October 17, 2016 5:01 pm
Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge
I have always felt games provide the best way of teaching children, especially if the concept involved is fairly abstract. When my son was tiny, back in the sixties, we used to play a game which, though simplistic in nature, provided him with an excellent lesson for the future. The biscuit tin game involved placing a biscuit tin on the kitchen table (often he would fetch it himself in anticipation of playing the game). We would sit on either side of the table and he would describe the tin he could see – it had two lambs and some roses. I would tell him my tin had a shepherd and a dog on the side. We’d hmm and hah, roll...
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...
