Schooling

Choosing a school for your child

So anyway, this week, following a process significantly more taxing upon one’s mind and conscience than that which attends the purchase of a house, we finally settled on a school for our daughter. After shortlisting two schools, here’s what swung it for us:

  1. It’s right next door to the fush ‘n’ chup shop, which means healthy lunches and so fit minds.
  2. It’s over the road from the fushing ‘n’ hunting shop, which means that I’ll be significantly more excited about doing school pick-ups and drop offs, and that kids who aren’t interested in taking up pansie sports like netball and touch rugby can pop over and buy a crossbow or gun and take up some really worthwhile sport like sheep- and/or zombie-hunting. I’m all for cat culls too.
  3. The main road which runs right through the middle of the campus encourages the entire local community to get involved in the battle to keep class sizes down. (This means fewer queues at the hunting shop too.)
  4. They offer free drum lessons!

So on your bike kid … have fun out there, and if you learn how to count or think along the way, then that’s OK; we can deal with that later. And as fa spellin an stuff wee got spel cheque noow aniwaye cept that mynes not workeeng. So just stick with the basics – playtimes and fush ‘n’ chup lunches.

BTW: For those of you who currently reside in other sectors of the empire, this video (sent to me by a guy whose wife – or son – stole my Bible; so not the most reputable of types) may help decode some of this post:

Your Baby Can Read

Trevor Cairney has posted a helpful (and encouraging) review of the ‘Your Baby Can Read!’ program developed by Dr Robert Titzer. While I was unaware of Titzer’s thesis, the concerns Trevor outlines make real sense to me. As I noted in a comment on his post, I spend all day with a 2-year-old. We cook, play, dance, listen to music, read, count the dongs on the grandfather clock, paint, sort through food, and eat leaves in the garden, among other things. It’s learning all the way, and the resultant growth in her is obvious. I can’t imagine how spending an hour a day sitting in front of a TV (which she is not interested in at all) watching DVD’s can compare with sitting on dad’s knee reading, or kicking a football or counting flower buds in the garden, or learning to share toys and attention with friends. I’m keen to hear from others who may have had experience with Titzer’s program, and whether or not their experiences echo any of Trevor’s concerns.

Podding around

Here’s a few more podcasts that I’ve checked out today that I thought were worth sharing here:

With the rise of the internet many parents are feelings that their kids know more about what goes on in the world wide web than they do. And with community like websites, danger for them is no longer just in the neighbourhood. In this podcast, Paul Wallbank of PC Rescue maps out some of the dangers of cyberspace.

In this podcast on living with drug and alcohol abuse in families, Shirley Smith, author of Set Yourself Free, talks about how we can help people with addictions or overcome our own. All of us know someone with a problem with addiction and it can create chaos in a lot of lives.

The first 9 minutes of this podcast includes a discussion on Boys, Men, and Fathers.

This podcast includes a discussion on reading to your children, this one and this one are discussions on co-parenting and reading to kids, while this one is on Single-sex schools.

This podcast includes an argument for co-ed schools, and this one’s on Political wives, Intensive parenting, and Maths for pre-schoolers.

There’s a discussion here on Kids and Money too, and one here on ‘From Babies to Blokes: The Making of Men’.

So that ought to keep us all busy for a wee while. I usually download podcasts to my MP3 player and listen to them at night while I fall asleep.