If you're interested in learning a language it might be useful to answer some questions on the site of the BBC to find out your pitfalls and strong points.
Starting with simple sentences in the first three months is something that the BBC encourages with beginners.
And now for something completely different...
Yesterday I gathered ingredients for making home made self-esteem soup. Today we're going to try to make it ourselves using the metafor of soup and play.
First we need to gather the ingredients. In order to make the experience tactile, we'll need pots and labels or pieces of paper, maybe seashells or pebbles. Anything that can represent an ingredient that we want to teach in the self-esteem soup.
One possible list would be:
- hart; this could be a pebble that symbolizes the heart and respiration, life and love for oneself, self-appreciation. A child can fondle the pebble when before an exam to remember to feel good about himself and to distract from negative feelings.
- resilience -just a little bit gets a long way. Children can be explained what resilience is and how it works. A empty salt jar with resilience written on it makes it easier to remember the idea of resilience to pop up when necessary.
- let them write their own positive ideas on scraps of paper and maybe make labels of these, or put the scraps as a salade in a pot to mix them with a spoon.
- don't forget higher goals such as forgiveness.
Have fun making your own recipy.
You can also look at toxins that you have to leave out. I as a parent would have to work at reducing 'criticism' or replacing it with a less salt version. I'm going to use the salt for this one.
A comb can be used to comb hair, to straighten it and to redefine order or it can be used by an artist to recreate a more complex order that takes into account more than one variable: shape, direction, angle, perspective and other that I wouldn't have thought about. 'Je ne sais quoi' surprise typical of art and able to take into account actuality dor science.
An important factor in succesful education is a healthy self-esteem. Self-esteem is not to be taken for granted in a school system where children don't have much quality contact with teachers or peers. However, I now have changed my children to go to schools where there is much attention for this part of development and I can see that the children feel better in general. The results improve at the same time. This asks much from the teachers and I admire them for their dedication to do more than just teach a subject.
This motivates me to do some chores for school this week.
It's a very dark beginning of the year inside our house. The weather is cloudy and there is some rain, but mainly it's dark. My husband and I were both ill at the same time and with a large family this is a heavy weight for all. All went well thanks to a lovely colleague of my husband who came to the rescue. Without her it would have been -well different-. Do you have such wonderful persons around you? I feel I haven't yet found a way to do something back. I'm not going to forget about this. Now everything is back to normal, well, almost. I've more energy and I'm finally busy to tackle the boys room that looked very horrible after they have been doing the dishes and coocking meals for us. So I went in, took a deep breath and started to clean. What a difference and it took much less time than I would have anticipated.
I'm feeling a little insecure though.
Another approach to education would be to look at what is a good practice. There are institutes, teachers, schools and researchers that already work that way that I've encountered in the Netherlands on internet. I don't know any worldwide examples but I'm sure they exist. However, serendip is a site where psychologists and biologists get into discussions on the human mind during their studies and is one of my favorite examples of a good practice teaching. I have more on this blog somewhere... (this blog is starting to look like my purse).
When outside is too windy to play, an alternative is educational puzzles on the computer.
