Ascot Media Group Blog
Welcome to the Ascot Media Group BLOG! Visit our main website at www.ascotmedia.com

Colorful ‘Lizzy’ Romp Teaches Kids to Live in the Now

Colorful ‘Lizzy’ Romp Teaches Kids to Live in the Now

(This press release may be reprinted in part or entirety by any print or broadcast media outlet or used by any means of social media sharing.)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“A lively, innovative story of friendship that encourages readers to think creatively.”

  • Kirkus Reviews

Young readers have watched and learned as the impressionable young Lizzy, of the It’s Just So… children’s book series, adapted to a new school, became a big sister and danced with animals in a talent show. Now What? is the latest adventure featuring the precocious redhead, as she and her amusing animal sidekick discover ways to entertain themselves through an otherwise very gray day!

The book title begs the question, and the answers come through in the form of silly mishaps that the contagiously enthusiastic Lizzy turns into new opportunities in this comical romp. Readers are taken on a little journey through a day that brings personal growth and the meeting of Luna, a new neighbor, who just moved from the Caribbean. Together, Lizzy and Luna color their way through inventive play and discovery as they embrace the concept of “living in the now” while being creative with what life presents.

Curiosity, frustration, imagination and a unique perspective are at the heart of Now What?, from author Brenda Faatz and co-author/illustrator Peter Trimarco, who bring Lizzy and the story to life with lyrical rhyme and colorful, whimsical illustrations.

An engaging picture walk for little ones, Now What? is also a fun read-aloud for older kiddos and features subtle yet effective messaging that gives readers of all ages a little something to smile and think about.

Brenda Faatz has an undeniable connection with children. Some say it’s because they instinctively know “one of their own.” A graduate of the University of Northern Colorado with a degree in Musical Theatre, Brenda is a professional singer, dancer, actor, writer and director. Having established herself as a critically-acclaimed actor while performing on stages from Minneapolis to Aspen, Boulder and Denver, Brenda has turned her talents to creating fresh content for youngsters. She has penned music, lyrics and scripts for original musical theatre works for children, and is the founder and director of the Notable Kids Arts Center in Denver. While collaborating with her husband and illustrator Peter Trimarco, Brenda has authored the award-winning It’s Just So … children’s book series because, as she likes to say, “no one ever told me I couldn’t.”

Peter Trimarco started his professional doodling career as an editorial cartoonist before turning to commercial art and designing packaging for both the film and music industries. Along the way, he also established himself on the business side of music as an executive producer and creative director on over 40 productions, with two going on to win Grammy nominations. While staying in the entertainment field, he published a trade magazine for the film industry and ultimately brought his creative juices and publishing expertise to the printed page for youngsters. Peter is a graduate of Lake Forest College, where he studied Literature and Fine Arts. In addition to designing album covers and book covers, he is the illustrator of Ella McBella In The Dark by Laura Pells, and the It’s Just So … book series, which he co-created with his wife, Brenda Faatz.

For more information, visit http://www.notablekidspublishing.com,
http://www.lizzysworld.com, or follow the publisher on Instagram and Facebook at @Notablekidspublishing.

Now What?
Release Date: October 12, 2021
Publisher: Notable Kids Publishing
ISBN-10: ‎ 1733354824
ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1733354820
Available from Amazon.com, BN.com, Indiebond.org and anywhere books are sold

Trish Stevens
Stacy Butler
Ascot Media Group, Inc.
Post Office Box 2394
Friendswood, TX 77549
[email protected]
www.ascotmedia.com
281.333.3507 Phone

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Bee Scared Plants the Seed of Environmentalism in Young Minds

Bee Scared Plants the Seed of Environmentalism in Young Minds

(This press release may be reprinted in part or entirety by any print or broadcast media outlet or used by any means of social media sharing.)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“Your Majesty,” said the Scout Bee to the Queen of the Bees, “The Honeybees are in trouble. They are disappearing in great numbers!”

What will the queen do? Who will she turn to? How will she keep her hive safe from harm? Without bees there will be no fruit, no vegetables and no flowers.

Bee Scared, an Old Doc Turtle adventure from author Richard Faith, follows the Queen and her community of family and friends as they try to find a solution to this scary problem. They use music. They call on Auntie Bee. Even Old Doc Turtle becomes concerned! Can your young reader think of any ways to help Auntie Bee save the honeybees?

This delightful children’s tale delivers a simple lesson about the challenges of climate change and global warming — and the impact on nature’s tiniest but mightiest of creatures — in a way that young audiences can understand. Bee Scared can help you open a dialogue with the curious young people in your life about the importance of conservationism and protecting the future of our planet.

Author Richard Faith is passionate about raising awareness regarding the impacts of global warming and climate change. He is also the author of the science fiction series, Megamerse, which features a superhero who fights for Mother Earth. Megamerse has been turned into a screenplay and talks are ongoing with a movie studio. Faith’s other book titles include “I Can Barely See” Said Mandy Manatee, Barkley & Silvia, Crocodilly Lilly: Not so Toothy A Grin and The Owl that Said What.

Faith is also the executive director of Mother Nature Festival Live Incorporated (http://mothernaturefestival.live), a 501(c)3 nonprofit that works to educate, inform and inspire everyone to get involved in helping Mother Nature.

Bee Scared
Publisher: Jongleur Publishing
ISBN-13: ‎ 979-8652428013
Available from Amazon.com

Trish Stevens
Alex Winters
Ascot Media Group, Inc.
Post Office Box 2394
Friendswood, TX 77549
[email protected]
www.ascotmedia.com
281.333.3507 Phone

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Expert Explores Cultural Factors Affecting Children’s Classroom Learning

Expert Explores Cultural Factors Affecting Children’s Classroom Learning

(This press release may be reprinted in part or entirety by any print or broadcast media outlet, or used by any means of social media sharing.)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Since 1970, students from East Asia have outscored their U.S. counterparts on every international student comparative test. Every test over 50 years; no exceptions. “Why is this always true?” asked Dr. Cornelius Grove. Now he has answers.

“I approached this as an interculturalist and an educator. I wanted to uncover the historical and cultural factors behind East Asian students’ repeated successes,” Dr. Grove explains.

Immersing himself in hundreds of research reports concerning East Asian children’s learning advantages, Dr. Grove resurfaced with two principal reasons for their academic prowess. The first is that they are raised at home in such a way that they arrive at school with a drive to learn academically. The second is that during their most impressionable years (preschool–grade 5), they are taught by means of lessons that are knowledge-centered, not teacher-centered.

Dr. Grove’s 138-page book for parents, The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Raising Students Who Excel, explores the ways East Asian parents instill in their children a receptiveness to the formal learning process. After seven chapters explaining the values underlying the parents’ mindset, he offers three chapters revealing their supportive practices. It’s an outline for action for American parents who deeply value academic learning.

A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel is the 148-page companion volume in which Dr. Grove examines the school side of the learning equation. East Asian lower-grade lessons gain the advantage because of their focused and tenacious attention to the day’s topic. Among other things, he addresses how East Asians regard teaching, learning, and why their math teaching has been so effective. Choice magazine (June issue) “highly recommends” this book for “general readers through faculty.”

Although each book effortlessly stands alone, The Drive to Learn and A Mirror for Americans combine to encourage complementary reassessments by parents and lower-grade teachers about the more impactful roles they could be playing in upgrading the academic performance and eventual college readiness of our youngest Americans.

For more detailed overviews, visit TheDriveToLearn.info and AMirrorForAmericans.info.

Author Cornelius N. Grove holds a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from Johns Hopkins and a Doctor of Education from Columbia. He has had a decades-long fascination with the cultural factors that affect children’s ability to learn in school. At a 2005 conference in Singapore, he spoke about the two instructional styles found around the world. In 2013 he wrote The Aptitude Myth: How an Ancient Belief Came to Undermine Children’s Learning Today, a historical study of why most Americans believe that inborn ability determines school performance. For two recently published encyclopedias (2015 and 2017), he wrote entries on “pedagogy across cultures.” And now with A Mirror for Americans and The Drive to Learn, he is revealing the complementary roles home and school play in strengthening children’s academic performance.
He also blogs about writing nonfiction at corneliusgrove.medium.com.

The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Raising Students Who Excel
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, Maryland)
Hardback: 978-1-4758-1509-2
Paperback: 978-1-4758-1510-8
eBook: 978-1-4758-1511-5
Available from Rowman.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Amazon.com and other booksellers.

A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, Maryland)
Hardback: ISBN 978-1-4758-4460-3
Paperback: ISBN 978-1-4758-4461-0
eBook: ISBN 978-1-4758-4462-7
Available from Rowman.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Amazon.com and other booksellers.

Trish Stevens
Teresa Hinojosa
Ascot Media Group, Inc.
Post Office Box 2394
Friendswood, TX 77549
832.569.5773 Direct
281.333.3507 Phone
[email protected]
www.ascotmedia.com

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Black Sheep: A Blue-Eyed Negro Speaks of Abandonment, Belonging, Racism, and Redemption

Black Sheep: A Blue-Eyed Negro Speaks of Abandonment, Belonging, Racism, and Redemption
(This press release may be reprinted in part or in its entirety by any print or broadcast media outlet or used by any means of social media sharing.)

With an afterword by My Haley, PhD, widow of Alex Haley, famed author of Roots and Malcom X

Ray Studevent walked hesitantly toward the door of the nursing home and prayed that his Momma, now in the throes of dementia, would recognize him. Surely, the blue eyes would give him away. The blue eyes that his Momma originally equated with hatred and brutality.

White on the outside, Black on the inside, Ray grew up on the eastern side of the Anacostia River, the Blackest part of the Blackest city in America not long after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the D.C. race riots. There were guidelines if you were Black; different rules if you were White; but only mixed messages for mixed-race children like Ray, who had to fight for acceptance and struggle to find his identity.

Black Sheep: A Blue-Eyed Negro Speaks of Abandonment, Belonging, Racism, and
Redemption is the unforgettable true story of Ray’s struggles as a mixed-race boy learning to fight the ghosts of his past to find trust and love. Abandoned by his White, heroin-addicted mother and Black, violently alcoholic father, Ray found salvation at age 5 when he was adopted into a loving, stable home by his father’s uncle Calvin and his wife, Lemell. But that is just the beginning of the story.

Lemell is suddenly widowed and must raise Ray and her two daughters as a single mother in Chocolate City. Each time she looks into Ray’s blue eyes, she sees the Klansmen who tormented her family as she grew up in segregated Mississippi.

Ray and Lemell must navigate the minefields of society’s outward racial tensions while inwardly, Lemell does her best to overlook her emotional scars and suppress her justifiable resentment toward White people when she looks into Ray’s blue eyes.

Black Sheep takes readers on an emotional journey and reveals universal truths through faith and great humor. It is a search for who we are, where we fit and who we can become. Imagine a book where The Notebook meets The Help.

About the Author
Ray “Ben” Studevent was a mixed-race child whose unique look led him to fight a racial identity crisis his entire life. Each time he entered a room, he had to decide whether it was better to be Black or White. His personal and career journeys ebbed and flowed, taking him to prison, fatherhood and gigs in comedy clubs, modeling and stock-market research. In all these varied experiences, he realized that race played a critical role. Visit his website at: raystudevent.com.

Black Sheep
Publisher: HCI Books
Release Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN-10: 0757323812
ISBN-13: 978-0757323812
Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Available wherever books are sold

Trish Stevens
Lindsey Mach
Ascot Media Group, Inc.
Post Office Box 2394
Friendswood, TX 77549
[email protected]
www.ascotmedia.com
281.333.3507 Phone

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Parents and Educators: Both Can Help Children Attain Academic Heights

Parents and Educators: Both Can Help Children Attain Academic Heights

(This press release may be reprinted in part or entirety by any print or broadcast media outlet, or used by any means of social media sharing.)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Children who arrive at school with an emotional commitment to learn are ideally equipped to excel academically. A second factor in their learning success is the set of values that guides the lessons they’re taught during their most impressionable years (preschool–grade 5). These are among the insights of Dr. Cornelius Grove, who has spent decades exploring the cultural factors that affect children’s performance in classrooms.

Consider Dr. Grove’s 138-page book for parents, The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Raising Students Who Excel. Here he explores the ways in which East Asian parents instill in their children respect for academic knowledge and receptiveness to the formal learning process. After a seven-chapter explanation of cultural values underlying East Asian parents’ mindset, he offers three chapters revealing their specific supportive practices. It’s an outline for action for American parents who deeply value academic learning.

A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel, is the 148-page companion volume to the above book. Dr. Grove examines the school side of the learning equation. East Asian lower-grade lessons gain the advantage because of their tenacious, narrow, yet multifaceted focus on the day’s topic. He addresses, among other things, how East Asians regard teaching and the reasons for pupils’ math superiority. Choice magazine (June issue) “highly recommends” this book for “general readers through faculty.”

“People who’ve had experience in unfamiliar cultures often remark that they now see their own culture with fresh eyes,” Dr. Grove explains. “It’s as though they’ve looked into a mirror and seen alternative possibilities for themselves. They realize that their usual ways of doing things are not etched in stone; instead, they’re choices. Different choices could be made.”

Although each book effortlessly stands alone, The Drive to Learn and A Mirror for Americans combine to encourage complementary reassessments by parents and lower-grade teachers about the more impactful roles they could be playing in upgrading the academic performance and the eventual college readiness of the youngest Americans.

For more detailed overviews, visit TheDriveToLearn.info and AMirrorForAmericans.info.

Author Cornelius N. Grove holds a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from Johns Hopkins and a Doctor of Education from Columbia. He has had a decades-long fascination with the cultural factors that affect children’s ability to learn in school. At a 2005 conference in Singapore, he spoke about the two instructional styles found around the world. In 2013 he wrote The Aptitude Myth: How an Ancient Belief Came to Undermine Children’s Learning Today, a historical study of why most Americans believe that inborn ability determines school performance. For two recently published encyclopedias (2015 and 2017), he wrote entries on “pedagogy across cultures.” And now with A Mirror for Americans and The Drive to Learn, he is revealing the complementary roles home and school play in strengthening children’s academic capabilities.

The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Raising Students Who Excel
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, Maryland)
Hardback: 978-1-4758-1509-2
Paperback: 978-1-4758-1510-8
eBook: 978-1-4758-1511-5
Available from Amazon.com, Rowman.com, Barnesandnoble.com and other booksellers.

A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, Maryland)
Hardback: ISBN 978-1-4758-4460-3
Paperback: ISBN 978-1-4758-4461-0
eBook: ISBN 978-1-4758-4462-7
Available from Amazon.com, Rowman.com, Barnesandnoble.com and other booksellers.

Trish Stevens
Teresa Hinojosa
Ascot Media Group, Inc.
Post Office Box 2394
Friendswood, TX 77549
832.569.5773 Direct
281.333.3507 Phone
[email protected]
www.ascotmedia.com

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

The Future of Us: What the Dreams of Children Mean for Twenty-First-Century America

The Future of Us: What the Dreams of Children Mean for Twenty-First-Century America

(This press release may be reprinted in part or entirety by any print or broadcast media outlet, or used by any means of social media sharing.)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

His approach is always subtle; his banter is casual and absent any pressure to respond. But when renowned pediatrician and children’s advocate Dr. Irwin Redlener casually asks his young patients, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the lights invariably come on, eye contact occurs, and the child emerges from deep inside a protective shell. “Children are essentially dreamers … undaunted by adversity or reality-based barriers to success,” Dr. Redlener writes in The Future of Us: What the Dreams of Children Mean for Twenty-First-Century America (with updated information on helping children through the COVID-19 crisis).

Inadequate education, barriers to health care and crushing poverty make it overwhelmingly difficult for many children to realize their dreams. Finding ways to alter these trajectories is serious, grown-up business, Dr. Redlener emphasizes, and it’s time for us to act.

In The Future of Us, Dr. Redlener draws upon his four decades of professional experiences to examine our nation’s health care safety nets and special programs that are designed to protect and nurture our most vulnerable kids, but that too often fail to do so.

The book follows Dr. Redlener’s long, colorful career, from his work as a pediatrician in the Arkansas delta, to treating child abuse in a Miami hospital, to helping children in the aftermaths of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. He has served on the board of USA for Africa, cofounded the Children’s Health Fund with Paul Simon (and persuaded Joan Baez to play a benefit concert) and dined with Fidel Castro. He once sat across the table from Michael Jackson, and he has traveled with presidential candidates. But his most powerful source of motivation remains the children who face terrible adversities yet dream of becoming paleontologists, artists and marine biologists. Their stories are his springboard for discussing larger policy issues that hinder us from effectively eradicating childhood poverty and overcoming barriers to accessible health care. Persistent deprivation and the avoidable problems that accompany poverty ensnare millions of children and impact the health, prosperity and creativity of the adults they become. Dr. Redlener argues that we must drastically change our approach to meeting the needs of children ― for their sake and to ensure America’s resiliency and influence in an increasingly complex world.

It is Dr. Redlener’s hope that readers will emerge optimistic about our future, with a deeper understanding of how investing in children today will increase our chances of a successful tomorrow. Fighting for our nation’s children is far from a lost cause, and nothing could be more important.

Author Irwin Redlener, M.D., is a pediatrician and founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, which works to understand and improve the nation’s capacity to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. In 2020, Dr. Redlener created the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia. He is a public health analyst for NBC and MSNBC, and recently partnered with Cher in CherCares, a new program that assists communities struggling with COVID-19.

Dr. Redlener is also President Emeritus and Co-Founder of the Children’s Health Fund, a philanthropic initiative that he created with singer/songwriter Paul Simon and Karen Redlener to develop health care programs in 25 of the nation’s most medically underserved urban and rural communities. He currently serves as a special advisor on emergency preparedness to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, and regularly communicates with leadership in U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, as well as Homeland Security. He has been a public health advisor to democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden.

He is also the author of Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do Now. For more information, please visit www.irwinredlener.org.

The Future of Us: What the Dreams of Children Mean for Twenty-First-Century America
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Release Date: October 13, 2020
ISBN-10: 0231177577
ISBN-13: 978-0231177573
Available from Amazon.com

Trish Stevens
Judy Frost
Ascot Media Group, Inc.
Post Office Box 2394
Friendswood, TX 77549
[email protected]
www.ascotmedia.com
281.333.3507 Phone

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Code-At-Home Tech Toys Keep Girls Engaged, Away From Computer Screens, During COVID-19 School Closures

Trish Stevens
Claire Downing
Ascot Media Group, Inc.
Post Office Box 2394
Friendswood, TX 77549
[email protected]
www.ascotmedia.com
281.333.3507 Phone
800.854.2207 Fax

(This press release may be reprinted in part or entirety by any print or broadcast media outlet, or used by any means of social media sharing)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Code-At-Home Tech Toys Keep Girls Engaged, Away From Computer Screens, During COVID-19 School Closures

Are you looking for constructive ways to keep your children stimulated and engaged during the COVID-19 school shutdown? SmartGurlz founder Sharmi Albrechtsen beat out 40,000 other entrepreneurs on ABC’s Shark Tank and negotiated with guest “shark” Richard Branson, before closing a deal with Daymond John on her line of groundbreaking toys that use an award-winning robotics platform to teach basic coding skills to girls as young as 6.

“Many girls’ toys lag behind in the development of spatial skills, hands-on problem solving skills, and confidence with coding and computer science,” explains SmartGurlz founder Sharmi Albrechtsen. “These are exactly the skills that SmartGurlz aims to develop.”

The SmartGurlz line of unique, interactive, self-balancing robots and dolls are controlled with the SugarCoded™ App than can be downloaded onto an IOS or android phone or tablet that once downloaded requires no Wi-Fi, just Bluetooth.

A full, step-by-step tutorial teaches basic coding strategies so young girls can maneuver the toys around obstacle courses of their own design. With several levels of learning and chal-lenges, the toy keeps kids occupied several hours a week for 4-6 months.

The company is also offering a free weekly webinar for parents and kids affected by COVID- 19 that includes getting started, tips and tricks, and weekly home assignments.

Girls playing with SmartGurlz products learn three key concepts:

  1. Spatial Reasoning. Girls learn how to direct/orient their robots in new environments and in-terpret maps.
  2. Computer Programming. Girls learn to program their robots using our kid-friendly coding App called SugarCodedTM.
  3. Storytelling & Problem Solving. Girls learn to tell stories and solve missions via coding.

The SmartGurlz product line also includes an e-book series available through the App that focuses on the everyday adventures of four talented young women studying at the fictional New York Institute of Technology — N.I.T.

We’re all adjusting to a new normal. You can use this extra time at home to inspire the female tech leaders of tomorrow with toys that integrate the power of play with the power of technology.

SmartGurlz CEO Sharmi Albrechtsen is a robotics aficionado, educator, author and mom with a passion for closing the diversity gap in technology.

In 2015, Sharmi started SmartGurlz after becoming frustrated with the lack of STEM toys available for her daughter. The SmartGurlz flagship product, Siggy, was the first robotics product designed specifically for girls. More than 30,000 girls have been educated with SmartGurlz. SmartGurlz partners include BlackGirlsCode, Girl Scouts of America and Morrison Mentors.

SmartGurlz recently expanded its product line to include Smart Buddies (a joint-venture with Pitsco Education), which features a diverse set of characters suitable for both girls and boys, targeted towards schools.

Sharmi was recently given AdWeek’s Disruptor Award in Championing Gender Diversity in Advertising and Tech. She has also been named Women Entrepreneur of the Year 2018 by the Asian Chamber of Commerce as well as named a Morgan Stanley Multi-Cultural Innovation Lab fellow. Sharmi has been featured in Forbes, Huffington Post, Financial Times, Fox Business News, Fox and Friends and CNN. She is also a featured TEDx speaker.

For more information, please visit www.smartgurlz.com or connect with her on social media at https://www.instagram.com/smartgurlzworld/; https://www.facebook.com/smartgurlzworld/; or https://twitter.com/SmartGurlzWorld.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail