Do you have good news to share about youth? I’m encouraging bloggers to share “Good News About Youth and the Adults Who Empower Them.” Please write about the great things you see happening in your community - and I’ll feature links once per week through August.

Here are a few of my recent articles related to youth empowerment:

Service to Others: Raising Charitable Kids (5 Minutes for Mom - Positively Speaking)
My Daughter Won the Kohl’s Scholarship (Pass the Torch)
How to Empower Your Students (So You Want to Teach)
Youth Empowerment (Pass the Torch)
Good News About Youth is There When We Seek It (E-Writing)
Growing a Servant’s Heart (Pass the Torch)

Feel free to attribute and republish a short excerpt of any of the above articles, and link to the complete original post.

My book, Empowering Youth: How to Encourage Young Leaders to Do Great Things will soon be available everywhere. If you’re looking for it, the following stores and major online retailers are a good place to start:

SearchInstituteStore.org
Barnes & Noble
Amazon.com
bn.com
Powell’s.com.

I also offer autographed copies from my company order page here.

And please be sure to ask your local library to carry it! Librarians are often looking for recommendations from their patrons.

We host regular giveaways for parents and educators. Please consider signing up for updates by email or feed. We will never spam you or give out your address.

I discovered this peculiar stuff on our family’s whiteboard a few weeks ago. I figured we’d either been visited by aliens, or Darla was being creative.

It turns out she’d developed a code with funky symbols replacing letters. It was pretty cool. So we went with that and read the decoder wheel section of Kris Bordessa’s awesome book, Great Colonial America Projects You Can Build Yourself. (Watch for my giveaway for this book in the next week!)

She made this out of a Pringles can.

It’s a model of the decoder wheel American spies used to help win the American Revolution.

Summer homeschool is cool.

Other torch-passers:
Fingerprints on my Window - Why me, why not?
Believer in Balance - Laundry Help

What does passing the torch mean to you? Is it teaching? Passing traditions? Or good news about youth? Join us each week for Pass the Torch Tuesday.Former PTT posts.

Positively Speaking has been published at 5 Minutes for Mom. My column this month is entitled, “Never Underestimate an Awesome Neighborhood.”

Other recent Internet articles and interviews:

Good News About Youth is There When We Seek It

Empower Your Kids - Let Go of the Reins!

5 Quick Questions with Kelly Curtis

Also, there’s still time to vote for Heather Wilder for the Energizer Keep Going Award. Heather is one of the inspirational young people I write about in my book. Vote daily through July 25.

Our next round of giveaways will take place the end of July. Please sign up for free updates by email or feed reader. I will never spam you or give out your address.

I’ve written two columns for May, on the subject of safety:
Positively Speaking at 5 Minutes for Mom, and
Keeping Youth Safe at ASCA Attitudes.

Also, my current series, Becoming an Author, leads up to the release date of my book, Empowering Youth: How to Encourage Young Leaders to Do Great Things.

Please sign up for free updates by email or feed reader. I will never spam you or give out your address.

My April Positively Speaking column has been published at 5 Minutes for Mom. I share insight I gained from the books Parenting Preschoolers with a Purpose and Parenting Preteens with a Purpose.

I’m also hosting giveaways for these books here and here.

I host regular giveaways for parents and educators - two more big giveaways are planned for April. Please consider signing up for updates by email. I will never spam you or give out your address.