As soon as the Thanksgiving holiday is over, Santa Clauses start appearing everywhere. It takes more than red clothing and a white beard to be a professional Santa In fact many successful Santas attend special classes.

    The CW Howard Santa School, one of the oldest Santa Claus school in the world, is in Midland, Michigan. It celebrated its 80th anniversary last year. Over 250 Santas gathered at the school to prepare for their seasonal work. Charlie Howard was the Santa Claus in the Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Parade for 17 years. He started the school in 1937.

    “At that time, there was a great need for good Santas. Santas didn't portray the character that we want. Santa Claus stands for all good things hut some of the gentlemen's images (形象) weren't up to the expectation,” said Charlie.

    The three-day Santa workshop teaches people “Santa sign language”, facts about deer and clothing and make-up style. The future Santas also become familiar with the newest wish list toys, gain (获得) interview experience for radio and television and even get advice on how to do their business taxes.

    It's said that about 15,000 students have graduated from the Santa school. They come from all over North America, Europe，Africa and Australia to study. Last year the school welcomed Santas from all 50 states as well as many other countries.

    The Santas never claim (声称) to be the one and only “real” Santa. Instead, they describe themselves as “the spirit of Christmas”. At the school's opening-night activity, they tell visiting children they are the “cousins of Santa”.

    Robert Davis says they also never promise children anything. Instead, they say they will try their best.

    After all, as Charlie Howard liked to say, “He is wrong who thinks Santa enters through the chimney (烟囱). Santa enters through the heart.''

    As countless unmade beds and unfinished homework assignments prove, kids need rules. Yet how parents make demands can powerfully influence a child's social skills, psychologists at the University of Virginia recently found after the conclusion of a study investigating the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

    Initially 184 13-year-olds filled out multiple surveys, including one to assess how often their parents employed psychologically controlling strategies, such as inducing guilt or threatening to withdraw affection. The kids rated, for example, how typical it would be for Dad to suggest that “if I really cared for him, I would not do things that caused him to worry”or for Mom to become “less friendly when I did not see things her way.”

    The researchers followed up with the subjects at ages 18 and 21, asking the young adults to bring along a close friend and, later, a romantic partner if they had one. These pairs were asked to answer hypothetical (假设的) questions that were purposefully written to inspire a difference of opinion. “We wanted to see whether they could navigate a disagreement in a healthy way, ”says study leader Barbara Oudekerk, now at the U. S. Department of Justice's bureau of statistics.

    In the October issue of Child Development, Oudekerk and her colleagues report that the 13-year-olds who had highly controlling parents struggled in friendly disagreements at age 18. They had difficulty stating their opinions in a confident, reasoned manner in comparison to the kids without controlling parents. And when they did speak up, they often failed to express themselves in warm and productive ways.

    The researchers suspect that pushy parents ruin their child's ability to learn how to argue his or her own viewpoint in other relationships. Although parents do need to set boundaries, domineering strategies imply that any disagreement will damage the bond itself. Separate findings suggest that parents who explain the reasons behind their rules and turn disagreements into conversations leave youngsters better prepared for future arguments.

    The consequences of tense or domineering relationships appear to get worse with time. This study also found that social difficulties at 18 predicted even poorer communication abilities at age 21. Psychologist Shmuel Shulman of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, who did not participate in the work, thinks these conclusions convincingly reveal how relationship patterns “carry forward” into new friendships.

    Nowadays kids can access various websites. However, they also need to aware of some websites that may bring them bad influences. There are a lot of good websites for kids that can be useful for their overall development.

    Kids, national geographic

    National Geographic Kids is one of the best websites for kids to stay updated with latest information on a wide range of topics. Every kid will surely find something important when he/she visits this website. It covers exciting information about activities, animals, education, fun and intellectual games, people and places, science and technology, stories, etc.

    Factmonster

    We know how much kids hate to study. If you also find it hard to make your kids study, you can ask him to visit Factmonster. This website is a fun way to study on all the school subjects. Kids will not have any punishments or long hours of lectures, but instead they will learn in a free way to study on their own!

    Clubpenguin

    Clubpenguin is an entertaining website, operated by Disney. As the name suggests, kids need to create a penguin alter ego (密友)and play online games and chat with fellow penguins, or friends. So, if you are looking for the chat rooms for kids only, then club penguin is a great choice for you! The best part is that all the chat information and history can be monitored by parents, in any time they want. Along with online chatting with friends, your kids can also participate in various activities that take place on club penguin, like drawing, painting! etc.

    For the first time, China's South Pole researchers can eat fresh vegetables grown regularly, according to Wang Zheng, the grower, who came home last month after a 400-day mission in Antarctica.

    "Growing vegetables in Antarctica reminded me of The Martian, a sci-fi movie about an astronaut who survives alone on Mars by eating potatoes he grows there," Wang said on Friday. "I totally understand the main character of the movie, I understand how he feels when he watches a small green plant grow in a fragile man-made environment,'' said the 40-year-old doctor. But he admitted that the conditions he faced in the Antarctic were much better than those in the film.

    Wang said the growth chamber(生长室) at the Zhongshan Station, had only a low yield when it was established in 2013. The amount was too small to make it possible for researchers to have vegetable dishes. To increase the yield, he reduced the number of vegetable varieties and focused on only some fast-growing ones, which makes the output stable. As a result, during much of his stay there, at least one vegetable dish, such as cucumbers, lettuce or cabbage, was served at every meal for a group of 18 researchers.

    Wang, an orthopedist, said he knew nothing about botany or farming before he arrived at the station in December, 2014. "I was given this job probably because my office is next to the growth chamber, and as a doctor, I had more spare time than others," Wang said. He considered many factors, such as light, temperature and humidity. Light music is played in the 16-square - meter greenhouse around the clock. "Mild music is good for vegetable growth," he said. "We also played Buddhist music, which has soft melody."

    "Growers before me did very good work. My job was to maintain the chamber and keep everything working." Before the  harvest, researchers had a very limited vegetable supply—mostly potatoes and cabbage, which taste awful after months of storage. "Because of our success in growing vegetables, we can have fresh vegetables every day," he said. "The Russian station is no more than one kilometer away from ours. We even had enough vegetables to invite our Russian colleagues for dinner."

    BELJLNG—Eating at a Beijing restaurant is usually an adventure for foreigners, and particularly when they get the chance to order "chicken without sex life" or "red burned lion head".

    Sometimes excited but mostly confused, embarrassed or even terrified, many foreigners have long complained about mistranslations of Chinese dishes. And their complaints are often valid, but such an experience at Beijing's restaurants will apparently soon be history.

    Foreign visitors will no longer, hopefully, be confused by oddly worded restaurant menus in the capital if the government's plan to correctly translate 3, 000 Chinese dishes is a success and the translations are generally adopted.

    The municipal (市政) office of foreign affairs has published a book to recommend English translations of Chinese dishes, which aims to help restaurants avoid bizarre translations. "It provides the names of main dishes of famous Chinese cuisines in plain English," an official with the city's Foreign Affairs office said, "Restaurants are encouraged to use the proposed translations, but it will not be compulsory." It's the city's latest effort to bridge the culture gap for foreign travelers in China.

    "The book is a blessing to tourist guides like me. Having it, I don't have to rack my brains trying to explain Chinese dishes to foreign travelers," said Zheng Xiaodong, a 31-year-old employee with a Beijing-based travel agency.

    "I will buy the book as I major in English literature and I'd like to introduce Chinese cuisine culture to more foreign friends," said Han Yang, a postgraduate student at the University of International Business and Economics.

    It is not clear if the book will be introduced to other parts of China. But on Tuesday, this was the most discussed topic on weibo.com, China's most popular micro-blogging site.

    Most parents fear getting letters home from their children's school. They are usually informing them that their child is in big trouble. But ahead of the SATs exams next week, one school decided to send a letter of a different type.

    Bosses at Buckton Vale Primary School in Stalybridge sent letter to all pupils in the sixth grade to tell them how special and unique they are. The letter highlights all the natural skills and abilities the pupils have and everything that makes them "smart'' individuals.

    They are told how their laughter can brighten the darkest day and that the examiners do not know the pupils are kind, trustworthy and thoughtful.

    The letter, signed by the headmaster and two other teachers, has been put on the school's Facebook page and shared more than 9. 000 times with more than 7,000 likes.

    The letter reads, "Next week you will sit your SATs tests for maths, reading, spelling, grammar and punctuation. We know how hard you have worked, but there is something very important you must know. The SATs test does not assess all that makes each of you special and unique. The people who create these tests and score them do not know each of you in the way that we do and certainly not in the way your families do. "

    The letter goes on to say that the tests are not the most important thing in life, adding, "The scores you will get from this test will tell you something, but they will not tell you everything. There are many ways of being smart. You are smart!"

    The letter has been welcomed by many parents on Facebook. Lynn McPherson wrote, "That's great instilling (逐步灌输) hope, faith and belief. " And Mary Tilling said, "Every child school receive one of these. Brilliant. "