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Student families in school

My kids’ school, Vidya Valley, has just introduced something they are calling “Tutor groups” in school. A tutor group is a group of 15 to 20 students consisting of a few students from each class from 5th to 10th standard (aka grade). Each tutor group is assigned one teacher (”Guardian Tutor”) whose job it is to ensure the full welfare of the children in this group. Here, “full welfare” specifically refers to non-academic issues, like mental and physical welfare (for example to help with bullying, truancy issues, or special medical attention).

Each student stays in the same tutor group for all the 5 years, and the guardian tutor of the group remains the same throughout. Each year, the students of Std. 10 will obviously pass out and leave the group. At this time, new students from Std. 5 will enter the group. This whole set-up creates a sort of a family unit, where the guardian tutor becomes the surrogate parent, and the other students become surrogate siblings.

The tutor group meets every day for a little time - the school time-tables have been adjusted to allow for this. In addition, they meet once every two weeks for a longer period. These meetings have no agenda. Just hang out and bond and behave like a family.

See this pdf for a more detailed description of the guardian tutor system in Vidya Valley.

It sounds like a very interesting idea, and I have not really heard of anything like this being used in Pune schools (but I could be mistaken). In any case, seems like a neat thing to have. They have introduced it just a few months ago, so it will be interesting to see how it works out in real life.

Interactive science website for kids

Click here. From BBC. Go here for a lot more educational goodies.

Kids learn to flatter around age 4

Kang Lee, a professor at the University of Toronto, has been researching the development of lie-telling in children for the past decade.  He has just conducted research which shows that kids start learning flattery around the age of 4:

They asked a group of preschool children ages 3 to 6 to rate drawings by children and adults they knew, as well as strangers. The preschoolers judged the artwork both when the artist was present, and when he or she was absent. The three-year-olds were completely honest, and remained consistent in their ratings; it didn’t matter who drew it, or whether the person was in the room. Five- and six-year-olds gave more flattering ratings when the artist was in front of them. They flattered both strangers and those they knew (although familiar people got a higher dose of praise). Among the four-year-olds, half the group displayed flattery while the other half did not. This supports the idea that age four is a key transitional period in children’s social understanding of the world.

Lee suggests adults flatter for two reasons. It can be to show gratitude for some positive action in the past. As well, when they’re meeting someone for first time – someone who may turn out to be important for their advancement down the road – flattery is also used as an investment for future favourable treatment from the person. “We don’t know which the child is doing,” says Lee. However, the fact that the older children flattered strangers as well as familiar people suggests “they are thinking ahead, they are making these little social investments for future benefits.

Found: here.

Fold a Towel Elephant and Impress your kids

See this page for easy to follow instructions with pictures:

A towel elephant is a cute addition to your bathroom and an incredible way to impress your guests! Cruise lines and “bed and breakfast” motels use these quite often. If you want to give your bathroom an original touch, have “Eddie the Towel Elephant” greet your unsuspecting guests and tickle their sense of humor.

Link.

Parent-child dancing shoes

These cute shoes from Finland are designed to be worn by a parent balancing a child on her/his toes while dancing.

Link. I found them on boing-boing.

Boing Boing: Alka-Seltzer tag

Sounds like a cute game to play with your kids on a Sunday afternoon:

Alka Seltzer tag sounds fun: each player wears an Alka Seltzer on necklace, and players run around with hoses/squirtguns trying to wet the others’ tablets. As the tablets foam, they drop off the string. The last intact tablet wins.

Found here; via boing-boing.

Ticket system helps kids track their own TV and game time

Found this on parenthacks:

I got tired of being the boss of when my kids (three and five) could watch videos and DVDs. I also wanted to help them learn to make choices about media consumption while they’re still young. So I decided to set up a ticket system.

Every Friday, they each get tickets (purple for one kid, green for the other) that can be redeemed for ½ hour of TV time.

See full article. And this post helpfully gives designs so that you can create the tickets yourself on your printer.

I am tempted to try it out, but I think that my kids might be a little too young for this.

‘Toy library’ promotes cleanup AND creativity

Your kids have too many toys? House is cluttered all the time? Maybe it is time to implement a toy library. This is a shelf in the corner of your house where the bulk of the toys sit, and your kids only get to check out a few toys at a time. Want another toy? Return something first! There are a bunch of interesting ideas in this post at parenthacks. Including:

Additional functions of the toy library:

1) Toy timeout home. When toys are left on the floor after cleanup time, they go to the library for time out. [...] If you want a toy to remain available, it has to be put away.

See full article.

Do Bachchon Ki Ma: Patch, the dog - I mean - Patch, the baby

The Mad Momma has this heart-breaking post about dealing with her baby’s medical problems. Very nicely written.

We took her home with the prescribed medication and sat down to bathe her, moisturise her and apply the medication. And the Brat came along and kept kissing her - big, wet open mouthed kisses all over her body, ingesting the ointment. I tried to stop him and gave up. Let him love his little Beanie baby as much as he wants.

Worth reading, if for nothing other than to just see how well she captures the anguish she feels.

Source: desicritics.

The Socratic Method

This page has a very interesting description of the Socratic method of teaching. The basic idea is that the “teacher” only asks questions and all the answers have to come from the students. Fairly difficult topics can be taught this way and the students will be more involved and interested, and claim is that the students will understand the topic better than a traditional lecture.

The post has a transcript of a session where the author taught the concept of binary numbers (and binary arithmetic) to third grade students. It is really impressive.

There is also an interesting discussion at the end which is also worth reading. Excerpts:

Of course, you will notice these questions are very specific, and as logically leading as possible. That is part of the point of the method. Not just any question will do, particularly not broad, very open ended questions, like “What is arithmetic?” or “How would you design an arithmetic with only two numbers?” (or if you are trying to teach them about why tall trees do not fall over when the wind blows “what is a tree?”). Students have nothing in particular to focus on when you ask such questions, and few come up with any sort of interesting answer.

For the Socratic method to work as a teaching tool and not just as a magic trick to get kids to give right answers with no real understanding, it is crucial that the important questions in the sequence must be logically leading rather than psychologically leading. There is no magic formula for doing this, but one of the tests for determining whether you have likely done it is to try to see whether leaving out some key steps still allows people to give correct answers to things they are not likely to really understand. Further, in the case of binary numbers, I found that when you used this sequence of questions with impatient or math-phobic adults who didn’t want to have to think but just wanted you to “get to the point”, they could not correctly answer very far into even the above sequence. That leads me to believe that answering most of these questions correctly, requires understandingof the topic rather than picking up some “external” sorts of clues in order to just guess correctly.

Read the full article.