When you choose to send one of our free E-cards, you save paper and give friends and family the opportunity to enjoy the wonder of nature.

    Celebrate the beauty of our natural world and send an E-card to friends and family who care about protecting our planet. Feel free to set your E-card to arrive on any day you please.

    Looking for something to do besides sending an E-card?

    Check out our Everyday Environmentalist page with eco-tips on how to live greener, and become an e-member of our free global online community or calculate(计算) your carbon footprint. You can even upload your photos to our site and your photo may be featured in an E-card next year!

    One day when I was 12, my mother gave me an order: I was to walk to the public library, and borrow at least one book for the summer. This was one more weapon for her to defeat my strange problem — inability to read.

    In the library, I found my way into the “Children's Room.” I sat down on the floor and pulled a few books off the shelf at random. The cover of a book caught my eye. It presented a picture of a beagle. I had recently had a beagle, the first and only animal companion I ever had as a child. He was my secret sharer, but one morning, he was gone, given away to someone who had the space and the money to care for him. I never forgot my beagle.

    There on the book's cover was a beagle which looked identical to my dog. I ran my fingers over the picture of the dog on the cover. My eyes ran across the title, Amos, the Beagle with a Plan. Unknowingly, I had read the title. Without opening the book, I borrowed it from the library for the summer.

    Under the shade of a bush, I started to read about Amos. I read very, very slowly with difficulty. Though pages were turned slowly, I got the main idea of the story about a dog who, like mine, had been separated from his family and who finally found his way back home. That dog was my dog, and I was the little boy in the book. At the end of the story, my mind continued the final scene of reunion, on and on, until my own lost dog and I were, in my mind, running together.

    My mother's call returned me to the real world. I suddenly realized something: I had read a book, and I had loved reading that book. Everyone knew I could not read. But I had read it. Books could be incredibly wonderful and I was going to read them.

    I never told my mother about my “miraculous” (奇迹般地) experience that summer, but she saw a slow but remarkable improvement in my classroom performance during the next year. And years later, she was proud that her son had read thousands of books, was awarded a PhD in literature, and authored his own books, articles, poetry and fiction. The power of the words has held.

    Diet Coke, diet Pepsi, diet pills, no-fat diet, vegetable diet… We are surrounded by the word "diet" everywhere we look and listen. We have so easily been attracted by the promise and potential of diet products that we have stopped thinking about what diet products are doing to us. We are paying for products that harm us psychologically and physically.

    Diet products significantly weaken us psychologically. On one level, we are not allowing our brain to admit that our weight problems lie not in actually losing the weight, but in controlling the consumption of fatty, high-calorie, unhealthy foods. Diet products allow us to jump over the thinking stage and go straight for the scale(秤)instead. All we have to do is to swallow or recognize the word "diet" in food labels.

    On another level, diet products have greater psychological effects. Every time we have a zero-calorie drink, we are telling ourselves without our awareness that we don't have to work to get results. Diet products make people believe that gain comes without pain, and that life can be without resistance and struggle.

    The danger of diet products lies not only in the psychological effects they have on us, but also in the physical harm that they cause. Diet foods can indirectly harm our bodies because consuming them instead of healthy foods means we are preventing our bodies from having basic nutrients. Diet foods and diet pills contain zero calorie only because the diet industry has created chemicals to produce these wonder products. Diet products may not be nutritional, and the chemicals that go into diet products are potentially dangerous.

    Now that we are aware of the effects that diet products have on us, it is time to seriously think about buying them. Losing weight lies in the power of minds, not in the power of chemicals. Once we realize this, we will be much better able to resist diet products, and therefore prevent the psychological harm that comes from using them.

    Since 1904, Ravinia Festival has been Chicago's “sound of summer”, a place where you can meet up with your friends, have a wonderful time and hear some of the greatest music in the world. We've got stars on the stage and stars in the sky, and it's all within your reach. But there's more to Ravinia than merely the world's greatest music. For as many people who walk through Ravinia's gate each summer, there are just as many ways to enjoy what we call “The Ravinia Experience”. For some, it all starts with a picnic picked up along the way, greeting your friends at your favorite spot on the lawn.

    Ravinia Dining

    Whether you want to add a bottle of wine and some cheese to your picnic on the lawn or sit down to a meal, Ravinia has a wide variety of choices and we welcome you to explore them all.

    Ravinia gifts

    There are two locations for your shopping convenience! Visit our Main Store in the Dining Pavilion. There you will find different CDs, jewelry, games and more. Or fill your more immediate needs at the shop located behind the Martin Theatre.

    How to Buy Tickets Online

    Tickets for the 2018 season begin to go on sale online on Tuesday April 25. Ravinia Festival's online ticketing makes ordering tickets for your favorite performances easier than ever before. It is available 24 hours a day at www.ravinia.org.

    Click on the date of your choice to select an event, select your seats and add it to your ticket order. Once you have selected all the events you wish to attend, simply enter your payment information and submit your order.

    By Phone

    Phone sales for the 2018 season start on Monday May 22.

    Order tickets by phone by calling 847-266-5100.

    Monday- Friday: 10: 00 am-5: 00 pm

    Saturday/Sunday: Closed

We can create learning moments that students remember forever if we open up our classrooms to awe and wonder. 

Toward the end of my high school year, our Spanish teacher organized a trip to see an Andean band perform in Philadelphia. My classmates and I egged one another on ironically（讽刺地）:Who could enjoy the show? The performers' clothing seemed odd. The instruments, strange. But then the performers kicked in, dancing to their bombo and wancara drums around the stage and the panpipes and quena announced a kind of sound—new to us. 

We had spent too little time discussing the culture of the Inca in social studies but its traditions came alive for us that evening. Once the wonderful performance lit up the stage and the hall filled up with music, my teenage cynicism disappeared. I rose out of my chair to dance with honest joy. 

I have spent the last seven years living and working in South America. But my thirst for cultural exploration and a desire to understand the world outside my language and country has been alive longer than that. Sometimes I think that night dancing to those ancient rhythms unlocked this fascination. Why do I remember it so clearly decades later?

In his recent book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, psychology professor Dacher Keltner explains that "brief moments of awe are as good for your mind and body as anything you might do." Besides being a memorable emotion, awe boosts curiosity, builds humility, helps with critical thinking, and makes people feel more connected. It even makes us happier. "Twenty years into teaching happiness, "Keltner writes about how to find deep happiness, "I have an answer: FIND AWF."

Moving forward, let's do our best to build instances of awe into our curriculum（课程）. So when our former students approach us on the subway years later, they will recall the magical moments from their days spent in our classes. 

Teachers across America are struggling to decide whether to view artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT as friends or enemies in the classroom. Our study on whether AI affects student creativity shows that the answer isn't always simple. 

In the study, we asked college students to brainstorm — without technology — all the ways a paper clip can be used. A month later, we asked them to do the same, but using ChatGPT. We found that AI can be a useful brainstorming tool, quickly generating ideas that can spark creative exploration. But there are also potential negative effects on students' creative thinking skills and self-confidence. While students reported that it was helpful to "have another brain", they also felt that using AI was "the easy way out" and didn't allow them to think on their own. 

The results call for a thoughtful approach to using AI in classrooms and striking a balance that inspires students' creativity while utilizing AI's capabilities. The good news is that the students in our study generated more diverse and detailed ideas when using AI. They found that AI was useful for kick-starting brainstorming sessions. 

When it comes to brainstorming with AI, some students voiced concerns about over-reliance on the technology, fearing it might hurt their own thoughts and, consequently, confidence in their creative abilities. Some students reported a "fixation of the mind", meaning that once they saw the AI's ideas, they had a hard time coming up with their own. Some students also questioned the originality of ideas generated by AI. Our research noted that while using ChatGPT improved students' creative output individually, the AI's ideas tended to be repetitive overall. 

The study results indicate that allowing students to practice creativity independently first will strengthen their belief in themselves and their abilities. Once they complete this, AI can be useful in furthering their learning, much like teaching long division to students before introducing a calculator. That's to say, teaching students to be creative thinkers rather than rely on AI for answers is the key to answering the question mentioned above.