Results tagged “kids”

Remember the Guess Brothers? They're the guys from Muncie who raised money using Kickstarter to help produce their newest opus, The Unhuman. According to a recent blog post they're almost finished shooting and intend to wrap by year's end. A few weeks ago their first effort, the short film Don't Go Into the Woods, was honored with a screening at The Drunken Zombie Film Festival in Peoria. Sadly neither could attend since the event was held at a theatre/bar and they're both underage! Head on over to their Kickstarter page and check out the trailer for the new movie. It's got a hatching alien egg and everything.

CIFF is over but a rich cinematic harvest has only just begun. Feast your eyes:

Last spring, 2,000 CPS third graders wrote letters to Mayor Daley. Kind of like letters to Santa, except scarier. The kids dispensed some advice to Hizzonah but we'd rather just see the kids put in charge of the City. Sure, maybe they'll go all Lord of the Flies on us, but could they do any worse than the current Mayor/City Council combo?

              

Saturday was "Talk Like A Pirate Day" and the Field Museum celebrated with festivities for the youngsters in an effort to show them the Pirate Way and to help promote their Real Pirates exhibit, closing soon (so get ye to the Field Museum).

We tried the same experiment with Tankboy and SPARKS. He didn't last long.

                     

More than 2,000 Chicago Public School students from all over the city came to Douglas Park on Saturday for the second-annual Fun Run, hosted by nonprofit Chicago Run. The fun run, which is the culmination of a year-long classroom exercise project, attracted students and parents to a one mile course around the park. Over the course of the school year, students have logged more than 136,000 miles in a Chicago Run database, running 3-5 times per week during school hours. Organizers said the program serves at least 4,000 students in 21 elementary schools throughout the city. The program, including a fall Fun Run, will pick up when classes start next year.

Have an aspiring kid chef (ages 9 - 13) at home? Get him or her to Kendall College this Sunday for the ConAgra Foods and Share Our Strength Healthy Kids Cook-Off. In this Iron-Chef style cooking competition, kids will compete to create both a healthy and tasty meal or snack with a limited list of ingredients. The event is aimed at education children about nutritional information as well as to raise awareness of childhood hunger in America.

Stark Trek had an estimated budget of $160 million. Even Sam Raimi's new "low budget" horror movie Drag Me to Hell cost millions. Turns out you can get more bang for your buck in Indiana: The Unhuman is being made for around $500. Co-helmer Jacob, 13, sketched out the story for us: "A group of teens are working on a video project for school when a meteor lands bringing with it an alien infection. When some of the friends start showing up dead the remaining group must figure out which one of them (if any) have been infected by the virus." His brother Michael, 14, adds, "We know that there's been many different movies made with storylines like this. Beginning with Invasion of the Body Snatchers going all the way through to Slither. I don't want to say too much, but we're doing our own twist on this idea."

The Shedd Aquarium, as part of their Community Discount Days, is offering free admission for the rest of this week! From February 16th through the 20th, visitors get in to the main exhibit galleries free . Entrance to the Wild Reef exhibit (which is excellent, by the way) is available at a discounted rate. We're guessing that the Shedd might be trying to drive up their attendance, since the Oceanarium is closed until June of this year. In combination with the Art Institute letting visitors in for free every day in February, it’s a very good month for museum-goers on a budget.

Yup, here it is, the inevitable "Best of 2008" music list (a later post centering on the top local offerings is forthcoming). In order to spare our readers the pain of reading through yet another list that tries too hard to impress with obscure releases or toe the party line on Stereogum / Pitchfork approved artists, we continue our personal decade-plus tradition of merely listing what we actually liked in 2008. That means that the albums below are the one we kept finding ourselves turning to when we wanted to kick back and enjoy some tunes. Sure, there was more artistically challenging stuff released this year than some of the selections below -- and we certainly do appreciate that sort of thing -- but our year end list reflects which music ultimately did for us what we think rock and/or roll is ultimately meant to do to any listener: it grabbed us by the heart and/or crotch and wouldn't let go.

We gave a shout out earlier this year to Minds Matter – a great non-profit college-prep program for inner-city high school kids. Their big fall fundraiser [PDF] is taking place tomorrow night and Minds Matter is hosting a three-hour all you can drink shindig at Sully’s House Tap Room & Grill, with proceeds going directly back to the organization.

Comedy

Now in its third year, the annual Mustaches for Kids fundraising event in Chicago combines an in (on?) your face concept with a commitment to raise money for Chicago public schools. M4K growers compete to sprout the sweetest ‘stash in four week’s time while soliciting the most pledges and donations to the campaign.

Just when we thought the Siskel Film Center had reached its maximum level of awesome, they've pretty much blown our minds by announcing a month-long Jim Henson retrospective. It runs from November 8 through December 4. It features all the highlights you'd expect (including The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth) as well as a bunch of stuff you won't see anywhere else.

Starting Monday, Lyric’s 13th annual Opera in the Neighborhoods program will kick off once again, bringing kiddie-friendly opera directly to young students throughout the Chicagoland area. This year’s program will present a version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, staging approximately 30 performances at different local schools and auditoriums through the beginning of November.

The new American Girl Place store opened Wednesday at Watertower Place, positioned to cash in on its proximity to mall traffic. Five store entrances lead shoppers into a space that is 30 percent larger, newly festooned with a doll T-shirt design shop, personal shopping rooms and a “streetscape” of doll service shops (shoppes?) like an ear piercing store and a beauty salon. Already the largest of the retailer’s flagship stores, Chicago’s American Girl Place has generated nearly half the cumulative traffic of the nation’s five retail stores since 1998 – 13 million visits. The move across the street will create 50 new full time positions and 120 part-time holiday positions.

This Thursday, Harold Washington Library will participate in Jumpstart’s Read for the Record, an event aiming to break a world record for the largest shared reading experience by encouraging children across the country to read the same book with an adult on the same day. The official campaign book is children’s classic Corduroy, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.

Newberry Library’s free fall exhibition, “Artifacts of Childhood: 700 Years of Children's Books,” meant to showcase and explore the relevance of children’s literature, will be the library’s first exhibition in two decades to focus solely on this theme. 65 of Newberry’s most “important and beautiful” children’s books will be displayed, including 500-year-old Italian and French first illustrated editions of Aesop's Fables and a rare 1865 first edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Oh boy! The concept of the exhibition is to demonstrate the history of children’s education – from morality-infused school primers to an alternative to modern technology – and the way children’s literature has carved out a place for itself in the literature market.

A new study released today found that 97 percent of Illinois parents don't know the state's child safety restraint laws, and 67 percent said "most parents with a young child do not have a clear understanding of how to correctly install and/or use child safety seats." For the record, Illinois law says kids in the car need to be in a "child restraint"—a car seat or booster seat—until they're 8 years old. Car crashes are the leading cause of death for children under 14, according to AAA, and, and the NTSB says using proper restraints for kids could reduce injuries and deaths by 50 percent. [AAA, Seatcheck]

We enjoy any excuse for a party but when lesions and scabs are involved we can't help but be a bit repulsed.

We were just informed of another local connection to National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month: the Chili’s at 2 E Ontario St. is participating in the restaurant chain’s fifth annual Create-A-Pepper campaign, running now through the end of September. Chili’s has pledged to raise $50 million over a 10-year period for St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital. The campaign will culminate with an all-day event on Monday, September 29, when Chili’s will donate 100% of the profits from the day’s restaurant sales to St. Jude’s. Last year’s Create-A-Pepper campaign raised more than $5.2 million for the hospital.

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and there are a few local events coming up in support of pediatric cancer awareness. If you can't attend any of the below events, but still want to help with the fight against leukemia -- the most common cancer among children and teens -- consider making a bone marrow donation or registering to become a donor at the National Bone Marrow Registry.

The Bronzeville Children’s Museum is growing so much it's relocated to a bigger space. The only children’s museum in the country devoted to African-American history, it has outgrown its former space in a shopping mall in Evergreen Park, re-opening yesterday at its new location at 9301 S. Stony Island Ave. in the far South Side. The new building has nearly ten times the space as the old museum, and room for three times as many exhibits, including a "Motherland to Chicago" tour, "African-Americans in the Food Industry," and "African-American Inventors." The museum is named after the Chicago Bronzeville neighborhood, a significant urban landmark in African American history. [Trib, abc7, WBEZ]

The three-year-old boy who was swept into Lake Michigan in April when wind blew his stroller into the water has made a full, and doctors say miraculous, recovery. Lazar Ognjenovic's grandfather, who also fell in the water, is fine, too. Doctors say after weeks in the hospital and months of rehab, the little boy is doing great, plus he's picked up English as his second language. [Trib, S-T]

A new school has opened in Chicago’s Medical District. The Easter Seals Therapeutic School and Center for Autism Research, a $32 million project, is specifically designed to meet the special needs of students with autism, emotional behavior disorders and severe learning disabilities.

Harry Potter fans from around the world will be converging on the Hilton Chicago Hotel this weekend for Terminus, a five-day conference revolving around all that is "wizard". Attendees can expect “academic presentations and lectures, educational workshops, a Quidditch tournament, a bon voyage ball, and certainly, lively discussion about Harry Potter.” Other planned events: a pre-conference Wrock (wizard rock) concert, featuring over 30 wizarding bands over three stages, and the chance to attend the wedding of two Potter fans.

The Autism Awareness Kids Baseball Program, a summer baseball league taking place on Sunday mornings in Humboldt Park, is Chicago’s first sports program for children with autism. The league was conceived by Alex Cruz, who was reluctant to place his autistic son in a competitive environment where he might be teased or ignored. Local families came together to help make the idea a reality, and now with the support of former White Sox infielder Alex Cintrón, the league has plans to expand into four little league teams for children with autism and with other special needs. Future plans are to expand the program into indoor soccer, basketball, and floor hockey.

Apparently finding a summer job is not as easy as it used to be. Kids looking for part-time employment are facing a shrinking job market, and it's already difficult to land a job without experience or job history. And on July 1, the state will increase its minimum wage from $7.50 to $7.75, possibly increasing the squeeze on the number of available jobs.

Kids are always stirring up trouble in the kitchen, but this weekend they can make a mess of the pots and pans at someone else’s place. Whole Foods, which will be hosting cooking classes for kids and adults all summer at the Farm House in Lincoln Park Zoo, is holding a special children’s program on Saturday that features berries as the main ingredient. The instructor is Chef Melissa Graham of Purple Asparagus, a local non-profit organization that aims to unite families through the joy that is good eating.

Terri Bollinger, the principal at Ridge Central Elementary School in Chicago Ridge, promised back in October that she would kiss a cow if her students read over 10,000 books by the end of the school year. Naturally, then, her students managed to tally a total of 11,014 books read, and she found herself actually kissing a cow yesterday afternoon. The cow, named Stella, is owned by Bollinger’s cousin.