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 […]
Category archives: Learning
Music lessons and single-parenting
What does your society think of single parenting? One can only assume it is largely linked to how your society views things such as divorce and marriage. Less permissive societies may frown on single parents because they do not approve of divorce and hold on to beliefs of marriage being for life. Or they may […]
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 […]
For information that sticks, look for meaning
School trips. Love them or hate them? I suspect that it depends on which side of the equation you are on. The children that go on them would likely be excited at the chance of doing something different, away from the classroom, and not having the “boring” learning, of information thrown at them that they […]
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 […]
Teaching Children the art of balancing
Among the useful life skills we can teach or children is the skill of learning to balance. Because life is about balancing. And when I speak about balancing, I don’t mean the physical skill if riding a bike or going about on a scooter. I refer to the skill of leaning on one set of […]
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 […]
Before facts, teach purpose, relevance and meaning
How do we assess if children have learnt a fact or not? Usually it is their ability to recall a matching answer to a question we post them. “What is 10 x 10?” “One hundred.” (Learnt! Tick!) “If ten friends give you ten sweets each, how many sweets do you have?” “Er .. er… er […]
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. […]