Tips on how as a parent , you can pepare your child for the school year

Taking time to talk with and listen to your child about the upcoming school year is one of the best ways as a parent that you can help your child with the transition back to school.

Pre-schoolers need to know what will happen

-As a parent you should take your child to visit the school and let them play and meet their new teachers.
-It's also a good idea to choose children's books about school life to help your child understand what to expect in school.
-You should establish routine bed and wake up times to prepare your child for their school schedule.

Primary school children will need to adjust to new beginnings

-You have to allow your child the freedom to buy something that they want, such as a trendy folder or pencil.
-Talk to your child about the new teachers he/she will have and the new freinds they will meet. The notion of a fresh start is usually appealing to children, and can help neutralize bad feelings about school.

Teenagers need positive reinforcement

-Help your teen set realistic goals on how to get better marks.
-Make sure that you help your teenager become organised by buying a daily planner and teaching them how to use it correctly.
-Encourage him/her to get involved in at least one extracurricular activity or sport because it will help them meet people.
-Try to convey a sense of optimism regarding the child's success because it enhances their motivation and sense of hope.

Understanding Depression

Research has shown that the highest risk of suicide and depression is the age group between 15 and 21 because there is a lot more pressure in this group. This includes pressure from peers to have boyfriends and girlfriends, to take drugs and alcohol, to be a certain type of person, as well as pressure from their families and schools to get good grades and meet expectations. All of this combined with the problems of adolescence and hormonal changes can contribute to a teenager feeling overwhelmed.

Symptoms of depression

• Feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. A bleak outlook—nothing will ever get better and there’s nothing you can do to improve your situation.
• Loss of interest in daily activities.  No interest in former hobbies, pastimes, social activities, or sex. You’ve lost your ability to feel joy and pleasure.
• Appetite or weight changes. Significant weight loss or weight gain—a change of more than 5% of body weight in a month.
• Sleep changes. Either insomnia, especially waking in the early hours of the morning, or oversleeping (also known as hypersomnia).
• Irritability or restlessness. Feeling agitated, restless, or on edge. Your tolerance level is low; everything and everyone gets on your nerves.
• Loss of energy. Feeling fatigued, sluggish, and physically drained. Your whole body may feel heavy, and even small tasks are exhausting or take longer to complete.
• Self-loathing. Strong feelings of worthlessness or guilt. You harshly criticize yourself for perceived faults and mistakes.
• Concentration problems. Trouble focusing, making decisions, or remembering things.
• Unexplained aches and pains. An increase in physical complaints such as headaches, back pain, aching muscles, and stomach pain.

Look after your children and support them where possible and necessary.

Education receives the largest slice of the budget pie

The 2011 budget has revealed high levels of spending on improving the quality of education in South Africa

The government has set aside 21% of the 2011 budget for improving the quality of education in South Africa.

This was revealed during Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s budget speech in parliament on Wednesday.

The total amount of spending equates to R190bn in 2012/13 to R215bn in 2013/14.

The key amounts to be spent include R9.5 billion for the expansion of further education and

training colleges and skills development, as well as R8,3bn on schools infrastructure.

A further R24.3bn will be added to education and skills expenditure for the next three years.

Gordhan noted that this amounts to the "most important programme of investment in future growth and redistribution."

-BusinessDay 24 February 2011

There's no such thing as a bad child...

In 1968, Rosenthal & Jacobson published a study called Pygmalion in the classroom. The study was conducted at a lower middle income school, where the principal, Lenore Jacobson, and Robert Rosenthal, an educational psychologist, told teachers at the school, after conducting what purported to be an new form of IQ test, that several children had IQ results which showed they were gifted and capable of learning at a rapid rate.

The result of this was that the teachers taught those children differently. The children learned at a rapid rate. The teachers had higher expectations of those children. They gave them more input, and more chances.

As parents we have such power. Our children have belief and faith in us, however difficult and troublesome they sometimes appear to be. If we tell them they are clever, and are capable, and that we believe in them, then they will believe in themselves. If we tell them all the time how wicked and incapable they are, they will believe us.

Children are at school a lot of the day. We do not always know what they are being exposed to. We might have to deal with bullying, or with our child being a bully. If our children have strong belief in themselves, and a good, wide open world view, then what happens at school doesn’t have to be the end of the world for them. They can benefit from the good, and deal with the bad.

Teachers are human. Not all teachers are as fair or sensible as we would like them to be. When there is a dispute between your child, and a teacher, then the important thing for all parents to do is to support their child. Many schools value “discipline” – punctuality and tidiness- over learning. When a child is being picked on about something other than schoolwork, then don’t hesitate to confront the teacher. It is also the teachers duty to mark all work completed by a child, as not doing so is an infringement of the child’s constitutional rights to an education. So if a teacher is refusing to mark work because it is late, don’t hesitate to complain.

Most importantly, make sure you protect your child’s confidence from attack. It isn’t appropriate for teachers to tell children “you will never amount to anything” “you are useless”. These are forms of verbal abuse, and shouldn’t happen.

When in doubt, stay staunch with your children. Don’t worry if teachers aren’t your best friends. It is more important to be a good parent than to be big chums with a teacher. Often the teachers who seek to befriend parents do so to ensure that the parent will not give credit to a child complaints about being picked on. It’s not usual for children to lie unless they are always being told they are untruthful. Once someone is being blamed for doing something they did not do, there is no real value for them in not doing it. They are already guilty…why not commit the crime… So don’t criminalise your kids, and keep a sense of humour. A lot of the drama associated with schooling comes from the childish and pompous nature of the school system. The only reason to get upset with your children is if they aren’t doing their work. If you praise them they will like work. People like being praised, it makes them feel good, and makes them willing to work harder.

-Katy Alexander
READ Educational trust

Every child can succeed in the right environment

Large classes at mainstream schools can't provide enough assistance for children who may need more one on one attention.

"Some children need assistance to perform which they are not receiving in mainstream schools," says Delayne Large, a registered counselor and independent psychometrist.

Delayne, who runs Alberton Remedial Therapy Centre adds that she became increasingly frustrated as she could only provide assistance one hour a week when the children were brought for remedial therapy after school. "Children need to receive this assistance throughout the day. Furthermore, children who struggle within a mainstream environment have very little time left to just be children. They have a full school day, extra mural activities, homework and then still need to go for remedial therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, whatever the case may be. These expectations are hardly realistic.

"Many people have a misconception about remedial education, falsely believing that its merely lowering the standards and giving children less work. Remedial education, on the contrary, is aimed at equipping the children with the skills that are preventing them from performing within a mainstream environment," Delayne said.

"While most teachers make a gallant effort at doing just this, the task is near impossible as a result of the large numbers and copious amounts of paperwork and procedures teachers are required to follow.
"By drastically reducing the number of children in a class children are able to receive the individual attention they deserve."

Extract from Southern courier, 15 February 2011

Tiger mom gets a mixed response

On 30 January 2011 the Sunday times published an article on Amy Chua and her book "Battle hymn of the tiger mother"  This author has ignited controversy with her parenting memoir. According to extracts from her book, Chua believes an A-minus is a bad grade, children should not be congratulated in public. Chua has called her children names like "pathetic", "garbage" and "fat".

According to Judith Ancer, a psychologist based in Johannesburg, Chua may very well have a high IQ but would score really poorly on any measure of
emotional intelligence.

 In her book Chua distinguishes between the "Chinese parent" and the "Western parent" she mentions that the first believes that children must be denied play dates, sleepovers, acting in school plays or watching TV, and no grade less than an A must be tolerated. In the latter she says children are coddled into mediocrity, protected from hurt feelings and praised for trying hard when they get a D for maths. Where Western parents are pleased if their child practises the piano for an hour, Chua reckons that the Chinese mother thinks the first hour is easy, two and three being the tough ones.Much emphasis is placed on drilling and repetition until "perfection" is achieved.

This is the kind of material extracted from Chua's book that has resulted in mixed response. Below are some responses found in the January 30 issue of the Sunday Times.

Allow youngsters to make mistakes and learn to persevere despite their failures. Teach, guide, support, and role model appropriate behaviour, while letting them discover their uniqueness, and in doing so fill them with a special kind of love - feeling understood by their parents. - Claire Marketos 

Childhood is a basic right and no parent has the authority to take it away; they are indeed the "losers". - VM Lloyd, Germiston

We would do multiplication in our heads until we could sing the numbers in our dreams. But this was just the beginning.
At home we used to wake up as my father left for work at 4am and only went to sleep after him, usually not before 10pm.
But I am eternally grateful, for while training in exile with the liberation army, I was in cruise control while for others it was hell on earth. Viva the tiger mom. - Moss, by e-mail 

 Each child should be viewed as an individual and one realises that we cannot use the same formula for all our children and expect the same results.

For more on Tiger mom visit  www.timeslive.co.za 








 

What does it mean to be literate?

Q: What does it mean to be literate? 

The question is one that many wonder about and are very shy to ask. Literacy is my business and I've taken it upon myself to source the best explanation to this question. Answers. com has come to our rescue.

A: If someone can read and write, that means that they would then have to have a large cognitive capacity to understand the communication. The ability to speak conveys meaning, so the same intellect used in speaking would be used in reading and writing. However, words written down are usually going to be longer than normal conversations, so literacy would mean the ability to understand entire books, articles, or even something as short as a paragraph, which isn't used in speech in the same way the same meaning or message would be communicated if it was written. In fact, reading and writing is just speech but doing it for longer periods of time. It could be for the same period of time, but it is usually going to be longer. That means that different mental abilities are going to be used for reading and writing since you are dealing with something that usually has one theme or main idea, but is very long. You could have a conversation about one thing for a long period of time, but this conversation isn't going to be structured to maximize understanding of the topic. When something long is written, it is put down in a certain pattern or way that itself communicates a message from the author, even if the author just meant to put it down in the most logical way possible. So literacy would then include understanding what complicated messages (which can be understanding of any sort - math, fiction, etc) mean, and how they can be understood in different ways, and the best way to structure and order it so understanding is maximized. That is even more important if you are the writer.

 

At the sentence level that type of understanding might be aided by better understanding how the parts of the sentence relate to each other, or grammar. But the rest of the piece relates to itself in other ways as well, and since it is going to be long and written down, each piece might contribute to the same idea. So literacy means understanding long passages, not just being able to read but a higher level of literacy would mean being able to put together a lot of information that is related to varying degrees and link it to a few ideas. So if you are reading a math book, and relate something in the end of the book to something in the beginning, you are a good reader, or more literate. That shows how the definition of literacy can vary greatly because math might be very different from say, reading a story of fiction. Literacy also means understanding the implications and subtle messages a text might convey - that would be a higher degree of literacy anyway. The math book example shows how literacy can cover any mental ability, so then what is the main idea of literacy, it is not just anything someone can understand. It is things that people can understand that is written down, or that they write down, it is the ability to structure large amounts of material in a logical fashion (or if it is a story, structure large amounts of material for emotional appeal, so really any fashion you want, but it is ultimately going to serve an end, or be logical). Unless you are the sentence level, then literacy is the ability to understand a sentence and relate each part of the sentence to other parts of the sentence. In terms of understanding a word (word level) literacy might mean understanding all the possible implications of that one word. The word "store" might mean any type of store. So things at the word level can be very complicated even if it is a simple word, it might be deceiving in context.

How would "literacy" if someone were reading a math book, be different from just the ability to understand math? It would mean how someone is comprehending that book, it would mean the way in which they understand math. How they put together the knowledge of the entire book. Math is just like reading a fiction book, different parts of a math problem relate to other parts in a logical way. If it is explained in that logical way, then someone would use literacy to understand it because literacy is putting together information in a logical manner so that one can read or write what meaning they want to convey.
So literacy isn't just the ability to read and write, it is the ability to understand what you are reading as well. One cannot read unless they understand what they are reading. So someone might not be literate in math if they cannot do any math textbook. In fact, if you cannot understand something written in specific, then you are not literate for that. In English this might mean that if you are more literate you would be able to get all the hidden meanings that could lie in the text. There is basic literacy and advanced literacy, there are levels to it.
In fact, that is all life is, figuring out how different parts of it relate to each other. This can mean emotional parts as well as physical, simple or complex parts. Unless it is just one part, and you don't want to know if it relates to anything else. But any one part is going to made up of it's own parts. 


Let's all do what we can to ensure a literate nation.

So many questions

One can't argue that the 7.2 percentage point increase in the matric pass rate has raised fears of result manipulation. Chris Barron of Sunday Times asked the head of quality assurance body Umalusi, Professor Sizwe Mabizela...

Do you share the minister's excitement?
I do, but we need to focus on the quality of the pass.

Does Adjusting results improve quality, or the reverse?
One cannot give a yes or no answer. One has to understand what is called standardisation.


Does that mean bringing the results of more privileged schools into line with less privileged schools?
No, you see, these things are so complex. Standardisation is used to make sure that learners are not advantaged or disadvantaged by factors other than their own abilities, their own knowledge of the subject and so on. In some instances it turns out a paper might have been on the easy side. And learners cannot be advantaged because they have written an easy paper.

If they write the same paper, how are they advantaged?
You want to ensure consistency across years.

What subjects were adjusted downwards?
I can tell you that there are four assessment bodies.


Can you tell me which subjects?
I can't.

Don't we have the right to know?
Absolutely.


Then why don't you tell us?
There is no easy and simple and straightforward answer. The statistical moderation of exam scores is buy its very nature, a confidential process.

Why?
It is a confidential process but not a secretive one. when we do the standardisation all the heads of provincial departments are there, the teacher unions are there, observers from higher education bodies are there.


You say the teachers are there, but the teachers say they haven't been told.
Let me just go back again.There are four assessment bodies...

Which subjects are adjusted upwards?
I'm not at liberty to tell you that, for the same reasons.


Don't universities need to know? Aren't you deceiving them?
No.The danger of disclosing the identity of the subjects is the potential of stigmatising that subject and possibly that cohort of learners. And I don't think it is the best interest of cohort learners to do that.

Is it in their best interest to pretend they're better at a subject than they actually are? Aren't you setting them up for failure?
No. As I have indicated, the process of standardisation is to mitigate fluctuations in student performance caused by other factors other than their innate attitude and knowledge.

How does it help the learner if he gets a 30% for maths and you bump that up to 40%and he comes a cropper at university?
Let's say you're writing a science paper and there is a question where vital information to solve a problem is missing and therefore you are not able to solve that question. So the candidate loses 30 marks. That is not fair to him.

Nine subject were adjusted upwards. Are you saying there were mistakes in all those papers?
I'm not saying that. I'm simply saying there are good reasons for adjusting upwards.

What would the pass rate have been if the original results had been allowed to stand?
We don't know that.

Surely you know the raw results before you begin manipulating them?
We know the individual subjects...


what would the pass rate in maths have been?
I wouldn't know that as I sit here. The pass rate  is worked out after the standardisation process has been implemented.


What is the margin of upward adjustment?
It varies from subject to subject.

For maths?
I don't know if maths was adjusted or not.

What have you got to hide?
There is a danger that people might misinterpret...

Is upward adjustment about making the government look good?
We do not do things to benefit the government. what we do is ensure that the quality of the qualification is maintained.


Evidence suggests you're not doing a very good job...
As a country we should be concerned about the quality of the passes. We have set the bar low. To get 30% or 40% and have a matric certificate is not in the best interests of the nation.

Poll: Do you believe that results are being manipulated to enhance the governments image.

Tip's for the first week of school

You’ve changed their diapers, tolerated their terrible twos and taught them to get dressed by themselfs. Now, it’s time for another milestone – the first day of school. Nervous? Excited? Don’t know what to expect? Welcome to grade 1. Here are eight tips to get you and your little one ready for the first week.

The Name Game
Teaching your child to write their name makes for excellent preparation. Small letters are used most commonly, but it doesn’t hurt to teach both upper and lower case. Once they can write their first name, have fun with it. Move onto the last name and then her a sibling’s name or the dog’s name – any practice is good. When you’re done with names, teach your child to write their address and telephone number.

Encourage Independence
Before going into school, most school boards suggest that children be able to get dressed and undressed, and use the toilet independently. They should also know how to put on their own coats and shoes. If your child isn’t up to speed, you may need to get creative. Stickers work well for encouragement. Also, a routine that the child begins to recognize can help. Make sure you allow enough time for each stage so they don’t feel pressured.   

Teach the Basics
Take your child on errands and explain how things work as you go. Stops could include the grocery store, library and post office. As you visit each location, talk them through the steps: “This is where all the produce is, here’s the meat section and this is where we go to pay at the cashier.” General knowledge of how things work makes for good preparation, says
Also, when reading to your child, encourage comprehension by talking about the story and asking questions. For example, what was their favorite part? Or, stop halfway through and ask what they think will happen at the end of the story.

Make Getting Ready Fun
Remember the excitement you felt starting school with new clothes and a fresh supplies? With younger kids, a bag full of gadgets, a new backpack and a few new items of clothing tend to gear them up without any further encouragement. Go shopping together to help get your little one excited.

Ensure that learning doesn't stop on the school grounds.