Get Greens For Your School: Free Idea Hamster Here to Help

Free ideas for the asking, folks! It’s not every day you see me donating brain time for a grant tied in with corporate sponsorship, as I can smell a wellness PR ploy a mile away…but the Love Your Veggies grants are not exactly akin to "School Sit-ups Sponsored by Soda and Snacks" or McDonalds pushing apples and milk and clowns hawking fitness assemblies, (or as … [Read more...]

Spider-Man 3: Web of Influence In Kid-Culture

There are plenty of spins on the Spider-Man 3 record-breaking $382 million worldwide “priciest movie ever made" buzz...so I’m going to take a deconstructionist view about summer box office biggies, and look at the impact of media hype-fests on kids. Not pickin’ on Spidey, here; haven’t even seen the flick yet, I’m talking about a global web … [Read more...]

Food For Thought: Media to Digest for Healthier Kids

March is National Nutrition Month, so Shaping Youth is adding to the ADA's Eat Right web resources with some fun and worthy positive picks in food media to share with your kids, boost their media literacy IQ, and counter-market the cartoon pitches for empty calorie crud. Here goes: I've always loved the SmartMouth interactive site for kids, but my new discovery is the U.K.'s … [Read more...]

Wrigley Field Now Sounds Like a Deodorant

There's "ad creep" in the outfield. Under Armour logos will now blare through the historic ivy-covered walls of venerable Wrigley Field. Hard to imagine the two doors in left and right field that were painstakingly painted green to blend with the ivy in 1937 will now have the big ol’ Under Armour sports apparel logo smack dab in the center as a shout-out to … [Read more...]

7 clues to a New Year’s riddle for the 7th year of 2000

This landed in my e-mail from some pals of mine, and it seems worthy to toss out there to get kids thinking along these lines and open up some dialogue. Yes, I’m being ambiguous on purpose so I won’t spoil the fun. To challenge yourself, write down your guess after reading each clue; then, after reading all the clues, see which (if any) of your guesses is … [Read more...]