July 28, 2016 2:15 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
An interesting article appeared in the Daily Mail of 18 July 2016. Eleanor Harding quotes a report from the charity Save the Children. It underscores what I have worked hard to promote for so many years. Learning does not begin at school. Learning begins way before, in fact, soon after birth. Your child learns every moment it is awake, and what it learns is up to you. When you recite, read, and sing songs and nursery rhymes you are formally educating your child. Eleanor Harding’s article quotes from the Save the Children’s report that the result of this parent/child interaction will affect a child’s education right through school and into the world of work. It follows that if this time,...
July 17, 2016 4:30 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
Oh dear, the first episode of Child Genius and already the metaphorical guns are out and taking aim. ”Poor kids,” I was told, ”bullied and pushed into achieving,” they said, ”child cruelty” and the one I personally dislike, ”let kids be kids.” Emily Martin of the Cambridge News of 16 July 2016 calls it, ‘Channel 4’s sanitised version of the Hunger Games.’ Sorry Emily but you just do not understand bright children. Children will always be children and bright children automatically turn learning into a game. Extremely bright children love learning. They sop up facts, dates, figures – anything and everything their wonderful brains encounter, while still being children. My own son never spoke until age three due to constant...
July 4, 2016 2:25 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
Number? Well, yes. Once upon a time there was simple addition, multiplication, division and subtraction. We all learned these drills and the easy methods to carry them out. By the time we left school we may not have been too hot on simultaneous equations, or applying Pythagoras but our very basic drills were set in stone. Then hoved into view the ‘experts.’ They changed old methods to ‘simplify’ them for slow learners. But, big problems arose. As I have said many times, parents provide the golden element in their child’s education. They are the people who deal with homework, parents shine a light into those dark, fearsome corners of a child’s misunderstanding. New maths, however, is simply not understood by...
