Invention and creativity

The humble barb wire fence has come a long way since its inception. On the face of it, there is nothing unusual about its design. The basic premise is two sets of wire rolled together and intertwined, leaving sharp bits exposed. There are obviously inventions that are more complex than that, but perhaps the barb […]

Misrepresentation

We’ve all possible encountered situations like this before. If you work in the childcare sector, you might find that sometimes when a child is caught out by a lie they have told, they will try to engineer the situation and construct a whole world of belief to alter the evidence to fit their view. For […]

Teaching, Knowledge and Assessment

Are exams a good thing or bad thing? It depends on whom you speak to. As children grow up and enter the academic world of school, they enter periods of testing and exams and homework. Most people would agree that exams to a certain extent are good, because they give the students something to focus […]

Taking care of vision

Could it be true that the more educated you are, the more likely you are to be short-sighted? The NHS website seems to think so. It cited a piece of research involving over 67,000 participants which surveyed their educational levels and correlated them to their vision. The result was that individuals who had higher levels […]

Daring children to fail

It seems that we are such a goal-oriented society and measure our progress by the attainment of success, that we have forgotten that in failure there is much to learn to. Think of a child making a Lego set. He or she follows the instructions, and then perhaps after a nunber of steps encountes a […]

Achieving Greatness

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together. We often wish for our children to achieve good things in life. Perhaps they have a skill that could be nurtured. Perhaps it could be art, music or drama. Maybe a child shows an engineering bias or a love for machinery, or craftwork. […]