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Maybe you are a fan of The Wheels on the Bus or Wind the Bobbin up? Now you have a chance to vote for your favourite nursery rhyme over at Rhyme Stars.

BT’s Openreach will donate £1 for every vote registered and you can win an iPod touch. If 50,000 people vote by 30th April then an extra £50,000 will be donated so get voting!

Also, if you are keen on karaoke then you can record your own rhyme to raise an extra £2 for charity! Not for the shy though as everyone will be able to listen to you warbling.

According to the website, the top ten are currently:

1 Twinkle Twinkle little star

2 Incey Wincey Spider

3 Baa Baa Black Sheep

4 Row Row Row your boat

5 Old MacDonald had a farm

6 Round and round the garden

7 Grand Old Duke of York

8 Humpty Dumpty

9 1,2,3,4,5 Once I Caught a Fish Alive

10 5 little ducks went swimming one day

I had to add my personal favourite to the list which is “A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go”. It is a great one for singing along to in the car

Following on from the previous post, I’ve just received this from Andrew Pakes, a councillor for Southwark where the Livesey is

Hello

Thank you for signing the online ‘Save the Livesey Children’s Museum’ petition, there has been a great response from all parts of the community and from supporters across the world.

Despite the overwhelming response and positive coverage in the South London Press and Southwark News, this morning the Council tabled its recommendation that the Museum should close at the end of March. The announcement was contained in just one sentence in a 14-page report.

Overall, closing the Museum will ‘save’ Southwark Council £140,000 – a lot of money but a small sum compared to budget as a whole. It is also considerably less than what the council proposes to spend on publicity, consultants, agency workers or a range of other items.

The recommendation will be discussed next Tuesday by the Executive – these are the Lib Dem and Tory councillors who have proposed these cuts.

So, we still have a lot to do in fighting this devastating cut. Please forward this email onto anyone else who has not yet signed the petition and ask them to do so:

http://www.gopetition.com/online/16681.html

For more information on the Museum visit: www.liveseymuseum.org.uk.

The more support we can get the better. This is a fantastic Museum and a great resource for children, parents and the local community. Shame on the Leadership of Southwark Council for putting self-interest and political spin before the needs of our local community in in Peckham and the children who benefit from the Museum.

Please do email me at this address if you have any ideas about how else we might highlight this issues or fight the cuts.

Kind regards

Andrew

Cllr Andrew Pakes
Member for Livesey Ward

WebUrbanist has an interesting post on urban adventure playgrounds. The following certainly struck a chord.

In a sense, you and I have always played in “adventure playgrounds.” We created a fort in the kitchen cabinets, jumped from couch to couch across oceans; we snuck out through a hole in the fence to a new world. We climbed trees and hid in bushes. We played in the mud and the rain. We chased each other, made secret worlds with our own language. We created spaces with whatever we could find around us. Some of us played in abandoned buildings, or barns, or vacant lots between buildings, used what we found and made up stories of our lives to be. We looked everywhere to find our space.

One of the links took me to a charity I’d not heard of before called London Play. Their mission is

To enhance the development and education of children in the Greater London area by developing and supporting the provision of children’s play, primarily by:
• improving the quality, diversity and accessibility of play opportunities in London;
• raising awareness of the importance of play in the development of London’s children;
• promoting co-operation and co-ordination amongst the play sector in London;
• developing a network of local play support agencies in every London borough.

Why? Well …

“Sadly, and increasingly, children are unable or not allowed to go out to play, and engage freely in play activities that a generation ago would have been taken for granted.

There is a serious danger of serious and long lasting damage to a whole generation of children by denying them opportunities to explore, experiment, and experience the wide, wonderful world around them. Being ‘wrapped in cotton wool’, children are deprived of the most natural part of childhood – playing and taking risks. It is only by direct personal experience that children learn to assess and overcome danger and hazardous situations, and gain varied and flexible responses to the different situations they find themselves in.”

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve just sent off the form to register Little Legends’ support, and we’ll be adding London Play certified playgrounds from tomorrow onwards. It’s great to know I’ll be able to keep one resolution!

Join in the short family walks taking place across the UK to give children orphaned by AIDS a better future. There is a small entry fee of £5 and all proceeds go to Save the Children.

The next walk is happening in Battersea Park on Sunday 19th August (10.30am start). You are given a goody bag and there is a chance to meet Children’s TV Characters.

To register and to get more information about the walks go to Pushy Mums

Go ahead and help push for change

There is a great site called Pledgebank where you promise to do something as long as others take some action too. The site was built by MySociety which is a charitable organisation headed by Tom Steinberg.

I have made the following pledge:

I will donate £100 to Barnardos but only if 10 other people will join in the Littlelegends UK Community Project for Parents and Carers by adding one useful comment or one new place to the website

Hopefully this will help to demonstrate that I am committed to social networking and really want to help parents across the UK help themselves by sharing information!

To sign up to my pledge, then please visit this page and follow the instructions.

Thank you

Source: BBC

This year’s appeal night is on Friday 17th November. As usual, the BBC will be trying to raise as much money as possible for helping children and young people in the UK. Just to give you an idea of how big this charity night is, in 2005 just over £17 million was raised!

It is the only night of the year when the whole of the BBC including TV, Radio and Online join together on a project. You will recognise the now familiar image of Pudsey Bear with a patch over his eye.

If you want to find out more about what is happening, visit the appeal website. There you can donate money, find fundraising ideas and more information about the campaign.

The BBC reports that the charity ChildLine celebrates it’s 20th anniversary this week.

For those who don’t know, ChildLine is a free helpline for children and young people in the UK.

Children call about:

*Bullying: 18%
*Family tension: 13%
*Physical abuse: 11%
*Concern for others: 8%
*Facts of life: 8%
*Sexual abuse: 7%
*Pregnancy: 5%
*Health: 4%

and here are some ChildLine Facts:

*More than 4,500 children call daily
*It takes on average £38 to counsel a child
*Has over 1,380 volunteers
*The annual cost of one volunteer counsellor is £3,762
*Three times as many calls from girls than boys

Unfortunately, ChildLine does not have the capacity to answer all of the calls it receiver. As part of its 20th Birthday celebrations, ChildLine is trying to raise £20 million in order to increase the number of calls answered and the number of counsellors. If you want to help visit their website