In today's world where many social services for young people are being scaled back due to budgetary constraints, outreach programs such as Project Safe Place are important to know about. The program got its start in 1983 in Louisville, and since then has spread to many parts of the country. Essentially, the Safe Place program creates a network of locations (such as schools, fire stations, YMCAs,...

December 2004 saw the release of The State of the World's Children 2005 report from the international organization UNICEF, and it contained some rather troubling findings. Based on the material in this report, more than one billion children are denied the healthy and protected upbringing promised by 1989's Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is the world's most widely adopted human rights...

While the Natural Start Alliance is primarily an advocacy group for getting kids outdoors, there are a number of interesting resources on the group's website. Readers may like to start by perusing the Bright Ideas section, which recently displayed an article on the No Child Left Inside legislation recently introduced to the House of Representatives with bipartisan support. There is also a section...

Created by Dr. Matthew Grenby, Hockliffe Research Fellow at De Montfort University, this site presents digitized versions of about 100 late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British books for children. Plans are underway to mount the entire Hockliffe catalog of over 1,000 early children's books on the Web as the entry point to the digitized versions. Once a title is selected, page images...

On April 13, 2000, the National Reading Panel (NRP) released the results of "the largest, most comprehensive evidenced-based review ever conducted of research on how children learn reading." Established in response to a 1997 congressional directive, the NRP is composed of "leading scientists in reading research, representatives of colleges of education, reading teachers, educational...

From the National Library of Canada, this entertaining site takes the user page-by-page through the creation of a picture book, Zoom Upstream, written by Tim Wynne-Jones and illustrated by Eric Beddows. Zoom Upstream is the third book chronicling the adventures of Zoom the cat; in this one he visits Egypt. The eight main sections of the site, in either French or English, trace the book's progress...

On April 13, 2000, the National Reading Panel (NRP) released the results of "the largest, most comprehensive evidenced-based review ever conducted of research on how children learn reading." Established in response to a 1997 congressional directive, the NRP is composed of "leading scientists in reading research, representatives of colleges of education, reading teachers, educational...

First, the CCB site offers "a non-circulating collection of more than 14,000 recent and historically significant trade books for youth, birth through high school, plus review copies of nearly all trade books published in the U.S. in the current year." Additionally, there are over 1,000 reference titles on the study of literature and storytelling for youth. The second site, from the University of...

The mission of the International Children's Digital Library is "to have every culture and language represented so that every child can know and appreciate the riches of children's literature from the world community." It's a lofty goal indeed, and by looking over their website, visitors will find that they are well on their way to achieving this goal. So far, they have placed hundreds of books...

Reading Rockets is a program, initiated by public television and funded by the U.S. Department of Education, that addresses how young children learn to read, why they struggle to read, and how adults can help. The Reading Rockets website takes a multimedia approach to getting information out to parents and educators. To read the site in Spanish, click on "En espanol" halfway down the page, on the...