Dear Friends,
New members from my community on LinkedIn – WELCOME! There seems to be quite a few who joined our community this week. Five minutes ago, I had a following of 2828 on LinkedIn – a nice symmetrical number! The engagement on some of my regular posts and articles there is pretty good! I also enjoy the threads of those I follow and some of the groups I’m in. I spend much more time on LinkedIn than on Facebook and now I spend almost NO time on Twitter.
Are there any other platforms that you think we should be joining?
As for THAT photo of myself and my son last week. I had more activity on my Facebook in response to the photo than I have EVER had before!
COVID-19
At the start of the week, I had a good, fun session with David and Liz Gifford, the Children for Health artist and author. We have dreamed up rather a strange, but engaging story. It is pandemic related, but we want the story to feel ‘beyond the pandemic’ in its character. Suffice to say, it has a kind of lockdown within a lockdown theme! We talked a great deal about the need for all our stories to be first and foremost – good stories! Also, Liz and David have written a book for very young children that you can find on our curated list of resources.
Our free resources section has lots of great storybooks to read while we’re working on this one!
Sustainability in School Health Programming
I know I wrote about this last week, but I thought worth mentioning again as I have worked hard since then on a revised checklist that I think will become an important part of our programme design role in the months and years to come. I did a lot of interesting reflection on FAILURE and why some of the projects I’ve been involved with over the years just didn’t take root…
I’ve done this looking closely at the research too. I’d be very pleased to discuss this further, so do contact me if it’s something that interests you too. There are also those projects which, by all accounts, did ‘work’. It’s complex work but interesting too.
Getting Us Connected
We have hired Camila, an early career development professional and her part time (voluntary) role is to increase our global reach and network. The first country she is looking at is Kenya.
If you are a child-focussed organisation based in Kenya or your know organisations there that might welcome a message from us and who might like to know about our FREE resources, then please let us know.
Children for Health Online School
This is another topic that I raised last week. This week was about getting clearer about how the course could look. I’m gearing up to send out a survey to potential users of such a course. Let me know if you would like to help look at a draft of the survey or be in the first group I send it to.
This week, on the blog…
- Games Children Play around the World
- A feature on The Enabling Education Network (EENET) and their video training.
- Musical Fun Time – a sixth post with ideas for those entertaining young children at home or in groups.
- A review of an important study on Pedagogy, Curricula, Teaching Practices and Teacher Education in Developing Countries. There is such an amazing tie in between their 6 top teaching practices and the work that we do!
- The Eye Health Session of the week focuses on Balanced Diet.
- The LifeSkills Session of the Week focuses on Peer Pressure.
- Features Steve Pavlina’s work and this post on Broken Edges Problem Solving which we really like. I have to remind myself that’s is a great one to deploy at various times!
Become one of our 100 precious supporters! Please join us if you can!
…if you think our work is valuable and you are able, please consider donating at any level and enable us to make it through this difficult year. Click here to go to our donations platform (UK taxpayers can also add gift aid).
If you are not in a position to give, but have ideas or contacts with partners who might like to know more about our work, please get in touch.
Enjoy the next week. We are expecting higher than normal temperatures this week. This suits me, but not my family!
Clare