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    If you want to help children develop language and speech skills, UCLA researchers say, listening to what they have to say is just as important as talking to them.

    The effect of a conversation between a child and an adult is about six times as great as the effect of adult speech input(输入)alone, the researchers found. “Adults speaking to children helps language develop, but what matters much more is the interaction, ”said the study's lead author, Frederick Zimmerman, an associate professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. The researchers also found that TV viewing didn't have much of an effect—positively or negatively—as long as it wasn't displacing conversations between an adult and a child.

    The UCLA study included 275 families with children between 2 months and 48 months old. They represented a variety of incomes and education. The researchers found that, in an average day, children heard about 13, 000 spoken words from adults and participated in about 400 adult-child conversations a day.

    Assessed separately, factors positively associated with language development included each additional 100 conversations a day and each 1, 000 words increase in the number of words spoken by adults and heard by children.  When looked at alone, TV was negatively associated with language development. But, when these three factors were analyzed together, the only one that stood out was conversation between adults and children.

    “The more a child speaks and interacts with an adult, the better idea a parent has about where the child is”, Zimmerman said. “Although it's mostly done unconsciously, parents will provide feedback and correct mistakes.  They'll also tailor their speech to the child.  Parents can give the children words by talking to them about what they're doing, such as, ‘I'm putting on your pajamas now'. But give your child the opportunity to talk, hopefully without the rest of the noise in the environment, ”she added. “If parents can carve out some conversation time—maybe at bath time or at dinner time—that's a wonderful thing. ”

    What are American high schools like? Well, I'm happy to tell you what I know.

    When I started school here, it had already been a week since the school opened. At this school, freshmen usually go on a trip for about three days at the beginning of school. Unfortunately I missed that wonderful trip, which would have been the best time to get to know my classmates. I was really sad. I wished I'd known about it earlier.

    Despite the disappointment, however, I gradually adapted to my new life and school.

    There is a space in the basement of the teaching building where students chat and meet each other. As we do not always have the same classrooms and classmates, the school wants us to get to know each other there. Students usually come to school early, sit in that space and have fun. Around the space, there are many lockers for students to leave their books in, so that students do not have to carry a heavy schoolbag everywhere.

    It really surprises me that we have almost no textbooks. We only have textbooks for World History and Algebra 2 and they are big and heavy, like bricks. For other classes, we only need binders (活页夹) with paper in them. Without textbooks, students learn things freely and actively. For example, my humanities teacher just teaches us what is in her mind at the time. We never know what we will learn.

    Another difference between American schools and Chinese schools is that American schools care about students' morality more than their academic studies. For example, if you do not finish your homework, you will just be asked to do it later, but if you cheat or lie, you will get a warning or even be kicked out.

    I think that most students here are good at schoolwork as well, but compared to Chinese students, they can make learning a more joyful experience. I think we should take the good points from our two different kinds of education to perfect our approach to studying.

    Children's Activities (6—13 years) — Summer 2017

    There is no chance of children getting bored in the holidays with these action-packed weeks of fun and games. Days begin with team building activities to help“break the ice” and get the children in the mood. The wonderfully safe and secure environment of Port Regis enables the children to explore the woods and enjoy their own creative play.

    WEEK 1: Festival of Sport (Monday 12nd July to Friday 26th July)

    The summer activities kick-off with a wonderful week of sporting fun including cricket, athletics other great team games. Swims in the pool and games in the gym.

    WEEK 1: Let's Go Wild (Monday 29th July to Friday 2nd August)

    A Whole week in the great outdoors with treasure hunts, camp bed and cave building along with amazing team games in woods. This week guarantees to be like no other. Navigate yourself through the huge spiders' web and guide balls through the huge ball maze… this is a great week for making new friends.

WEEK 3: Sporting Madness (Monday 5th August to Friday 9th August)

    A wild and strange week of tournaments and twin (both traiditional and a few of the homemade variety) games, but be warned, you might get wet! Arts and crafts, fun in the gym and swims in the pool make this a hard week. Besides exhaustion you'd better learn to get used to challenges and accept any result. Activities will be dependent on the weather.

    WEEK 3: Make a Racquet(球拍)（Monday 12th August to Friday 16^th August）

    What a racquet this week brings with all the bat, racquet and club sport you could wish for…crazy golf, tennis, hadmintion, cricket and table tennis to name but a foe for the children to enjoy.

    WEEK 5: Having a Bull (Monday 19th August to Friday 23rd August)

    Quizzjes, arts and crafts, fun in the gym and swims in the pool are not to be witnin this week of Fun.

    WEEK 6: Mgdal Medley (混战）(Tuesday 27th August to Fridy 30th August)

This week re-runs the best bits of the last five weeks with great team games and tournaments, action-packed ball sports, floaty fun in the pool and adventures in the woods.

    Children will need to bring:

    Swimming kit, plenty to drink and break snacks. Dependant on the weather, children will need either sunscreen and sun hats or wet weather gear.

    Why do I volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters of America? I have many reasons. Perhaps the biggest reason is that someone volunteered to help me. Years ago, I was on the other side of the table. I was lonely and felt kind of lost. More than once, I found myself on the wrong side of a jail cell(牢房). If someone hadn't stepped in, I probably wouldn't even be here right now.

    I've seen the work that Big Brothers Big Sisters has been doing all over the country and I'm pleased to be part of it. I've never done anything that made me prouder than my volunteering work. Big Brothers Big Sisters helped me get my head on straight. There are no words to describe the joy I get from helping somebody turn their life around.

    Don't tell anyone I said that, but volunteering is probably the fastest way to get over sadness or depression. Every time I start to feel bad, I talk to someone who needs my help and it makes me feel better and worse all at the same time. I feel better, because doing good things fills me with a sense of pride. I feel worse because I feel I have no right to complain about my situation especially when I hear what others are going through.

    I've come a long way from where I was. Volunteering is how I want to leave my mark on the world. I recommend volunteering work to everybody, especially for somebody who isn't sure where they're going in life. Helping someone find their path is often the best way to find yours.

    I had reached the age of twenty-eight. Still, I doubted the letter from my past would make it to me, all these years later. It was a simple creative writing assignment from when I was eighteen. The teacher collected our letters to our future selves in self-addressed envelopes with stamps and promised to mail them ten years later. Yet so much time had passed. Would he even remember?

    Thinking back on the letter, I vaguely recalled giving my future self some advice. When you're eighteen years old, twenty-eight seems like a grown-up age but I wasn't feeling as grown up as I believed my younger self had expected me to be.

    When the letter finally reached me, I opened it eagerly. It began," How much do you bet this letter will never get to you "It continued to greet me casually as if we were having an IM (instant messaging) chat. My eighteen-year-old self was so stressed! As a senior in high school, facing the SATS and college applications, I was apparently not quite happy and hoped I wouldn't worry so much in the future, and that I wouldn't forget to be present and enjoy my life!

    Contrary to my belief, my eighteen-year-old self did not have any demands of me, or expectations I might have failed to meet. Instead, she wrote," I'll stand by whatever you do. Even if you are not who I'm imagining now, I'll support you, because maybe who I' m imagining is someone else, and you are-well you're not someone else, you're me."

    I was blown away, and tears welled up in my eyes at this self-acceptance through time. I had put a lot of pressure on myself to be the best version of myself that I could be. However, I came to realize what I would have accomplished in ten years' time would pale in comparison to how I'd feel and who I'd be.

    Science is finaly beginning to embrace animals who were, for a long time, considered second-class citizens.

    As Annie Potts of Canterbury University has noted, chickens distinguish among one hundred chicken faces and recognize familiar individuals even after months of separation. When given problems to solve, they reason: hens trained to pick colored buttons sometimes choose to give up an immediate food reward for a slightly later (and better) one. Healthy hens may aid friends, and mourn when those friend die.

    Pigs respond meaningful to human symbols. When a research team led by Candace Croney at Penn State University carried wooden blocks marked with X and O symbols around pigs, only the O carriers offered food to the animals. The pigs soon ignored the X carriers in favor of the O's. Then the team switched from real-life objects to T-shirts printed with X or O symbols. Still, the pigs walked only toward the O-shirted people: they had transferred their knowledge to a two-dimensional format, a not inconsiderable feat of reasoning.

    I've been guilty of prejudiced expectations, myself. At the start of my career almost four decades ago, I was firmly convinced that monkeys and apes out-think and out-feel other animals. They're other primates(灵长目动物), after all, animals from our own mammalian(哺乳动物的) class. Fairly soon, I came to see that along with our closest living relatives, whales too are masters of cultural learning, and elephants express profound joy and mourning with their social companions. Long-term studies in the wild on these mammals helped to fuel a viewpoint shift in our society: the public no longer so easily accepts monkeys made to undergo painful procedure kin laboratories, elephants forced to perform in circuses, and dolphins kept in small tanks at theme parks.

    Over time, though, as I began to broaden out even further and explore the inner lives of fish, chickens, pigs, goats, and cows, I started to wonder: Will the new science of "food animals" bring an ethical (伦理的) revolution in terms of who we eat? In other words, will our ethics start to catch up with the development of our science?

    Animal activists are already there, of course, committed to not eating these animals. But what about the rest of us? Can paying attention to the thinking and feeling of these animals lead us to make changes in who we eat?