just one year old—against a disease called leukemia, which is a form of cancer.
Miles’s leukemia is in “remission,” which means that he is doing very well now. In fact, he started kindergarten this year.
Has Lego gotten grumpier?
A new study says that the faces on Lego minifigures have become less happy and more often mad or sad.
The study was designed to find out if the Lego characters have become grumpier over the years.
Christoph Bartneck works at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He loves Lego and even worked for the company in the 1990s. He worked with another researcher on the project.
They looked at all of the 6,000 figures made between 1975 and 2010.
They made a note of each figure’s facial expression: happy, angry, afraid, disgusted, surprised or sad.
They discovered that while in 1980, all of the figures were described as “smiley,” by 1990, only about 80 per cent of them were “smiley.”
Four-year-old Gavin Pope of Garfield, New Jersey, loves to cook.
But when his family decided to buy him an Easy-Bake Oven, they found that the colour and packaging made it look like a “girls only” toy.
The Easy-Bake Oven and its box are purple.
The packaging and advertising show only girls baking with it.
So McKenna Pope, Gavin’s 13-year-old sister, started an Internet campaign for a gender-neutral oven.
More than 54,000 people signed the petition.
Hasbro executives met with McKenna and told her they planned to introduce a black, silver and blue oven next fall.
Only a quarter of Canadian kids walk or bike to school and that’s not enough, according to a new “report card on physical activity for children and youth.”
Active Healthy Kids Canada (AHKC) is a Canadian charity that encourages children and their parents to get more exercise.
Their report found that only 24 per cent of five to 17-year-olds in Canada use “active transportation” to get to school.
“Active transportation” means not using cars, trains or buses.
On the other hand, their parents were twice as likely to walk to school when they were children.
Every year in its report card, AHKC focuses on one aspect of healthy living.
This year’s theme, “driving,” looked at how much exercise kids are getting when they travel to and from different places near their homes.
A four-year-old boy named Robert Tufts is the mayor of the small town of Dorset in Minnesota.
He was given the job last August – when he was only three – and will continue to be mayor until this August.
The boy was awarded the position after his name was pulled out of a hat.
Once a year, people who live in or nearby Dorset can pay $1 to have their name written on piece of paper and put into a hat.
Then a name is randomly drawn out of the hat, and the person whose name it is becomes the mayor.
Last year, Robert Tufts’ name was pulled out.
A program to prevent kids from dropping out of school is now available in Canada.
Reconnecting Youth is a U.S. program that helps kids gain self-esteem and cope with their emotions.
The Canadian program adds something more. It helps kids to see how anger can rule their lives.
The Canadian program is taught by social workers, who have training to help kids deal with anger that may be holding them back.
Many teens who are angry may also skip classes, insult teachers and even drop out of school, says Ed Schild, a spokesperson for the Reconnecting Youth program.
Reconnecting Youth has been a pilot project at R.H. King Academy in Toronto for the past two years.
I’m watching history happen, right in front of my eyes.
It’s 12:30 Eastern Time on Monday, May 6.
On my computer screen, I’m watching a live satellite feed from space.
An astronaut is singing and playing guitar. He’s singing a song he wrote (with Canadian songwriter Ed Robertson from the band the Barenaked Ladies) called I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)?
But the really exciting part is something I can’t see. Hundreds of thousands of children in Canada and throughout the world are also singing, right at this moment, singing the very same song.
It’s part of Music Monday, which is an annual event in Canada that began in 2005. Each year, a song is chosen and school children across the country learn it so they can sing it at the same time on the same day.
Artist Alex Law believes kids know best what a superhero should look like.
So, in a new online project she calls “Little Girls Are Better At Designing Superheroes Than You” she’s taken her inspiration from girls.
“I remember being a young girl myself and being unsatisfied with the female characters available to me,” she told TKN in an email.
“Most female superheroes are designed and written by adult men, and I don’t think adult men know or even care about what girls like.”
So, when she saw some little girls dressed as their favourite superheroes, she started drawing them.
And she turned them into superheroes.
Six young people and a guide walked 1,500 kilometres to bring awareness to the issues of First Nations people in North America. The walk was inspired by the Idle No More movement.
They called their walk, “The Journey of Nishiyuu.” In Cree, “nishiyuu” means “the people.”
The group left the Cree community of Whapmagoostui in Quebec on January 16. Along their walk, more than 300 people joined them; thousands more gathered with them at the end of their journey, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on March 25.
Along the way the group stopped at aboriginal communities. They also visited Victoria Island where Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence recently held a hunger strike to protest the Canadian government’s First Nations policies.
