Thursday, October 25, 2012

This year's results

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Congratulations
 
Well done to all of you who have passed your 11+. I am so proud of all of you and your scores have been amazing! Good luck to you with getting your chosen school and I wish you a wonderful rest of year 6 and an even more amazing year 7

For all you mums and dads out there who have supported your children through this, well done and enjoy the relief which I am certain you are feeling together with the pride of their successes.
For information, this year's average scores from jobell tutoring were as high as ever.
Overall average score:     398.5
averages for sections as follows:
verbal reasoning:    136
non-verbal reasoning:     135
maths:      127

Monday, October 22, 2012

What can we expect from a 10 year old?

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The level of skill in writing is only limited by a few factors; the child’s vocabulary, their exposure to the use of grammar and their imagination/observation.
If you have spoken to them in a way which has encouraged the development of a wide language structure, they will incorporate that into their writing very quickly, because to them, it is normal to use those words. The grammar knowledge often comes from the books they are exposed to, not only the ones they read on their own but also he books you read with them. If they see the use of commas, colons and semi colons, speak marks and paragraphs they will absorb the use of them as they would the words they hear. I have often worked with children who by the age of 10 are able to produce highly sophisticated pieces of poetry or prose which would be comparable to a 16 year olds submission for GCSE. To them it is natural.
So can this be encouraged? It most certainly can and by exposing them to the language will start that process.
I have produced a manual of words which appear on the 11 plus verbal reasoning paper, and this challenges the year 5 pupils to learn the meanings of the words [please note the spelling is irrelevant] and to then incorporate them into passages or stories. What words are these? Well, here is one list:


Economical     Fatal   Provoke   Adopt   Domestic

Origin   Quaint   Scripture   Ambition   Sturdy

Restore   Sleek   Sincere   Proportion   Procure



The aim was to write a 300 word story about themselves or someone in the family which included at least nine of these words. To do this they had to know the various connotations of the words and then weave something which incorporated them. To many parents and teachers they would think this beyond them but to be honest unless you give them a challenge to aspire to how high will you know they can reach?
Some of the sentences and paragraphs incorporating theses words are enclosed below.

  •     … so she adopted a wild animal instead of the domesticated cat.
  •     … Ben had provoked an argument with his brother over football and then George took Ben’s figure from him. It was obviously a favourite figure because Ben was moaning and crying, so George restored into Ben’s hands.
  •  We left the cafĂ© and saw the deer with their sleek and shiny coats. They were so cute I wanted to adopt one!
  •  “Where are we going?” I asked in confusion. “It’s a surprise,” replied dad with a cheeky grin on his face. We drove to the station and dad asked the man behind the counter for a ticket to London. The helpful man replied it would be more economical if we got a family ticket…….
  •   .. the first place we visited were the sturdy gun turrets……… made our way to the rest of the ship to see the domestic arrangements for the sailors……… we noticed a quaint chapel…. Being on the ship provoked thoughts of what it must have been like for the sailors….


What can 10 year old's achieve? Sometimes a lot more than eventhey realise until we throw down the challenge.

Monday, October 8, 2012

The language of failure

Its so frighteningly common to hear a child as young as 5 or 6 stating they have failed, when really they have only just begun the learning process of growing into an adult. That word, failure, can halt the progress of an individual in its tracks, to a point where they can become unwilling to try anything new.

I work with adults who, for some reason or other, have reached a point in their lives where they are unable to move forward in something they would like to do. So often when it is explored, we discover things which have happened in the past and stopped them then are stopping them now. My aim is to give children the opportunity to move forward with a 'can do' belief rather than an 'its hard one'.

If you allow your child to continually express the phrase, 'Its hard,' they will believe that statement in the end. So, if they don't believe it when they are using it, why are they saying it?
Its to get you to help them, to step in and make it easy for them.
Whilst children, we only have very rudimentary knowledge of the value of a word. To a child, the word 'hard' means the opposite of 'easy' and that to them means someone does it for them in the way mum or dad has done everything for them up until now.
If you think about it, as a very young child we tie their shoes laces, cut up their food, buy their treats, put them to bed, magic the washing clean and dry, we do everything for them and they luxuriate in a five star hotel with love and protection thrown in as a free-be; quite a nice existence.
Then they get presented with something which lifts them out of this comfortable cocoon of wall-to-wall fun and we ask them to do something that is not generated from their fertile mind. Many respond by looking to the source of their luxury for them to take over and when we don't, they express the difficulty they are experiencing, that is, 'its hard'.
If we have been conditioned well enough by our children we automatically step in and help them. They continue to express difficulty and we do more and more of it, until they have stepped back far enough so as to allow us to do it. I often see this because it is at this point where a large grin comes onto the childs face, very similar to the one you see when they suddenly understand something.
Quick to learn, slow to reset.

What have we taught them? We have taught them, if they say its hard, we will step in and do it for them. 

Question: When do you think this falls down and fails to reward them in the way they want?
Answer: Its around the time when the, 'its hard' phrase, takes on a whole new meaning; I don't have the skills to know how to approach something that is hard [outside my current understanding] because until now, my mum or dad has done it for me.
Can you see how the feeling of failure can grow?
OK, so you've already fallen in the trap and they are saying its hard and you have to break  them of the need to rely on you, because you know this is not a good strategy to rely upon, how do you move forward now?
Firstly do not think you have failed, you've done something without being aware of how it can affect them later, so its not a failure its a temporary hiccup on the way. Another very quick way of learning is to mimic your parents and if they feel failure then the child will go out of its way to make sure it learns it too, sadly its a matter of instinct.
Here are a few strategies to employ, I use them all in different situations and they work well.

Strategies to use:
Comment: Its hard, I can't do it.
Response: Is it, mm, so what is making it hard, which part of it is the problem?

Comment: Its hard, I can't do it.
Response: I'm thinking we need to get to the bottom of this question and find out what it wants you to do..


Comment: Its hard, I can't do it.
Response: Can't do it or wont do it? What do you mean by that statement?

Comment: Its hard, I can't do it.
Response:I know dear, but really, you can do it, just not yet because you haven't worked out how to do the question that's all.

The responses above give you an idea of how to use language to push the problem back in their direction but at the same time be helpful to them in giving clues. Then you can use the plan of supporting them in working out the problem as shown in the article,"Whose homework is it anyway, part 2".





Thursday, October 4, 2012

I can't do it............

One of the biggest problems I come across when working with children is the learned response to something which poses a problem. They are being asked to step outside their current understanding and explore something new; it isn't straight forward, they do not come up with the 'right' answer straight away and give up.

Why? Because they do not have the strategies in place for dealing with a state of confusion.

One of the world's most eminent philosophers, Nietzsche, said, "out of chaos comes order". What he meant by this is, you have to go through a stage of not knowing something [the chaos] to learn it and then understand it [the order]. This is the element of learning which is missing, when your child says, they can't do it, or, its hard, or, I'm useless, I've failed. In a child's mind, the connection between can't do something and failing is close and has to be handled carefully before it becomes an established pathway to a lack of self esteem and the desire to give up and the slightest difficulty.

So, let's look at this process a bit more closely and work out, where, as parents we can intercept this path and divert it into one of exploration, where they feel confident within themselves not to  get the 'right answer' each time they do something.

 A question I used to pose new teachers I was training in the classroom was, why do we teach children? What, as teachers is our role in a child's life and how can we do that effectively? This equally applies to parents, what is it that parents teach and what role, in teaching, do they form within that child's life?

Put in that context, we can start to un-pick the responsibilities as it were, within a child's development and share the teaching, rather than what often happens at the moment, both fight over one another to teach the child the same thing but using different methods and employing different loyalties within the child. So what role does each have and where does the overlap come? Interesting thought and one worth pondering.

As teachers, we take the child into the world of known facts and introduce them to the wealth of knowledge the world has already gained. We cannot show them all of it because every day that knowledge gets more and more, but we can show them how to do the major skills our society feels is important for everyone in that society to know. We turn them to face the past and show them what has gone before; we invite  them to learn how to do/learn these skills and reward them for successfully doing them - making each child like everyone else in that society with a similar knowledge base.

Where, however, do new ideas come from?


We have words for these people - innovators, explorers, thinkers, genius', even scientists, philosophers and psychologists. All very grand words which seem to separate these people into a 'super-race', but why? All children are capable of being innovators, of exploring the world around them, of thinking things through for themselves and coming up with something novel [ the definition of which is, new and unusual, not seen before, a new approach]. So why not teach them this? Why not allow them the room to continue their exploration of the world? Why restrict their 'learning' into being taught how to do things we, as a society already know and not give them the tools to think for themselves as well?

A child is an amazing piece of kit; they have a brain poised to absorb everything it is given. They have sets of neurons [brain cells] just sitting waiting for stimulation, to be switched on and used to their fullest capacity, so why not give them the privilege of giving them the opportunity?

If you are saying yes to this then read on............

Puzzles, games, exploring/visiting new places, experiencing new skills, joining clubs and organisations which take them to camps, adventure playgrounds, learning about life from a fun perspective.

Why do you think so many Australian and American students travel? They're not afraid to do it!

 As teachers, we can introduce the element of exploration through various methods and as a rule do many of them, but the one which I feel is missed in both camps is the one Nietzsche mentioned, the one which allows the child to be in chaos before they can find new order. How do we do that? We show them the way of exploring, using their own strategies, and one of the best ways of doing this is through topics such as non verbal reasoning and verbal reasoning. By their very name, you can see they are expecting the child to do some thinking, to become thinkers themselves and process through, to find the most logical answer. In some cases there is no one answer but a range of answers that can be proved to be true by the explanations given. Is that not the basis of an innovator? By taking facts they know and placing them into the melting pot of the problem they 'feel' their way through to the answer and come up with something which is logical to them. Is that not the start of an explorer? They take paper and scissors and replicate the problem then explore in the physical world the process of working to wards an end point. Is that not the beginnings of a scientist?
In this world there is no failure, just a range of possible answers; no-one can reach a point of 'not being able to do it' because no-one can do it, its a conundrum which needs a logical answer.

If we want to take the pain out of learning we have to give them the fun back

If a child doesn't understand a fact, then the teaching hasn't addressed something in the child, not the other way round! If the child isn't willing to try something that may not have a concrete answer it has to be taught how to 'let go' of the need for right answers all the time and that is done through the language of the adult who is with them.
In the next blog I will start to review how we talk about failure and failing and how that has a direct impact on children. I will also show you some language patterns which may help you adjust your attitude toward failing and therefore allow the child to change theirs.