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.

    One afternoon I toured an art museum while waiting for my husband to finish a business meeting. I was looking forward to a quiet view of the art works.

    A young couple viewing the paintings ahead of me chatted nonstop between themselves. I watched them a moment and decided the wife was doing all the talking. I admired his patience for putting up with her continuous talk. Distracted by their noise, I moved on.

    I met with them several times as I moved through the different rooms of art. Each time I heard her constant burst of words, I moved away quickly.

    I was standing at the counter of the museum gift shop making a purchase when the couple came near to the exit. Before they left, the man reached into his pocket and pulled out a white object. He extended it into a long stick and then tapped his way into the coatroom to get his wife's jacket.

    “He's a brave man.,” the clerk at the counter said, “Most of us would give up if we were blinded at such a young age. During his recovery, he made a promise that his life wouldn't change. So, as before, he and his wife come in whenever there's a new art show."

    “But what does he get out of the art?” I asked. “He can't see.”

    “Can't see? You're wrong. He sees a lot. More than you or I do,” the clerk said. “His wife describes each painting so he can see it in his head.”

    I learned something about patience, courage and love that day. I saw the patience of a young wife describing paintings to a person without sight and the courage of a husband who would not allow blindness to change his life. And I saw the love shared by two people as I watched this couple walk away.

    Earlier this month a study showed that bees can teach themselves to play football. They can learn by watching and, rather than copy what they have seen, change it to make it better. Bees also have a clever trick for helping their friends find lunch. New research shows that bees leave smelly little footprints on flowers that help them know what flowers they and their family members have recently visited.

    The discovery was made by scientists from University of Bristol who report these smelly footprints help bees distinguish  between their own scent(气味), the scent of a relative and the scent of a stranger. And by using this ability, bees can improve their success at finding good sources of a food and avoid flowers that have already been visited and mined of nutrients.

    The Bristol team performed three separate experiments with bumblebees(大黄蜂)in which they were repeatedly exposed to rewarding and unrewarding flowers at the same time that had footprints from different bees attached to them. Each flower type either carried scent -marks from bumblebees of differing relatedness or were unmarked. The marks were either the bee's own marks, sisters from their nest, or strangers from another nest.

    The study shows that not only can bumblebees tell the marks of their own nest mates from strangers, but they can also discriminate between the smell of their own footprints and those of their nest mate sisters, which could help them to remember which flowers they have visited recently. But it doesn't explain how they use that in the wild. They may detect the footprints of their friends and keep moving on, since that flower may be tapped out. Or they may smell a bit of familiar foot smell and dive in, seeing it as a marker that nectar(花蜜)is present.

    Nola is a 41-year-old northern white rhino (犀牛) that lives at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in Escondido, California. She is one of only four remaining northern white rhinos in the world, and the only one in the western part of the earth. The other three live in Kenya (肯尼亚).

    Rhinos have lived on earth for more than 40 million years, but they are now at the risk of dying out. Hunters illegally hunt rhinos for their horns (角), which are used for art, jewelry, and decorations. They sell the horns for thousands of dollars per pound, though it is not allowed by law. Rhino horns are also prized as a key part in traditional medicine, even though scientific tests have proven that the horns cannot cure illnesses. Experts say that every eight hours, one rhino will be hunted.

    Scientists are trying to find ways to prevent rhinos from dying out. In 1975, the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research started the Frozen Zoo, a program through which researchers have collected cell samples (细胞样品) from more than 8, 000 different animal species until now, including the northern white rhino. Scientists hope that by studying the rhino cells, they will gain greater understanding of the species, and will find ways to increase its number.

    Jeanne Loring works with the Frozen Zoo. Loring's research focuses on pluripotent stem cells, which are cells that can renew and become any cell type. Coloring's lab at TSRI is working together with scientist Oliver Ryder of the San Diego Zoo to use plenipotentiary stem cells to try to increase the number of the northern white rhino. Loring said the goal is to start producing new rhinos through this method over the next couple of years.

    Every year in America, high-school students who want to go to college take a national examination called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT in a shortened way. Their score is an important factor in determining which colleges will admit them or whether any will be admitted at all. The Scholastic Aptitude Test measures one's mathematical ability and use of the English language. Traditionally, the English portion (部分) involved grammatical questions and paragraphs that test reading comprehension.

    But the SAT folks have added a single question, to be answered in an essay, hand-written on the spot. That's an interesting way to test writing ability, put content aside, have you ever seen young people's handwriting lately? Or anyone's for that matter, in this age of computer keyboards? Students write numbers and sign their names on bank checks.

    They scribble class notes in what can generously be described as the written word. And they hand-write, or more often print, a word or two of identification on luggage and lunch bags. Otherwise penmanship (书法) - once taught so morally and easefully by second-grade teachers, has gone the way of the dodo bird which has died out.

    Yet today's kids are asked to write, thoughtfully and legibly (字迹清楚地),for several minutes on this SAT Test. Good luck to the text scorers who must work out difficultly the scrawl of young people who've been typing on computers since the age of three! Teachers insist that good handwriting can not only help one's score on the SAT, but also, later on in life, impress potential employers and earn bigger tax refunds (退税) because the tax inspectors can actually read the computations (计算结果). And don't forget, we all have to turn to handwriting from time to time, as computers go down when power goes out.

    Then how to improve the handwriting? Well, with a few simple steps you can improve your handwriting.

    PositiQn the pen. You should hold the pen between the forefinger and the thumb, then rest it near the first knuckle(指节)of the middle finger. The rest of your fingers should be curled(卷曲)under your hand and your hand should remain relaxed.

    Evaluate your writing. Make changes to your letters till you like how they look. Take your time. Speed is bound to make your writing messy-looking.

    Practice. Practice it a lot; it's not enough to do it once and hope for the best. It has to be something you work at to make great improvements.

    When young, I loved going on trail(小路) runs. It was my favorite way to escape stress. So, when I was back in my hometown after a tough first year of my Ph. D. program, I thought a trail run was just what I needed. But instead of helping me relax, the run did just the opposite.

    After I moved to the city for college, where my runs were on flat concrete paths instead of winding dirt trails, I used a GPS watch. When I went on trail runs again in the country, it constantly reminded me of the fact that I wasn't keeping up with my usual pace. I turned my watch off, thinking that would allow me to enjoy my surroundings and find the peace I expected, but I worried I was underperforming. "Why can't I let go and just enjoy myself?" I wondered. But after some introspection(反省), I realized why I was struggling­both on trail runs and in graduate school.

    Going into my Ph. D. , I had thought that my solid undergraduate track record would set me up for instant success. To my surprise, I was wrong. I lacked confidence in my research abilities which I thought stopped me performing well and I constantly felt my progress was too slow. Other students'self-confidence and their excellent results made me feel insecure. Finally, one day I broke down in tears in my adviser's office.

    Then came my visit home: I was having trouble because I hadn't properly adjusted my expectations to the differences between an urban run and a trail run.

    A Ph. D. is like a trail run: Sometimes you can run fast. Sometimes you might find yourself climbing up a steep, winding trail at a snail's pace. And that's OK. Barriers are unavoidable, and success looks and feels different on a challenging trail than it does on a smooth, flat path. Sometimes it's best to take a deep breath and do your best to meet the challenge.