TYO Recommends: Friday, April 13, 2012
Media Matters. The Fred Rogers Center has found a way to bring parents and children together with interactive DIGITAL MEDIA tools that bridge the generational divide. Activities like “Reading Together” and “Talking Together” give parents creative ideas for engaging with their little ones. So the next time your daughter or son gets excited about how the wheels on the bus go ‘round and ‘round, look to the Rogers Center for activities in fingerplay, honing rhyme, rhythm, and recall memory skills in your little ones!
Drool on Page? A-Okay! Though babies often forget, many parents remember the difficulties of reading to infants and children under the age of three, long before the prospect of reading becomes a reality for most children. The DROOL ON PAGES, the eagerness to flip faster, the inability to get through the cow jumping over the moon before the little one seizes the book and gnaws at the pages. Education Week comments on the benefits of this interaction between children and their books, even before they are able to comprehend the stories being told or read the words printed before them. The next time the baby grabs that book at story time- let the little one play away! A little drool never hurt anybody, and might actually help.
Make Way for Royalty. Hear, hear, the princess of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia speaks up on necessary changes to bring her country and kingdom to fulfill its true potential to provide for its citizens and secure its place in the global community. While the divorcee condemns practices curtailing a WOMAN’S RIGHT to a divorce and limiting women’s educational opportunities, she cautions against a sudden sweep of radical changes such as permitting women to drive. “I am definitely for women driving but I don't think this is the right time for a reversal of this law. In the current climate if a woman drives, she could be stopped, harassed beaten or worse to teach her a lesson.” The BBC reports.
Unite University! As students around the world flock to college campuses in droves during the spring of college admissions, universities in the MENA region evaluate YOUTH skill-building in college for the job market. With post-graduate unemployment on the rise around the world and especially in the MENA region, universities are hard pressed to create strategies and techniques to best equip their students for the work place and the competitive global market.
Elections and Education, the US chimes in. If you ask American VOTERS what the most important issues are in the upcoming presidential election for the fall of 2012, you would hear a wide spread of concerns from women’s reproductive health issues to the ballooning costs of healthcare in America and President Obama’s much-challenged health care reforms. You might even hear the unfailingly persistent claims that the nation’s leader is in fact a closet Muslim. What you might not hear is the fervent debate on the deteriorating state of the US education system churning in the minds of a large percentage of eligible voters. With subsidized federal loans for advanced degrees on the budgetary chopping block, many have diverted their attention from the antics of the primary race to lasting concerns about the path of education in America. The Huffington Post highlights.