The Georgous

What would you do when your 5-year-old comes home everyday with tales of ‘C says I’m naughty but I’m not!’ ‘C says I smell’ ‘C always tells on me’ ‘C doesn’t want to play with me’…. Read more »

As Georgia progressively interacts with more and more with people outside of our home and our immediate circle of friends, I have become more aware of how many different ‘parenting faces’ I have and which I call upon depending on the situations.

It often feels as if we have an embedded inner compass of actions, reactions and culture that unfortunately, unlike a true magnetic compass that points due North; this inner compass often flip-flops between East or West (cultural influences) and all points in between.

I have often attributed a large part of this, to the fact that we are parenting and raising a child in a culture and environment so completely different from the one we were raised in (being immigrants).

Beyond cultural influences, however, it has also occurred to me that technology, the changes of societal demands and simply how things have changed over a generation is reason enough to continuously reflect on and question the decisions we now make, or have to make, as parents.

The oft-heard cry of ‘Back in my day…’ is universal; we have added recently though a ‘We do not do that…’ to our arsenal of reasons or excuses, often, rightly or wrongly (any thoughts would be welcome here!) with a cultural implication.

An example is saying ‘Yuck!’ to food. Read more »

Maths is easy

Georgia’s school recently held an Information Evening for the parents of KS1, mainly to introduce a new Maths scheme that the school had recently bought in to – Maths Makes Sense.

Designed and developed by Richard Duune, I first heard and saw Mr Duune and his new approach to Maths teaching in a Dispatches programme on Channel 4 in early 2010. (A related Math quiz) In ‘Kids Don’t Count’, featured in typical sensational broadcasting fashion, Mr Duune was brought in to ‘turn around’ Maths instruction at a couple of schools in the South East. The programme focussed mainly on the vast discrepancy in Maths ability among students and how being perceived as a boring subject, students were unable to answer some very basic Math questions.

The new Maths Makes Sense scheme is essentially a new style of presenting mathematics based on visual aids and models to both allow children to be able to better visualise the direct link between numbers and physical objects and a new style of teachings mathematics that rely significantly on the teacher to provide the information in an engaging, stimulating and fun way.

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With Chinese New Year just around the corner, we sat talking about how we could celebrate it in our own way, especially as it’s not a public holiday here. Somehow the conversation progressed from, who we would invite, what we would eat, when we would celebrate to…

Dad: It’s actually ‘our’ year. Year of the Rabbit

G: Why is it your year?

Dad: We were born in the Year of the Rabbit.

G: And me?

Dad: You were born in the Year of  the Dog…

G (at this point looking at little confused): …and after that it’s the Year of the Hedgehog!

Dad: … ????

to Reinforce the Positive and Encourage Achievement. First let me explain how we came to create the Star Book.

Throughout almost all of last term, Georgia, moaned and whined and made a fuss of going to school. She would be clingy and there were even daily tears.  It was awful! For those of you whose children skip happily along to school, you’re really lucky… 🙂

It helped tremendously that I knew and trusted her teachers and their feedback was always taken positively, and it was great knowing that we were partners working together towards a common goal. However, it was still a challenge every morning.

Over the Christmas and New Year holiday, as a treat to myself, (I had been good :)) I read Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles. Now if you like me watched The Secret and liked it but never really got to the practise of  ‘the secret’, Canfield’s book provides and almost step-by-step guide (an all very logical too) to achieving anything you set your mind to. One of the chapters in the book, suggests that you list every day, 5 achievements for the day (even if you did not accomplish things that you set out to do that day, if you reflect on your day, you will often find achievements each day) and to focus on goals for the next day.

So we thought, what a great way for Georgia, and especially for us, to focus on what we can achieve and to celebrate the successes each day, and that was how we came to create the Star Book. Read more »

15 January, 2011

A note sent home from georgia’s class…
I love the idea and the approach, don’t you?
🙂

then why don’t I feel like I’m the best mother in the World?

A recent article Why Chinese Mothers are Superior in the Wall Street Journal has caused a lot of controversy and raised a lot of emotion amongst it readers and it’s certainly worth a read. Being an immigrant (Malaysian Chinese) to a Western culture (we now live in the UK), this article has certainly struck a chord for many reasons….not least because I too am, to a certain extent, trying to instill my child with ‘Asian values’ while being surrounded by Western Culture (I wrote about this when Georgia was little more than 1 here);

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The idea that watching too much television is bad for children has been around for decades and if you have children you would probably have read about one of the many studies expounding the evils of children watching television. That said, it is an amazing baby sitter and the ability to keep a child quiet for a significant amount of time simply by turning on the television is without a doubt one of it’s many appeals.

Have you ever wondered though what it might be like to ‘unplug’, to live without ‘live’ television at home?

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Today, for the first time since starting school in September 2010, Georgia actually walked in to her classroom without clinging on to me or whining! What a breakthrough!

The Secret: Her very own Star Book…read more about it here.

But for now, Well done Georgia!!!

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