Showing posts with label Children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Children. Show all posts

31 May 2013

Dr. Dean: Transcendental Meditation In Education

The alarming rise of classroom stress fuels widespread problems in education, including poor academic achievement, anxiety, depression, school violence, and teacher burnout. To help neutralize this stress, many schools are establishing a “Quiet Time” period at the start and end of each school day, two 10 to 15 minute sessions when students sit quietly to rest and/or read silently. Increasingly, schools are offering their students and teachers the opportunity to learn and practice during these Quiet-Time periods the Transcendental Meditation program of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a simple, scientifically proven, nonreligious technique for reducing stress, improving health, and developing an individual’s full creative potential. Extensive published research in education has shown that this program strengthens physiological and cognitive foundations of learning, while promoting healthy lifestyle choices and positive behavior.

Website: Stress Free Schools



TM & ADHD

16 May 2013

Free To Learn

Free to Learn is a documentary that offers a perspective of the daily happenings at The Free School in Albany, New York. Like many of today’s radical and democratic schools, The Free School expects children to decide for themselves how to spend their days. The Free School, however, is unique in that it transcends obstacles that prevent similar schools from reaching a economically and racially diverse range of students and operates in the heart of a city. For over thirty years in perhaps the most radical experiment in American education, this small inner-city alternative school has offered its students complete freedom over their learning. There are no mandatory classes, no grades, tests, or homework, and rules are generally avoided. As a last resort, rules are created democratically by students and teachers, often at the prompting of a student.

21 March 2013

Logan LaPlante: Hackschooling Makes Me Happy

When 13 year-old Logan LaPlante grows up, he wants to be happy and healthy. He discusses how hacking his education is helping him achieve this goal.

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life.”  (John Lennon)

8 March 2013

Sugata Mitra: School In The Cloud

Professor Sugata Mitra, whose research inspired the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, has been named the 2013 TED Prize winner. The professor of educational technology, who has used the slums of India to show that children, irrespective of who or where they are, can learn freely using computers has become the first $1m prize winner in TED prize's eight-year history. The TED Prize grants its winner $1m for ‘A wish that can inspire the world’. Professor Mitra’s ‘wish’ is:

'My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Help me build the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online. I also invite the global community to create their own miniature child-driven learning environments and share their discoveries.'



Short version with Dutch subtitles: Self Learning Children

The Hole In The Wall: self organising systems in education.



23 February 2013

Katie's Crops Feed The Homeless

It started with a tiny cabbage seedling that Katie Stagliano, a third grader in South Carolina, took home and tended until it grew to an amazing 40 pounds! Katie donated that cabbage to a local soup kitchen. Now 11, Katie has several gardens and has donated 2 tons of fresh produce to organizations that serve people in need!

22 February 2013

The Dumbing Down Of America

'The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality'.
Henry Louis Mencken

This video is just a brief introduction to a very serious subject.

21 November 2012

Meditation Helps

In the 2002-2003 school year, there were 41 murders in the neighborhood of Visitacion Valley Middle School. Young students were playing "cops and robbers" with real guns, and many suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2007, the principal instituted a program called "Quiet Time" to teach meditation to every student in the school, with dramatic results. Truancy rate fell by more than 7 percent (while the average for the State rose to 30 percent) and suspensions fell by more than 50 percent. Twelve minutes at the beginning and twelve minutes at the end of school day have given these children a coping mechanism to deal with the many stresses of poverty and violence in their lives.

19 November 2012

One World, One Heart Beating

An anthem to global unity sung and played entirely by children (with a video created by a 9-year old), "One World, One Heart Beating" is the creation of singer songwriter Oona McOuat to raise funds for children affected by war.

12 May 2012

Unschooling In Austria

Is going to school the only possibility? In Germany there still exists compulsory education. However, it doesn¹t exist in countries like Austria or France.
Just a few months ago, we visited our friend, Daniela *Ela* Gumpoltsberger in Upper Austria and we were totally surprised by her positive Unschooling-project! We were very happy to see the space and the courses she offers for the children that they can learn freely and happily. Therefore we decided to make a short film about her project. It is a project not only for children, but also for adults, to learn voluntarily, with joy and freedom.

30 April 2012

Adora Svitak: What Adults Can Learn From Kids

Child prodigy Adora Svitak says the world needs 'childish' thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and especially optimism. Kids' big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grownups' willingness to learn from children as much as to teach.

18 April 2012

Caine's Cardboard Arcade

Caine Monroy is a 9-year old boy who spent his summer vacation building an elaborate cardboard arcade in his dad's used auto parts store. He spent months perfecting the game designs, making displays for the prizes, designing elaborate security systems, and hand labeling paper-lunch-gift-bags. Unfortunately, his dad's store is in an industrial part of East L.A. and gets almost no foot traffic, so Caine had exactly zero customers... until a random filmmaker, Nirvan Mullick, stops in for a used door handle and buys a Fun Pass.

14 April 2012

Peach's Neet Feet

Shoes + Art + Love = Happiness. Watch this emotional, inspiring and beautiful story of Madison 'Peach' Steiner's service through shoe art for children with critical health issues. Madison's slogan, painted on her own shoes: 'From my heART to your sole' says it all. She is changing one child's world with every pair of shoes she sends out.


29 February 2012

What Babies Want

An Exploration of the Consciousness of Infants.
This a documentary exploring the spirituality of the newborn.



Part 2



Part 3



Part 4



Part 5



Part 6

19 January 2012

When I Grow Up

A short clip of a 6 year old sharing her concept of a community she will have when she grows up, based on Gift Economy. Unstaged, unprepared, just straight from the heart...
Listen to her, it is her generation that will see the world operate this way, after all! It is from the children that we will about the world to come, for they, as Khalil Gibran says, 'live in the house of tomorrow'.

13 January 2012

Who's Your Favourite?

It's Maddie vs Daddy as I interrogate my baby daughter to reveal her favourite parent. What takes place is a ruthless contest of cunning and skill... with one of us clearly out of our league.

5 January 2012

Consuming Kids: The Commercialization Of Childhood

Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world. Consuming Kids pushes back against the wholesale commercialization of childhood, raising urgent questions about the ethics of children's marketing and its impact on the health and well-being of kids.

7 December 2011

Vaccine Nation (Full Movie)

At the end of the eighteenth century, British physician Edward Jenner, with highly questionable medical credentials, initiated the theory and practice of live virus immunization that continues to serve as the scientific basis for the ever increasing vaccination of the world’s citizens. With the number of vaccinations given to infants and children rising, kids are receiving doses of toxic mercury and other heavy metals well above environmental safety levels.

Yet the medical evidence is clear. Mercury, known as thimerosal, and other heavy metal additives are highly toxic and threaten children with neurological damage. The long-term efficacy of global vaccination remains controversial, inconclusive and is suspect in light of the powerful corporate interests, lobbying efforts, and profits associated with a multi-billion dollar vaccine industry..

In his documentary film Vaccine Nation, award-winning investigative film director Dr. Gary Null challenges the basic health claims by government health agencies and pharmaceutical firms that vaccines are perfectly safe. This is one of the most critical questions facing today’s children and future generations to come. If inoculation with a large regimen of vaccines is safe, what can account for the rapid increase in autism and other mental disabilities that are now at epidemic proportions? And why isn’t the sudden onset of neurological illnesses in children being treated as an urgent crisis by our government and medical industries?

Weaving together interviews with many of the nations most expert medical researchers, private physicians specializing in autism, parents of children victimized by immunization, congressmen, vaccination activists, legal authorities and more, Vaccine Nation will awaken viewers to one of the continual perils to the health and future of children.



25 November 2011

This Way Of Life (Full Movie)

Shot over four years, This Way of Life is an intimate portrait of Peter Karena and his family. Masterful in the saddle and Hollywood handsome, Peter lives by an internal code of values and honor largely lost in modern times. Though European, Peter was adopted into a Maori family and is Maori in all but skin. He is a horse-whisperer, philosopher, hunter, and builder, a husband and father. Despite seemingly overwhelming challenges, Peter refuses to compromise. Especially troubling to Peter is his broken relationship with his adopted father – a malevolent man who refuses to leave him alone.

Peter’s wife Colleen Karena (Ngati Maniapoto) is the keeper of her family’s taonga tuku iho (heritage). A true matriarch, Colleen sees family as the center of the universe and mothering as the world’s most important job. As the film progresses, we discover her quiet exterior conceals a profound and beautifully articulated approach to parenting resulting in the physical competence and emotional openness of her children.

The film portrays the intimate life of the Karena family. In their early 30’s, Peter and Colleen have six kids and 50 horses. We follow them up into the Ruahine ranges and down to their hidden beach camp. Against these isolated backdrops we explore family relationships, their connection to nature, their keen survival skills and their absolute intimacy with each other and their horses.

Close advertisment and click play.


5 May 2011

What Makes The World A Better Place?

Subtitles:

Hello my name is Sophia and I'm gonna ask you what makes the world better.
Zephra, do you know 5 things that make the world better?
Sharing.
Sharing.
Hug Friends.
Have parties.
Ow spank. (kiss) Ow spank. (kiss) Love
Don't hit people.
Sharing.
Poo poo in the bum.
That's the funniest thing I ever heard.
Zephra. Zephra what makes the world better?
Um, Can't remember.
Aw Zephra.
She wiped my mouth
K? K. Poo Poo!
Maybe we can build a popcorn tree and we can build outside
Nature's candy
What are you picking your nose for?