For a learner to get information from the textbook into their long-term memories requires many cognitive functions. In this blog article, we’ll explore the role of a dedicated study space for a homeschool learner and try to answer why this is important. To answer this question, we look to cognitive load theory.
Sugar Bay is a luxury holiday camp in Kwa-Zulu Natal, for children between the ages of 7 and 17 years old. We offer over 100 activities, including surfing, skate boarding and ropes courses. Our newest activities are airsoft (which is similar to paintball) and tie dye. None of our activities are compulsory and children are given the freedom to choose what they would like to do. We have qualified staff known as camp counselors, who look after the children 24/7. No child is ever left alone and we have a strict supervision ratio of one counselor to every three children.
Allergic reactions are becoming more prevalent around the world, especially in more developed countries. This heightened sensitivity may be due to increased exposure to harmful environmental factors, such as air pollution and cigarette smoke, as well as cleaner living environments with fewer micro-organisms and bacterial exposure
TikTok is taking over the world, or so it seems! It’s an app that allows users to share short videos. It enables the user to be incredibly creative with the use of stickers, music tracks, filters and augmented reality. As a result, so people find the creative side really enjoyable and because videos are only 15 – 60 seconds long, they’re incredibly consumable from a viewers perspective. This is why it rocketed to being the most downloaded app worldwide at the end of 2019.
Socialising is often a big concern for prospective home schoolers as well as the family of home schoolers. However, these students often get to socialize with a greater variety of age groups when compared to learners who attend mainstream schools.
With an automated future ahead of us, the workplace will require a different way of thinking with an emphasis on problem solving, through mathematics as a vehicle, we can cultivate this skill in children from an early age.
‘Innovation has paved the way for an alternative form of education and with the latest technology, Brainline is bridging the gap to accommodate the digital age. In 2019, the focus was on masterclasses to prepare learners for tests and tasks. This year saw the introduction of Brainline Cloud School, the hub of teaching. Here, the focus is on the learner and innovation regarding teaching and facilitation,’ says Coleen Cronje, Brainline Chief Executive Officer.
Even if your child sometimes tests your patience, the point of being their parent is to help them grow. Everything that you teach your child should come from a place of love. Children need affection. Show your kids that you love them with smiles and hugs. While love is not enough to be a good parent, it is a vital part of raising happy and emotionally healthy children.
According to Cindy Glass, Co-Founder and Owner of Step Up Education Centres, “Teaching is one of the most under-rated and under-appreciated professions in our country! Most teachers do not recognise the value of their skills and even less so, the possibility of becoming financially well-off business owners! Teachers have been scraping the bottom of the barrel for so long that the idea of using their skills to achieve business success may seem quite impossible!” Why is this? Cindy offers the following reasons:
At Impaq, we know that every child is unique. Every learner studies at his/her own pace and some might need to spend more time on certain subjects to ensure they grasp the basic concepts. We aim to help learners, who have unique academic needs, achieve their goals.
With South Africa’s Matric pass rate at an historical high, many thousands of learners are in the unexpectedly happy position of having received a Bachelor’s pass, and therefore qualifying for further study. Those who didn’t make provision for this eventuality, may now find themselves in a situation where they no longer need to settle for their Plan B, but can in fact go for Plan A – realising their dreams of pursuing a degree – but with no place at university yet.
In that moment, when this little life first comes into the world, you can’t help but become emotional. I cried big tears; I was overwhelmed with love and pride. The kind of pride that only jumps into your body the second your child is born, and it’s this newfound pride that stays with you from then onwards. “Dads, you are hugely influential in the eyes of your children. Don’t be content with the fact that you’re simply a dad. Instead, challenge yourself to become a dad who is a force in the lives of your wife and children.”
You just received your matric results and they weren’t what you expected. Maybe you didn’t get the required marks to receive a National Senior Certificate (NSC). Or, you got your NSC, but you didn’t achieve the symbols required to apply to the tertiary institution or course of your dreams. Luckily, you have a few options when it comes to improving your matric results.
Preschool and prep-school teachers are modern day superheroes. They gently introduce our little ones to a love of learning and creativity, yet they are also tough enough to manage anything that could affect their little charges. Even the horror of head lice in the classroom.
Parents have an inherent right and duty to form part of their child’s lives. However, it often happens that parents of a child cannot see eye to eye as to what is in their child’s best interest. More often than not, when parents are divorced, separated or not living together, issues arise regarding the children they share. And then there is the case where parents want full custody over their children. These issues may range from the amount of contact the other parent has, the school the child may attend, or what extra-mural activities the child should pursue.
South Africa has seen a significant increase in teen deaths and the reality is that 9% of all teen deaths are due to suicide – and this figure is on the increase. Suicide is the fastest growing cause of death amongst teenagers and young adults between the ages of 15 – 24. But children as young as 7 years are now committing suicide in South Africa the question is why?
Much like the rest of the world, the typical South African family structure has changed over the years. The prevalence of single parent families is on the rise and increasingly, women head more households. The combined effect of these two structural shifts has seen a growing number of single working mothers in the South African workforce.
Navigating life without following our passions can be like pushing a cart with square wheels uphill says Cindy Glass, Owner and Co-Founder of Step Up Education Centres, “With so many learners getting ready to leave school and make their way in the world, it is essential to consider the role that passion has in guaranteeing success in their lives!”
Holidays are like cats! They creep into your lap for a cuddle and just when you start feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, they jet off to some unknown place, leaving you feeling disappointed and perhaps a little cold! Is this not true of these school holidays? They crept in, had a cuddle and left – just like that!
The word “camp” may conjure up memories of slurry porridge and compulsory exercise, but fortunately there is one camp in South Africa that will have your kids remembering the complete opposite.
While school violence is prevalent and widespread, schools are also being targeted by criminals for electronic devices such as computers and IT equipment.
When it comes to children, strong commitment and love are not negotiable. Unfortunately, not all parents honour this duty, specifically their legal duty to maintain the well-being of their children. Considering this, the child maintenance system ensures that all parents honour their duty to maintain/support their children.
As December rolls around, many parents get to breathe a momentary sigh of relief that a monthly school fee payment won’t be going off this month. That is until you remember that you’ll be expected to re-start payments again in January and this time it will come with new text books, school stationery, uniforms and for the bigger “kids”, you might even be paying boarding school or accommodation fees.
We all tell ourselves stories about who we believe ourselves to be and what we believe we are capable of achieving! “The trouble with these stories is that we accept them to be true, even when they are not!” says Cindy Glass, Owner and Co-Founder of Step Up Education Centres. She adds, “We make decisions and choices based on what we think we deserve, so if our stories comes from a fixed mindset, we are unlikely to achieve the successes that we dream of. If, however, the stories we tell ourselves are based on a growth mindset, we are going to be set-for-success.”
When co-holders experience difficulties in exercising their responsibilities and rights, they must agree on a parenting plan to regulate the exercise of their rights and responsibilities as a prerequisite before approaching the court. They must first seek the assistance of the family advocate, social worker or psychologist; alternatively, they must go for a mediation facilitated by a social worker or other suitably qualified person.
You may have already imagined your child’s first sleepover camp, and everything you could get done. A week or two without your child may sound like a dream come true. However, when you finally get the solitude you have been craving, the house seems dreadfully empty and too quiet.
Most of us are scared of the dentist which means dental care can easily be overlooked but, taking good care of your teeth will not only leave you with a brilliant smile, it will also keep your mouth healthy. By following a good at-home care regime and regular dental visits, you can decrease the likelihood of health problems in the future.
Thinking processes,I define as the manipulation of information. Problem solving requires reflective thinking; reflective thinking encourages critical thinking and develops a range of thinking skills. According to Scheffer and Rubenfield (2000), the critical thinking skills are; analysis, applying standards, discriminating, information seeking, and logical reasoning, predicting and transforming knowledge. Analysing, defined as the ability of separating or breaking a whole into parts to discover their nature, function and relationship, is understood as a critical thinking skill (Scheffer & Rubenfield, 2000). When making a drawing, both the content and concept of the drawing are actively analyzed because they must be broken into parts so that they can be understood before the concept can be drawn in a student’s book. Through this engagement each student processes, understands, explores, and integrates, the content and concept they are interacting with in the drawing. For example, ‘global warming’ can be represented visually, left, Examples of how two elementary school participants represented features after learning about global warming, (Katz, 2017, pg. 238). The child draws the factory, water in solid or liquid form, while the symbols for temperature are communicated and thus concepts are mapped through the visual mode of language. In the second example an abstract concept is drawn, how the students feel about global warming. Left, Examples of affective interpretations of two elementary school participants in relation to global warming content, (Katz, 2017, pg. 239). In the drawing, the child wrote ‘Don’t cut me!’ Drawing operates to present two different types of information. In this case, the way the task is directed impacts the way a drawer analyses the content. Since alphabetic language, symbols, numbers have intersubjective meaning drawing a diagram brings together different codes of symbolic thought in a focused ‘slow thinking’ method, because drawing takes time to represent content and concept on the white page. See Daniel Kahneman for thinking fast and low. The literate person develops practices in code breaking, text meaning, pragmatic text use and text critique & analysis (Luke & Freebody, 1997) with the use of critical thinking skills. Discriminating, the ability of recognizing differences and similarities among things or situations is understood as a critical thinking skill (Scheffer & Rubenfield, 2000). Logical reasoning is the ability to make inferences or conclusions that are supported in, or justified by evidence (Scheffer & Rubenfield, 2000). In 1988, Johnson developed a task where students select one English language rule that they want to illustrate in a poster to communicate its conventions to the class. The freedom to select a rule empowered student with agency. “[S]tudents` explain how their drawing represent the rule” (Van Meter & Garner, 2005, pg. 295). Later the visual stimulus is put up in the classroom, arguable to aid memory, support student’s motivation and application of knowledge. This task is an example of concepts being translated across linguistic modes from the verbal linguistic mode of reading the rule to the visual mode of representing the rule. Secondly, encouraging thinking skills to remember because the rule was visualised for memory retention. Also apply knowledge, as the rule was designed in a poster, and problem solve as the child was asked to convert written to visual mode. The development of higher order thinking skills was practiced in this task. Predicting, as the ability of envisioning a plan and its consequences, is understood as a critical thinking skill (Scheffer & Rubenfield, 2000). I propose that ‘innovating’ designs is part of visualising a plan, for example envisioning architectural structures which is a structural example of composition planning in EGD. Also, to predict experiment outcomes in science or colours in art for paint colour mixing. Reflective thinking is part of the critical thinking process defined as analyzing and making judgments (Scheffer & Rubenfield, 2000). Creative thinking is considered as holistic thinking where various parts are considered in unison. One part develops in unity with another part in relation to the problem being solved. Transforming knowledge, as the ability to change or convert the condition, nature, form or function of concepts within contexts,is understood as a critical thinking skill (Scheffer & Rubenfield, 2000). Barbara Tversky from Teachers College, Columbia University explains the benefits of “messy lines [that promote] discovery of new ideas” (Tversky, 2011, pg. 16). She explains how a variety of different marks on a page have “context dependent meaning related to their mathematical or Gestalt properties” (Tversky, 2011, pg.16). She clarifies that marks, which make up the drawings, represent externalized symbolic thought. The act of drawing is a union between perceptive skill and cognitive skill where the perceptive skill involves ‘seeing’ in context of the object and the cognitive skill involves ‘thinking’ in context of the idea. She refers to this as “constructive perception” (Tversky, 2011, pg.16). It seems that when perception and thinking processes operate in tandem creative thinking is operating to innovate new ideas and products from existing knowledge and context. Tversky explains that messy lines aid thought because they are ambiguous, “pre-categorical, so they allow for many interpretations” (Tversky, 2011, pg.16). Messy lines are evident in Michelangelo’s Horse Composition (right, and detail a, Studies of a Horse and a Sketch of a Battle Scene, authors photograph from Ashmoleum Museum Oxford). The lines look like they were drawn quickly to visually externalize memory or observation and understanding of the structure of the horse for manipulation in a new composition. It could be argued that the horse was moving while it was being drawn. Interestingly, the observation of the horse (an uncommon subject for Michelangelo who focused more on the human body) is visible as two different poses from observation drawing on the same leaf of paper. A plan drawing for arranging the subject of the person and the horse is visually explored alongside the detailed horse representation. The drawer is creating from perception towards innovation thus using ‘constructive perception’. According to Ewa Grabska “Although designers during design process can form mental images in their heads, the majority of them do much better when those images are out of
Early introduction of technology in schools is important to close the gap between our current situation and where we need our future graduates to be. It is predicted that by 2031 all repetitive tasks will be replaced by robots, so it is no longer enough to merely teach a child how to use a computer. Children need to be taught those skills that robots cannot do. According to Michelle Lissoos, Managing Director of Think Ahead, these skills include empathy, creativity, and higher cognitive thinking. Using technology to teach these human characteristics might seem contradictory, but technology can open doors for children which would otherwise be impossible in certain home situations.
Whilst modern technology and its increased usage is seen as a boon to teenagers, most parents have a total opposite view of this. The question then remains…… Is technology to be blamed for poor communication between parents and teenagers? The answer quite simply is NO since a lack of communication between parents and teenagers is an age-old issue.
