a free week with the children

* Museum
* organizing
* internet quests
* reading about ethics
* throwing away old emails
* maths
* crafts

blood is...

"Blood is red!" said the children in the classroom of my daughter. "when it's inside your body it can be blue." I replied. They weren't going to change their opinion. During the arts lesson, many children tried to convince me. They came up with arguments, red is the colour. You can see it, blue is only the colour of the vein, not of the blood.
I touched the story that before the earth was thought to be flat. One of the children started to defend that point of view. They did think it to be a good idea to check internet or to ask a doctor.

I develop a top-down technique to learn to read

I've been reading at school often with my five year old, who started reading but seems to have dyslectic traits the same as his brother had: many aspects of reading are fine, but just a specific difficulty is there matching the sound to the image which causes him to slow down. I'm figuring out a way to read together at this moment and it's finally working well. I'm a little bit enthousiastic about it because it's a top-down approach and I might be getting a better result than the classical way. A special way of reading for early detected intelligent dyslectics. I'm thinking to write a longer article about it describing what I do. Maybe it will grow to be a top-down technique for reading. I couldn't find any material on top-down reading techniques, so if anyone has any kind of information please mail me at Odile AT schmiodile POINT NL. Thanks in advance.

accidents happen regardless blame

My husband wrote a report for a trial in court about safety. He spent all free time this summer and his research hours to write it. I'm not getting into details, because it's not public. But what I can say in general is the point that for safety it's important to move away from the question of guilt and shift attention to mistakes in the process of action. When we want safety, we should focuss less on blame and focuss more on what happens. Look more at decisions that lead to error, factors that lead to error, situations that lead to error.
Unfortunately, when we look for a person to be the reason of an accident, there is a real chance that another accident will happen.

kindness

I want to write something about kindness, but although I know what kindness is when I am with children, what is it exactly...
It's something I like to search in children when we work at an art project. I like to relate to the children and after a few weeks I like it when a child that was 'difficult' slowly changes to become more attentive, quiet, smiling, concentrated, kind. When we work together at arts this often happens. We talk, ask questions, work together, share ideas, smile.