Ask any kid, and you'll likely hear that time spent with friends is the coolest and most important part of the school day. Educators, as well, acknowledge that making friends is one of the most valuable things children do as they learn and grow. But many parents are perplexed by their children's social lives, wondering how to help their kids cope with the challenges, heartbreaks, and the joys of making friends, losing them, and making friends again.

    “Friendships help children gradually learn to be independent, contributing members of a community and it's just as important as their academic growth” notes Diane Levin, Ph.D., author of “Remote Control Childhood.” However, it's a slow process. There are many social skills to learn, which advance with age and experience, trial and error, and experiencing the satisfaction that comes from contributing to an ongoing friendship.”

    “Friendship starts as soon as children can crawl off their parents' laps over to another child,” adds Michael Thompson, Ph.D., co-author of her life with you to her life with her friends. but who their friends are, how they interact with them, and how popular they are, is something parents have only limited control over.”

    Experts on children's behavior say that problems like jealousies, breakups, bullying and teasing account for a big part of what parents, kids and teachers talk about, and what parents worry about.

    Get insights into how children's friendships develop and how parents can help, if needed, and find ways to determine if your child is at risk for serious social problems or simply suffering from real (but common) social challenges.

    Today's museums include plenty of high culture, but you can still find shrines（圣地）to the extraordinary. Here's a look at five curious museum stops across Canada.

Vancouver Police Museum

    The setting, terrible enough, is the old Coroner's（验尸官）Court and forensics lab, including the morgue(room where dead bodies are kept). Artifacts, from the 1870s on, include badges, uniforms, police equipment, items from criminals, and even preserved organs—all in all an arresting experience.

Vulcan Tourism & Trek Station

    Designed to resemble a spacecraft, the Treck Station celebrates Vulcan's coincidental relationship to Mr. Spock's planet, Go to a building that features an 800-piece collection of Star Trek memorabilia — including Spock's ears and floor-to-ceiling space paintings. If you want to know more about it, click here: http//www. Vulcantourism. com

Accordion（手风琴）Museum

    Through instruments, photos and recordings, the museum traces the history of the accordion and its influence on Quebec culture. They've even acquired Asian instruments that show the use of the free reed— call them ancient ancestors of the accordion—that date back 4000 years.

Chocolate Museum

    It's chocoholic heaven — whole museum featuring displays on how chocolate is made, hands-on exhibits, collections of historic chocolate boxes, and antique candy- making equipment and, of course, lots of chocolate treats ,located in an old candy factory building. Click below to learn all about their hours and admission rates. http:// www. Chocolate museum .com

Potato museum

    A 14--foot high potato greets you at what's billed as the world's largest exhibit of potato artifacts. Explore the humble potato's role in the economy, a collection of farm tools related to growing and harvesting potatoes, Hall of Fame.

    For hundreds of millions of years, turtles (海龟) have struggled out of the sea to lay their eggs on sandy beaches, long before there were nature documentaries to celebrate them, or GPS satellites and marine biologists to track them, or volunteers to hand-carry the hatchlings (幼龟) down to the water's edge lest (for fear that) they become disoriented by headlights and crawl towards a motel parking lot instead. A formidable wall of bureaucracy has been erected to protect their prime nesting on the Atlantic coastlines. With all that attention paid to them, you'd think these creatures would at least have the gratitude not to go extinct (die out).

    But Nature is indifferent to human notions of fairness, and a report by the Fish and Wildlife Service showed a worrisome drop in the populations of several species of North Atlantic turtles, notably loggerheads, which can grow to as much as 400 pounds. The South Florida nesting population, the largest, has declined by 50% in the last decade, according to Elizabeth Griffin, a marine biologist with the environmental group Oceana. The figures prompted Oceana to petition the government to upgrade the level of protection for the North Atlantic loggerheads from "threatened" to "endangered"— meaning they are in danger of disappearing without additional help.

    Which raises the obvious question: what else do these turtles want from us, anyway? It turns out, according to Griffin, that while we have done a good job of protecting the turtles for the weeks they spend on land (as egg-laying females, as eggs and as hatchlings), we have neglected the years spend in the ocean. "The threat is from commercial fishing," says Griffin. Trawlers (which drag large nets through the water and along the ocean floor) and longline fishers (which can deploy thousands of hooks on lines that can stretch for miles) take a heavy toll on turtles.

    Of course, like every other environmental issue today, this is playing out against the background of global warming and human interference with natural ecosystems. The narrow strips of beach on which the turtles lay their eggs are being squeezed on one side by development and on the other by the threat of rising sea levels as the oceans warm. Ultimately we must get a handle on those issues as well, or a creature that outlived the dinosaurs (恐龙) will meet its end at the hands of humans, leaving our descendants to wonder how creature so ugly could have won so much affection.

    Sometimes I have to admire people's imagination but what I admire most is the businessmen's sense of smell. China's Singles Day, which falls on Nov. 11 every year, has far surpassed its U.S. counterparts of Black Friday and Cyber Monday—combined. Last year, Americans spent a record $12.8 billion online between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday. It's impressive until you compare it to the $17.6 billion in sales made by Chinese consumers in a single 24-hour period during 2016's Singles Day.

    Singles Day is known as “Bare Sticks Day” or “Bare Branches Day” in Chinese—because the date “11/11” looks like bare branches and “one” is the loneliest number. Singles Day began in the early 1990s in the dorm rooms of Nanjing University when a group of single friends were sorry about the lack of significant others and decided to mark the day by organizing activities as a group of singles and reducing their loneliness by buying themselves a gift.

    Then in 2009, sensing s break between the sales period of China's National Day on Oct. 1 and Chinese New Year in late January or early February, Alibaba's Jack Ma saw an opening: sell to comfort lonely hearts.

    The first year did only $7.5 million in sales, but just 8 years later, shoppers spent $25.3 billion, or 168.2 billion yuan, this year—a 40 percent jump from last year's $17.6 billion. Foe comparison, Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S. only netted $6.79 billion in 2016. Amazon doesn't release sales figures for July's Prime Day, but it's pretty safe to believe the not-quite-national-holiday doesn't come close to $25 billion.

    “More than $25 billion in one day is not just a sales figure,” Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang said in a statement. “It represents the desire for quality consumption of the Chinese consumer, and it reflects how merchants and consumers alike have now fully accepted the combination of online and offline sales.”

    Making decisions when shopping is often tough. Even if you're satisfied with the first dress you try on, would you go on looking for alternatives, comparing styles and prices, until you drop dead?

    According to a recent Wall Street Journal column, psychology researchers have studied how people make decisions and concluded there are two basic styles.“Maximizers” are people who want the best. They like to take their time and weigh a wide range of options—sometimes every possible one—before choosing.“Satisfiers” would rather be fast than thorough. They are people who want to be good enough.

    Schwartz and his colleagues followed 548 job-seeking college seniors at 11 schools from October through their graduation in June. They found that the maximizers landed better jobs. Their starting salaries were, on average, 20 percent higher than those of the satisfiers, but they felt worse about their jobs.

    There is no right choice.“The maximizer is kicking himself because he can't examine every option and at some point had to just pick something,” Schwartz says.“Maximizers make good decisions and end up feeling bad about them. Satisfiers make good decisions and end up feeling good. ”

    Faced with so many choices in our lives, we need to learn how not to waste time and energy on our decision-making, says Jane C. Hu in Slate online magazine.Hu suggests, decrease your range of options. Once you've arrived at a decision, stick with it. Just accept that no decision is ever completely perfect, and remind yourself that it is the best you can do at the moment.

    If you make a list of the top ten most challenging jobs in the world, chances are that being a teacher will not make the cut. Let's think about their complex task millions of educators face each day as they try to teach a group of often unfriendly, disorderly kids into intelligent, well-rounded individuals. That surely has to be the toughest job in the world, especially taking into consideration that there is no promotion waiting for them even if they are wildly successful!

    What if these all-important individuals that we often take for granted disappear from our lives? That was what Project Ed and Participant Media's teaching campaign asked filmmakers of all ages to envision for their recently-held contest.

    Their short films were called "A World without Teachers", whose intention was to inspire more young people to become teachers. However, the 62 amazing video submissions (提交物) also serve as a reminder of how terrible things would be if we didn't have these selfless individuals guiding us through life. What was interesting is that even the youngest contestants didn't accept the idea that there's no person to tell them what to do.

    High-school student Savannah Wakefield considered if art as we know today would have been different without teachers. Would C. Monet have discovered his talent for impressionism?

    Miles Horst won the 1,000-dollar prize for the best adult submission, lie pictures n world where teachers are replaced by a "brain box". Youth group winner Marina Barham's video describes a fact we all know but often forget. Teachers don't just teach; they inspire—something that no electronic device, no matter how smart, can do!

    So the next time you think your teacher is being "troublesome" for trying to channel you in the right direction, imagine a life without him/her.