Is It Possible for Kids To Take Responsibility for Their Own Learning?

When I was at school, I remember always sitting at the back of the class and being one of the worst students. Only later on in life, during my Special Education studies, I learned about how kids are treated based on where they sit in the classroom.

Did you know that some seats are better than others and determine the teachers’ attitude towards the kids sitting in them? Well, I didn’t know this either and by the time I did, it was a bit too late for me to save myself all those frustrations at school.

But what I realised was that teaching the teachers about their varying attitudes based on sitting positions was missing the mark. Who do you think really needs to know this?

If you have answered “The kids”, you are right! But kids, of course, do not read blogs, so I would like to encourage you, the parent, to pass the information below to your kids and, by doing so, to allow them to take responsibility for their own learning and future success.

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FREE HUGS for Christmas 2007

Just before the holidays and the start of a new year, we went to Southbank Parklands in Brisbane to spread some real holiday cheer with free hugs and some good friends. Some truly touching stories were told to us, like a grandmother, whose grandson had been in an accident in the country and had been […]

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Do You Really Believe That Setting a Goal Is Enough to Achieve It?

My immediate answer is “I wish”. I really do. Think about it – how easy it would be if all we needed is to set a goal, write it down (to make sure we will not change it often, based on circumstances) and let the universe take care of it, right?

But I am a person of action. I believe in motion as the ultimate way to growth and I that action speaks louder than words. While the universe is taking care of some of your goals, just because you wanted them, your actions will help you with the rest. When you set a goal and wait for an external source to fulfil it, you fail to help yourself and miss the opportunity to grow.

My Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) teacher did believe that it was enough. She said, “If you really, really want it, it will happen”, but I ask you, “How do you know if you really, really want something? When does your desire become ‘real’?”

When I want something, I can swear I really want it.

You see, some people set goals and do not achieve them, at least for a while, so they accept defeat by saying “Maybe I didn’t ‘really’ want this goal”.

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How to Stimulate Visual Kids

Visual kids have a combination video-and-still camera in their heads. They like to see things. Pictures, colours and visual representations of things are their main information carriers. These kids learn best and expresses themselves best using pictures, graphs and colours. To them, one picture really IS worth a thousand words.

Visual kids use colours, graphs and pictures to learn the sounds around them.

Here are some ideas that help visual kids learn better…

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Interview with Ronit Baras on Her New Book "In the Outback with Jasmine Banks"

Following the announcement of her book “In the Outback with Jasmine Banks”, here is an interview with Ronit Baras about this inspiring story of a young woman’s personal journey to freedom.

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Hugging Season

As we prepared to hug the homeless, I happened to read about hugging and found a post where Carl Munson expressed his uncomfortable feelings about hugging. Here is my response.

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Beware of Pink Elephants

Most of our coaching clients ask us, “How come I keep getting all the things I don’t want to have in my life?”

Oddly enough, the answer is hidden in the question. It’s all to do with … pink elephants.

Our brain is a very sophisticated machine, with its own way of interpreting the things around us. It turns out that one particular thing our brain can’t understand is negatives. Whenever we hear or use the words “no”, “not” or “don’t”, the brain simply ignores them and keeps the rest.

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A Holistic Approach to Holiday Blues

We have many hopes for the holidays – we hope that something special will happen at midnight between when the year changes. We have hopes for the new year (even though in different places in the world, that moment happens at different times). The more frustrated we are with our current situation, the more hopes we have for magic to happen to us, just like that.

During the holidays, many people realise they are lonely just by looking around and seeing others travel to another country to be with their loved ones. Many people realise they are broke just looking around at the shops full of people buying like crazy. Many people realise they are still frustrated with their work, hearing about others getting bonuses for the holidays. Some people find out how troubled their relationships are just trying to decide where to celebrate the holidays.

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Diagnosing Learning Difficulties and Gifted Children in the Early Years

Drawing of cogs inside a head and symbols flying around

It was psychologist Howard Gardner’s book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which first questioned the common psychological orthodoxy about intelligence, the intelligence quotient (IQ), and presented the revolutionary concept of Multiple Intelligences. At a time when a set of tests positioned children in a single spot on the bell curve and educators’ capacity to affect this position was seen as limited, the dawn of multiple intelligences shone a light at the end of a tunnel.

With this great recognition of our ability to enhance intelligence, the two extreme parts of the bell curve – the children with the learning difficulties and the gifted children – became the center of attention. Those two seemingly unrelated ranges of ability require the same type of attention and multiple intelligences brought hope for improvement for both.

A natural progression of that was the area of early diagnosis and early intervention. Should we diagnose learning difficulties during early childhood or will this put a label on them that is too hard to remove? Should we diagnose gifted children or will this doom them to isolation and social challenges? And once a special need is identified, should we intervene or just let nature take its course and allow the kids to “grow out of it”?

Each of the questions presents the choice between a reactive and a proactive approach. For government organizations, these questions are translated to the cost difference between the two, which then determines the approach. For teachers, however, critical time plays an important role in the choice.

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14 Tips to Protect Your Kids Online

The Internet is a great source of information and allows us to connect easily with many people around the globe. For kids, like adults, the Internet is a fascinating world of discoveries, great exploration and yes, some danger. Like many other areas of life, in order to appreciate the “light” of the Internet, we need to have some “darkness”.

There are horrible stories of abuse and even death through misuse of connections formed with kids on the Internet. Sneaky people exist on the Internet as much as they do in any other place society and they abuse their right to participate and become a risk to our children.

So, if you want to protect your kids online, the answer, I say, is education (surprise, surprise).

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