NEW YORK & FRAMINGHAM, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–This summer, Staples (Nasdaq: SPLS) and DoSomething.org teamed up with the stars from ABC Family’s hit show Pretty Little Liars to encourage teens and Staples customers nationwide to make a difference. The collective efforts raised $810,000, the most ever in campaign history, for the fourth annual “Staples for Students” national school supply drive.

The cast of ABC Family’s series — Lucy Hale, Troian Bellisario, Ashley Benson, and Shay Mitchell – teamed up with Staples and DoSomething.org to kick off the national school supply drive in May starring in a public service announcement to encourage teens to join the cause.

“Throughout the entire campaign, we have seen teens rise to the occasion. The donations Staples collected will help students across the country get their school year off to a great start, and I was just so happy to be part of such a meaningful cause,” said Troian Bellisario.

Young Hollywood stars also supported the campaign by attending the Staples for Students event at the Globe Theater at Universal following the Teen Choice Awards. Along with the stars from Pretty Little Liars, actress Olivia Munn and singers JoJo, Jason Derulo and others joined teen volunteers to fill hundreds of backpacks with school supplies for Boys & Girls Club members in Los Angeles.

“I was so honored not just to host the event in Los Angeles, but to also be one of the spokespeople for this year’s campaign,” said Ashley Benson. ”I am truly inspired by the teens who came out to do something to help kids in their communities.”

All summer long, Staples customers were able to give back to their local communities by dropping off new school supplies or making a donation at the register with 100 percent of the proceeds benefiting local students. Since 2008, the campaign with DoSomething.org has raised more than $2.5 million for youth throughout the country.

As part of this fourth annual campaign, Staples also provided thousands of backpacks filled with supplies to Boys & Girls Club members in communities affected by this year’s devastating tornadoes, including Tuscaloosa, Ala., Joplin, Mo. and Springfield, Mass. so children in those hard-hit areas could go back to school with the supplies they need to succeed.

“It’s been amazing to see our customers and the many teens who donate their time and energy during the summer to benefit this great cause,” said Christine Mallon, vice president of retail marketing at Staples. “We thank everyone for coming together to ensure students in our local communities will have the tools they need to succeed in school.”

In support of the USDA’s recently updated nutrition initiative “MyPlate”, Learning ZoneXpress (LZX) is now offering a variety of Kids MyPlate products to promote the Dietary Guidelines for children.

“We are excited to release a kid-friendly version of MyPlate. With high rates of childhood obesity, it’s important for children to learn how to build a healthy plate,” said Melanie Nelson, President and CEO of Learning ZoneXpress.

Healthy food characters that are friendly and fun deliver the message of balancing food with physical activity. The new products from LZX, include:

• Kids MyPlate Poster – 18” x 24” A colorful poster featuring kid-sized portions of healthy food choices shown from each food group.
• Kids MyPlate Tablet – 8 ½” x 11” These handouts include an empty plate for kids to write or draw in their favorite foods. It also includes tips for parents for making the best food choices for their kids.
• Kids MyPlate Bookmark –These appealing bookmarks feature key MyPlate messages representing each food group. (PRWeb)

Incoming search terms for the article:

• usda kids plates

Imagine Learning has released a significant upgrade to Bookster™, an interactive reading app for kids. The popular app was designed to entertain young readers while helping them develop reading skills. The app now features a bookshelf with eight new books and is available for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, as well as Android devices.

Bookster is a read-along storytelling app that not only reads to kids but also records and plays their voices—all while teaching vocabulary. With turnable pages, a read-along mode that highlights words as they’re read aloud, and an easy-to-use interface, Bookster is designed to make reading fun and easy for even the youngest of learners.

The upgraded version of Bookster features nine books filled with dynamic artwork from acclaimed artists, including New York Times bestselling illustrator Maryn Roos. New page previews and story summaries allow users to preview books before adding them to their bookshelves. The app can be downloaded for free through iTunes, the Android Market, or the Amazon Appstore for Android. More books will be added to the app in the coming months.

Imagine Learning, best known for its award-winning language and literacy software solution, Imagine Learning English, sees mobile applications as another way to deliver engaging, effective literacy instruction to children.

“Kids naturally love to explore picture books, but today’s mobile devices invite an even higher level of engagement,” said Clydie Wakefield, executive director of curriculum development. “With Bookster, kids can touch the words on the screen and hear them read again, turn pages, listen to a narrator and even become narrators themselves by recording their own voices. In the process, they learn print concepts, expand their vocabulary and develop a love of reading.”

The app was designed with both children and educators in mind, said Derek Dobson, director of product management at Imagine Learning. “Bookster is a wonderful app for both home and school use,” said Dobson. “More and more classrooms are implementing mobile devices like iPads and iPods as part of the curriculum, and we are working to meet schools’ technology needs by supplying them with quality content that is both educational and engaging.”

In a review on iPad Curriculum, a website that spotlights top educational iPad applications and practices, Edublog award-winner Kelly Tenkely identified Bookster as a valuable tool for helping students develop fluency.

Tenkely noted that giving students feedback on proper pronunciation and enunciation can be a challenge. Bookster helps teachers provide better feedback by enabling students to “play back their recording and compare what they recorded with the prerecorded narration, hearing the difference for themselves,” Tenkely wrote.

About Bookster
Designed by educators to help kids of all ages develop literacy skills, Bookster makes beginning to recognize and read new words fun and easy for even the youngest of readers.

Your kids will love Bookster’s

• Entertaining illustrations
• Engaging narration by kids their age
• Read-and-record mode that records as they (or you) read out loud
• Listen-to-recording mode that reads the book with their narration
• Read-along mode that highlights words as they are read aloud, teaching word recognition and vocabulary
• Easy-to-use interface
• Turnable pages that let them move at their own pace
• Interactive pages with tappable words

(PRWeb)

The Child Rescue Centre, a program of Helping Children Worldwide, has established a partnership with Faith Alliance Against Slavery and Trafficking (FAAST), a program of World Hope International to combat child trafficking and forced child labor in Sierra Leone, West Africa. FAAST works closely with the Sierra Leone Ministry of Social Welfare and Gender Affairs and the Child Rescue Centre works in partnership with the Sierra Leone Conference of the United Methodist Church, together these organizations will have a larger impact on child trafficking. In the entire country, no long-term shelter exists for child survivors of forced labor or trafficking.

In the 18th and 19th century, Sierra Leone was a major center for the slave trade in West Africa. In the 1820s, a population of former slaves returned to Sierra Leone and named the capital Freetown. Now, in the 21st century, in Freetown and throughout Sierra Leone, slavery and trafficking have returned, exploiting the most vulnerable – the children. In Sierra Leone 48% of children aged 5 to 14 are engaged in child labor, ranking third in the world (UNICEF 2009). Children in Sierra Leone are exploited in the worst forms of child labor, many of them in agriculture, mining, fishing, and domestic work (US Dept. of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs 2009).

Child traffickers find rural families with too many mouths to feed. They promise parents that they will take their unschooled children to the city to be educated, but instead sell or force those children into lives of servitude and suffering. In the streets of the cities, there are children everywhere. Children who should be in school are forced to sell in the streets, collect scrap metal, or break rocks at the quarries. Boys who should be playing soccer are in the mines, forced to search for diamonds for hours in the blazing heat. Girls are sold into terrible lives of child prostitution.

Sierra Leone is perpetually at the bottom of the United Nations Human Development Index, ranking low in indicators such as malnutrition, infant and maternal mortality, and life expectancy.

The recently released U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report 2011 assesses efforts by 184 governments worldwide to fight sexual exploitation, forced labor, and modern-day slavery. In that report, the previous paradigm for addressing child trafficking was the “3P’s”: prosecution, protection, and prevention. The 2011 report recommends a fourth “P”: partnership. The problem of trafficking is so great that it is essential for agencies to coordinate their programs and capitalize on combined resources.

Through the Child Rescue Centre’s partnership with FAAST to implement anti-trafficking interventions in Sierra Leone the organizations will provide the help children need to be rehabilitated and reintegrate into society. Communities will be educated about identifying signs of trafficking. Efforts will be made to prevent trafficking before it starts, identifying desperate families and providing assistance before they are forced to place their children into trafficking situations.

The Child Rescue Centre’s mission is to help the most vulnerable children in Sierra Leone. Children who are victims of trafficking and forced labor are in desperate need of protection and trauma/behavioral care. The vision is to transform the existing Child Rescue Centre in Bo, Sierra Leone into a replicable and sustainable centre of excellence, designed to rescue child survivors of forced labor and trafficking, gradually restoring and reunify children to nurturing local families.

The Child Rescue Centre, which was established in 2000 during the brutal 10 year civil war in Sierra Leone, has become a nationally recognized model for bringing up at-risk children to become leaders. The CRC has a long-standing partnership with the Sierra Leone Conference of the United Methodist Church. Today the CRC provides safety and hope to nearly 300 children who have been rescued from desperate situations.

The CRC provides children with nutritious meals, clothing, education, healthcare, and a safe, nurturing environment. CRC children are trained to become strong leaders in their homes, communities, and in their country. The CRC consists of a residential program, foster care, a child support program which helps children and families in the wider community, and a post secondary scholarship program.
The Child Rescue Centre is a program of Helping Children Worldwide, an umbrella organization that capitalizes on the power of partnerships to holistically address the needs of vulnerable children in Sierra Leone, West Africa, and in Herndon, Virginia. (PRWeb)

As our country’s 55 million school-aged kids head back to the classroom this fall, many are facing learning challenges, struggling to grasp what they are being taught, and others exhibit behavioral problems that challenge their teachers and make it difficult for them to make friends.

Poor working memory may be the cause of their difficulties. Working memory is the cognitive function responsible for keeping information accessible, manipulating it and using it in thinking. Often called the “engine of learning,” working memory capacity is strongly correlated with academic performance and successful socialization.

To help schools ensure that all students are successful, Pearson today launched Cogmed Working Memory Training for K-12 students in U.S. schools. Successfully used in schools in Sweden since 2003, Cogmed training is an evidence-based, computer training program that strengthens students’ working memory and learning abilities. Delivered to students via computer at school or at home, Cogmed Working Memory Training consists of 25 sessions of 30 to 40 minutes each over a five-week period.

“Cogmed has a record of successfully transforming the lives of students and adults when used by clinicians in private practice, as well as in schools in Sweden and pilot schools in the United States,” said Jonas Jendi, general manager and vice president, Cogmed. “With today’s launch of Cogmed Working Memory Training for schools, we will be able to reach even more children around the country who need help building the working memory capacity that will allow them to succeed academically.”

Joni Holmes, Ph.D., a cognitive developmental psychologist and senior investigator scientist at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, was one of the first independent academic researchers to investigate the effects of Cogmed training.

“Children with poor working memory skills struggle to complete many common classroom activities that require large amounts of information to be held in mind, and typically fall behind in both reading and math at school. In our research, working memory scores improved for the majority of these children immediately after completing the Cogmed program and were sustained for a further six months without any additional intervention. Gains in working memory were measured by independent, and validated working memory assessments that were not trained,” said Dr. Holmes.

Rob Budwig, special-education supervisor for Southern Trinity Unified School District in Dinsmore, Calif., has been piloting Cogmed with students since 2009. His district has also seen dramatic academic improvements in students who completed the Cogmed training. “Overall, we have seen students no longer qualify for special education and no longer need it. We have seen students move from being two years behind their peers in academics to, in one year, catching up and staying with their peers. We have seen students move from struggling academically, hating school so much that they developed psychosomatic symptoms of being sick to avoid school, and not having any friends – to being among the top students in the class, enjoying school and developing friendships.”

Best of all, Budwig said, the results have lasted. “Our first group of trainees is in their third school year since their training, and we have not seen any change in their new behaviors or success. In fact, some are still making gains.”

Across the country in Ohio, Barbara Marsh, the district literacy specialist for Bay Village City Schools, used Cogmed with the students in her ninth-grade reading intervention class during the 2010-2011 school year. Her class is composed of students who have learning disabilities, English Language Learners and many who face socio-economic challenges. Marsh credits Cogmed with a significant part of her students’ success last school year.

“My students saw three years’ growth on a nationally standardized reading test, and 100 percent passed the state reading test,” said Marsh. “That kind of transformation is truly exceptional. When my students saw that they could be academically successful, it helped them build confidence in every aspect of their life at school. We will definitely be using Cogmed training next school year and, I hope, for many years to come.”

For nearly a decade, rigorous scientific research has been conducted and published in leading, peer-reviewed scientific journals, such as Science, Nature Neuroscience, and the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, demonstrating that Cogmed training is effective. No other brain-training product or attention-training method has Cogmed’s extensive foundation of research validation.

“There are so many interventions being marketed to parents and schools who are desperate to help kids who struggle with memory retention, but they don’t have a research base and proven results. With its strong foundation in research, Cogmed is a program that can be relied on to make a difference,” said Arthur Lavin, M.D., Cleveland. Dr. Lavin was a pioneer in introducing Cogmed to the United States and has been successfully using Cogmed training in his pediatric practice since 2006. “We can tell teachers and parents that there is an 80 percent chance that it will improve children’s lives. That cannot be said about any other intervention for cognitive function in the United States.”

Pearson provides professional development and implementation support for schools that use Cogmed Working Memory Training. Introductory pricing is $980 for a group of students. For more information about Cogmed Working Memory training for schools, visit http://www.education.cogmed.com or contact Susan Parrino, susan.parrino(at)pearson(dot)com, 888-748-3828.

About Pearson

Pearson (NYSE:PSO), the global leader in education services, education technology and school solutions, provides innovative print and digital education materials for preK through college, student information systems and learning management systems, teacher professional development, career certification programs, and testing and assessment products that set the standard for the industry. Pearson’s other primary businesses include the Financial Times Group and the Penguin Group. For more information, go to http://www.pearsonassessments.com. (PRWeb)