Wednesday 12 December 2012

Learning in the holidays

As we approach this Christmas Season this is a good opportunity to look at some recommendations for what you might do to keep your children's brains ticking over during the holiday.

Over the last few weeks my blog has referred to maths activities, listening games and reading skills. If there is any extra spare time why not turn your thoughts to history and geography?  There are many great places for family visits, such as Hampton Court Palace, museums in London (free admission to those), and art galleries. Websites will inform you of special exhibitions and of discount events, and travelling on the train gives you two for one offers on prices.

To make the experience particularly educational involve your children in the planning. Train schedules, car parks, ticket prices, choice of visit, maps of venues and making a timetable for the day can all be worked out together. Children love to be trusted to organise events and will be proud to show you their skills. Learning works best in the shape of an enjoyable experience… counting cash and sorting change on a shopping trip is the point of learning mathematics – it is what number work is for! Use those mobile phones for learning; sign up to a dictionary app for a new word every day or a puzzle, or even a simple daily crossword.

Allowing children to choose and make decisions is also very useful. Buying books for them is not quite the experience that being allowed to browse and choose them is. Don’t forget the public library either, a great, cheap and enjoyable outing. Direct your children to the non-fiction sections of the library, children love history and will be fascinated by how others lived. Maps are a great source of discussion… plan a walk using a local area map, or see if you have a local heritage trail… and keep talking as you go because discussion helps children to understand more than they will take in for themselves. Even a walk in the park (walking allows for far more conversation and observation than a car journey) or around the neighbourhood can be filled with discussions about what can be seen. Can you and your children name and recognise 5 types of trees or breeds of dog? Which Christmas decorations do they like as they pass them?

If you have lots of children and the possibility of childcare, try making an individual plan for a special and different day out for each child – children like few things more than a day of their parent’s undivided attention. My own mother took me to see the Tutankhamen exhibition on my own when I was about eight and I have never forgotten the pleasure of the exhibition or the delight of a day out with her by myself.  

Enjoy the precious days of the Christmas break.

Thursday 6 December 2012

Practical Maths

There is an idea among school communities that maths is a difficult abstract set of activities that need to be learned in order to be good at the subject. This is an interesting idea that denies much of the import and creativity that make maths an exciting and practical skill for real life.

This week I thought I would share a few ideas for bringing maths to life in the very simplest way, and show that it is the most basic skills that lead to the ability to think in the imaginative ways that lead to mathematical success in later years.

Understanding quantity is the key to dealing with numbers inside our heads. If you can’t work out the value of numbers and the general size you are considering, then estimating, checking and understanding are going to be difficult. Children find number ordering relatively easy by rote – many nursery children can count to fifty easily, but few have a sense of quantity and constructing this is an important task. An activity you can try for your selves is looking at a crowd of people (in a stadium or on the news) and asking ‘how many people can I see?’  For children estimating simple numbers is difficult: twenty, thirty  or forty - do they recognise the relative sizes? Most children assume that large numbers are homogenous and similar to each other instead of vastly different. People who are good at mental arithmetic generally have an accurate picture of the size of numbers to use alongside a quick understanding of the operation required. For those of you who find it hard to add up and divide the bill without a calculator at the end of the restaurant meal, you may not be bad at maths at all, but your mental picture of the numbers and quantity bonds is not well established, and you dont quite trust it!

So helping children to develop a notion of quantity is very useful. Guessing the number of things in a jar is a good idea, guessing first and then checking, and then playing again with other amounts to consolidate. Counting money is a truly valuable activity – estimating by recognising the different denominations, and not by the size of the coin heap! I have always used cards with children that find number concepts difficult. Simple games of gathering cards in turn round the group to make up an exact number… this game is fantastic for children on many levels firstly because children love turn taking games with their parents, secondly because it is number conservation and quantity practice, but thirdly and most usefully because the card configurations of numbers (diamonds, spades, hearts and clubs) always use the same shape for their numbers, and this allows children to develop a mental image of the quantity named by the number.

Once exhausted by number games how about the quantity of liquids or capacity - can you identify 100ml? Cookery with children is great introduction to measurement; ask them to measure and check, all the while reminding them of the sizes they are looking at. How tall are your children? Make a guess before you get out the tape measure – and ask them to guess too.

Maths is a game the whole family can play!





Wednesday 28 November 2012

Why Do Good Manners Matter?

Why do good manners matter at all in this competitive day and age? What are good manners anyway?

For some this may appear to be about old fashioned courtesy, saying please and thank you, holding doors, helping old ladies across the street. Perhaps by doing a few formulaic things we can offer apparent kindness and make our little worlds run more smoothly. Is this little bit of altruism actually about making things work for ourselves or for other people?

The Christian Humanist view is that we should look after other people as we would like to be looked after ourselves. Christ himself asks us to do this, and to regard the lowliest among us as people of value by treating them with dignity and kindness. For me this is also about how we want to engage with the world; finding a place to belong with the people who live on this planet with me.

Ask yourself the question “Who is the nicest person I know? Someone I value and who values me. A person who I could go to with anything that troubled me, someone I trust, who will gently help me to the truth, who will ‘be there’ for me dispensing joy, wisdom and kindness”. Of course we may hope it is ourselves who are viewed as such, or that is how we may see our loved ones, or our special or old friend, or you at least know who that person might be; someone who knows and cares for you just as you are. Whoever they are I suspect they are someone with good manners. I expect they listen, make time for you, appear interested, are happy to pass the time of day, and are solicitous, kind and warm. I hope that I might be so regarded, although I know I am guilty of not making time (and always checking my phone or having somewhere else to be), but most of all I hope the children that I now teach might grow up to be that person.

How do we go about making our children into the wonderful adults they could be? I believe it starts with simple good manners. Children are naturally egocentric and they see the world through self-centred eyes. Children at play will naturally push past each other, avoid sharing and try to gain the main advantage in give and take. With little encouragement they are naturally competitive, like to be better (faster, brighter, stronger) than their peers, and enjoy demonstrating their talents and gifts, even to the detriment of their friends. So to help them to become the amazing popular friends to others that we hope they will be they need to have reflective thought processes introduced to them, the perspectives that others might have of them and the way others might feel.

Empathy starts with good manners, understanding that an engagement with someone else has a meaning and a purpose beyond the business of functional communication. So we want them to learn to say please and thank you because it offers dignity and value to the person they are speaking to. Stepping back or holding a door open to allow someone else to pass reminds us that we all have a role to play in making life pleasant for each other, and shows respect. Saying good morning, and looking at the person they are speaking to creates a bond of communication. We all know that a smile shared can lift a grey day!

So this week a focus on manners might make busy life a bit more pleasant for all. Children need lots of encouragement to understand that they are not the very centre of the universe, but telling them is unlikely to help, and can be unhelpful to a developing self-esteem. However, training them (by copying us) to take simple actions that validate others, that enable them to understand how to respect people by small acts of kindness and courtesy, these are the starting place. To grow up with a warm understanding of others and an ability to be a good friend brings its own happiness, perhaps one that is unfashionable when thinking about success, but being rich and fulfilled is about more than money.

What I hear referred to as ‘bullying’ is more often than not simply a rough and tumble lack of simple kind good manners. Children that push others or manage themselves to the front to assert themselves or their will over others are often unaware of the impact they are having on their peers. Rather than a consistent calculated attitude to nastiness they trip into it by overenthusiastic or thoughtless approaches to other people that speak of lack of understanding of the other and what they might want or be feeling. Sadly these are the very children that end up mystified when they have few close friends, and cannot see why they are considered unkind or rough. So I tell them that if they want to have a friend, they must be a friend – and it starts by showing good manners: sharing, caring, listening, standing back and saying please and thank you.

I wonder whether we confuse our children. We know they have rights and we fight for them. We want them to get ahead and we tell them so. We let them hear us compete with each other, or even bend the truth to manage our own lives. They learn from any self-motivated actions we take that deny the importance of someone else. If we do everything for our children it is no wonder they take little responsibility for their actions. If we let them believe they are the most important person in the solar system they won’t understand the cooperative compassion and respect that makes the world go round, and contributes to their own happiness. Unfortunately the last step in this process is to leave the learning of good manners until too late, to let schools teach it, to save it for a day when we are less busy (good manners can’t be used in a hurry) or to say one thing and then do another.

This week I would love to see the pupils in my care taking a little extra time to remember their manners and to take that step towards being the most wonderful person they can be.

Good day to you all.


Thursday 22 November 2012

Listening Skills?


How much listening do you actually do?
Every day we hear thousands of things, some in the background, many that we are supposedly attending to, some that we actively listen to. We expect the children in our care to listen to instructions, filter out the important sounds from the rest and then do what they have been told. In the background they also have conversations of their own and ambient noises to deal with. We tell them they must listen, but how well do we train them to know what they must listen to?

Hearing is an extremely acute sense. It is generally understood that it is the last sense to disappear, and that unconscious patients can still hear sounds and voices. Hearing is an evocative sense, and most basically acts as an alarm system for danger, alerting us and preparing the body for fight or flight. That’s why a sharp sound will make our hearts race and unexpected noises in the night spring us into alertness. Even someone adding your name when speaking to you will naturally increase your attention.

However, in the visually rich culture we live in now, how do we give our children the opportunity to develop this valuable sense? Listening is the ability to process what is heard using the brain’s conscious rather than automatic functions. If we allow children to see that we are only half- listening to them, if they think we are constantly listening to the same music, if we fill their lives with artificial noise then we are limiting the discriminatory powers that intelligent listening can give them.

To develop listening skills it is important to enable some peace to hear the sounds that naturally surround us. For me, providing constant external sound from the radio, TV, or MP3 player runs the risk of reducing my thinking, and cuts off the relationship with the outside world. Some people feel they need the noise to help them work, or use the sound to act as company, but try a morning without extra sound, just a patch of peace and quiet to see how background noise can calm you and help to reduce the pressure of noise keeping you busy. Creating a bit of peace and quiet also enables us to hear our own inner voice; to listen to ourselves!

It is worth training children’s listening skills, taking the time to listen to the sounds around and to talk about them, to teach them to look at the person speaking and to engage in meaningful conversation, and to actually take time away from the multitasking madness of our visual world to listen, uninterrupted to something new – a piece of music, a story, or a different style of each.

I know that I am guilty of doing other things whilst people are talking to me, and have learnt (the hard way!) that I am not really capable of taking in sufficient information that way – but I also know that we all do this to children, from hearing reading whilst busy ourselves to just sidestepping the constant bubbling ideas that flow from a happy child, and so, naturally, our children learn from us that listening is something that can be happily compromised. To make things worse we then get cross if they don’t listen to us barking instructions.

So how about making an effort to listen to things together, and making time to enjoy the sounds around you? Make space for a family conversation, listen to something new rather than the same old music, and take those earphones out so that listening can be a valuable shared experience. A game that children will enjoy is the ‘add an instruction’ game (although they will love any game that guarantees your attention) by sending them several instructions to remember and follow before returning successfully to you. Start with one (for example: run upstairs and bring me a hairbrush) then add one more instruction at a time (for example: run upstairs and fetch me a hairbrush and then go to the kitchen and get me a spoon before returning) and then let them dictate the terms to you for you to have a go. You may think this is just training the memory, but ‘not remembering’ is often just an excuse to cover up the fact that real intelligent listening didn’t take place. 
Happy listening!

Wednesday 14 November 2012

Why do our children need to read?

I wonder where all of us learnt the things we know…? Was it by listening to parents or grandparents? Perhaps the television or radio furnished us with facts or ideas? For me reading was the foundation of much of my understanding of the world, from a love of poetry, well written prose and exciting ideas beyond my small experience of the world, to how to replace my own windows, cook, and understand aspects of science for my teaching career. Every day, once the alarm has gone off, before I even jump out of bed, I start by opening the ‘newspaper’ on my ipad or smart phone, and reading the headlines, the comment section, the culture highlights and any education news. This sets me up for the day and connects me to the world of understanding.

I firmly believe that without real exposure to reading, deep immersed daily reading, it simply isn’t possible for our children to develop a sufficient understanding of life.
It is common in schools to teach comprehension (let us not forget that comprehension means understanding) in bite sized chunks. We give children a few moments to read a small passage of text, and then expect them, through that small medium, to have sufficient understanding to answer literal and inferential questions, and by year six to give opinions, discuss vocabulary, recognise some parts of speech and make predictions. It is as if we believe that this disjointed approach will enable them to learn and to demonstrate their learning. But the evidence before us suggests otherwise: today a  class of ten year olds could not identify Scotland from a piece that mentioned highland games, tartan and kilts. A whole group of nine year olds did not know what ‘milking a cow’ meant. Nobody in one of my upper junior science groups could tell me which tree a conker came from… This type of understanding is essential if children are able to make connections and understand the work they are faced with.

How can we make a difference to this woeful state of affairs? Easy – open the world by opening a few books; the more and the more varied, the better, and as often as possible. So take note: reading to accelerate through a reading scheme, reading to digest a set number of classics, reading to improve speed or skimming and scanning techniques, all of these strategies count for nothing if the general development of vocabulary, basic understanding, love of reading and knowledge are not part of the foundation of learning.
Happy reading.