I didn’t have much time to write blog post these last weeks, since my son was home on summer break and I really wanted to spend some time with him. But I did have time to read, so I’ve made good progress on my Top 100 of teen fiction and I’ll be posting my reviews in the days and weeks to come.
I came across this fascinating research from Pew about what teachers in the US think about skills their students will need in the future. ‘Judging the quality of information’ and ‘Writing effectively’ share the number one spot.
I have to admit it, I’m partial to the New King James translation. It’s my favorite version of the Bible by far, so when I saw that Ignite: The Bible for Teens
I think we may have gone a bit overboard when it comes to relationships between youth leaders and students of the opposite sex. We have become so careful to avoid any and all appearances of wrongdoing, that we are basically keeping youth leaders and students of the opposite sex away from each other. And that is plain wrong.
Two interesting results of scientific research recently attracted my attention. The first was that teens suffer from a chronic lack of sleep and that that sleep deprivation amongst other negative side effects, leads teens to make poor dietary choices. Sleep deprived teens eat more food that is good for them and eat less healthy food.
My son is having a horrible day today. Usually he’s fairly well behaved for a 5-year old and he can certainly play well by himself, but today he was a nightmare. There was a lot of whining, hanging, sitting on my lap, being bored and whatnot.
Yet I couldn’t blame him. You see, we’re having two guys staying with us this week and my son is all excited about these 18-year olds playing with him. They took him out to McDonalds a couple of days ago while my husband and I enjoyed a romantic dinner, but because of circumstances they missed a train and a bus and didn’t make it home till after 11 p.m.
I wish I could recommend The Mortal Instruments Series
Students often communicate like ogres.
If there’s one social network you should be on when it comes to youth ministry, it’s Pinterest. Except this network isn’t as much about connecting with students, as it is about finding hundreds of brilliant ideas and resources you can use in your youth ministry.
Pinterest is a relative newcomer in social media land, but it’s one of the fastest growing networks. If you’re unfamiliar with Pinterest, let me give you a quick intro. Pinterest is like a digital pin board where you can ‘pin’ stuff from websites you like, want to remember and want to share. That means that everything that’s pinned on Pinterest is ‘posted’ on some website, you can’t ‘upload’ stuff onto Pinterest directly. You can pin it, thus creating a visual link to that site.
Mind the ‘visual’ part here, this is a big difference between Pinterest and other social media. Pictures are everything here. It’s also what I love about Pinterest, since I’m a fairly visual person.
Pinterest works with ‘boards’, often topics or areas of interest. I have 14 boards for example, ranging from youth ministry stuff, to book wishlist, vegetable garden, low carb recipes and writing. It shows all my interests and I don’t have to limit it to just youth ministry.
You can follow people, meaning all their boards, but you can also follow specific boards. That’s where Pinterest is so brilliant. You see, when I follow people on Twitter or Facebook or Google+, I also get a lot of stuff on my timeline or whatever it’s called that I’m not interested in. With Pinterest, I can decide which boards are interesting and which aren’t. That makes Pinterest relatively focused.
Pinterest works with ‘likes’, but also with repinning, meaning you re-pin someone else’s pin. It’s the Pinterest version of sharing or retweeting so to say. The social aspect is relatively low, usually few people comment and you don’t really get to connect with people. In my opinion, that’s fine. I can live with a more topic-oriented social network.
Reading the first two books of the Divergent Series reminded me while I promised myself I’d never start reading a trilogy again before all books were published. The first two books in the series, Divergent and Insurgent, were so good that I’m really bummed to have to wait for the release of the third and last book later this year.
Divergent
