National Science Week: August 15 to 23. Australia’s biggest science festival is splashing into real schools, school-at-home, and virtual classrooms. With this year’s activities migrating online, stories have local talent and national reach: ▪ Make a melon go boom—Brisbane ▪ Gamers: can you power up enough molecules to fire...
Australian Council on Children and the Media's child-development based movie reviews have now been running for 18 years. That’s quite an achievement, and one that we are very proud of writes Barbara Biggins (CEO) In 2002, encouraged by our patron Steve Biddulph, ACCM set up a...
Research shows a strong link between mum’s mental health and her child’s emotional development. Women experiencing psychological distress during pregnancy and after birth are twice as likely to have children with emotional and behavioural issues throughout their childhood, new research shows, highlighting the need for broader...
Helen Dickinson, Catherine Smith and Sophie Yates report their survey results on the experiences of students with disabilities and their families, when schools across Australia had mostly closed. Only 22% of family members and carers of students with a disability agreed they had received adequate educational...
Video calls to isolated family can be improved. Here are ways to improve them, report Christa Lam-Cassettari, Paola Escudero and Virginia Schmied. COVID-19 has seen a huge increase in video calling as we try to socially distance but still stay in touch. This is particularly the case...
2020 ‘Storyathon’ event shows an uptick in social awareness amongst children in lockdown during COVID-19. Data from Oxford University Press in partnership with Storyathon, the largest story-writing event in Australia, reveals the impact COVID-19 has had on children’s vocabulary, interests and social awareness.More than 20,000 stories...
In a landmark decision in June 2019, the High Court says YES, reports Cassandra Seery, The High Court handed down a landmark decision last year that confirmed parentage rights to a man who donated his sperm to a woman who wanted to have a child. The ruling...
How do you stay 1.5 metres apart in a rugby scrum? And have we seen the end of communal showers? asks Philip Russo. As we emerge from lockdown, so does our sport. And many sporting bodies are grappling with the best way to do this while...
Just a spoonful of imagination can make chores a breeze if you can turn the chore into one with a fun outcome, suggests Dr Yeshe Colliver Have the weeks on end at home with your young children during lockdown sapped the magic from the moments you...
Reading aloud reports Margaret Kristin Merga, can help young children learn about new words and how to sound them. There’s great value too in providing opportunities for children to enjoy regular silent reading, which is sustained reading of materials they select for pleasure particular during...
