Just love our phonetically spelt language 🙂
As reported elsewhere, the children have been exploring Education City today. So far I’ve discovered that Big likes scoring well, and she doesn’t like doing anything where she might score badly. We’ve got a date with some cuisenaire rods to work through the whole ‘times’ thing tomorrow.
I’m really not sure about scoring high on tests as motivation for learning. Brings me back round in a circle to a conversation that started on Tues night – I went to a course on montessori run at the children’s school. As might be expected, there was a fair bit of discussion that went on around certain aspects of montessori teaching, and one part that seemed to cause most unease amongst most of the parents was the lack of reward or punishment. Montessori focuses on saying ‘thank you’ rather than well done, and stays away from the sticker/certificate model of reinforcement. Several of the parents wanted to know why the children would bother doing anything then, as it’s well known that praise is the way to go. It was difficult to get across the idea of intrinsic motivation – the self assessed pride in a job well done, versus external pats on the head where someone else values your work for you.
Oddly, this sort of debate has echoes in a situation at work atm, where I’ve a team member who just doesn’t seem to have any umph right now. Can’t help feeling that part of it is that lack of internal drive just to do it right.
So back to Big, who on some levels is a complete perfectionist, and on others just lives for a word of praise. It’s a difficult balance. I do think children do want approval from parents, but at the same time, I firmly believe that internal motivation is one of the best things that they can gain from their childhood. If you are always waiting for the world to validate your existence, you could wait an awfully long time.
I’ll wait and watch with education city – when it comes down to it, Big wants to score well for herself, so I guess that’s still internal.
Small really rather enjoyed the games, but I get the impression the nursery level isn’t going to stretch him overly. He doesn’t seem bored with it yet though.
In other news, I mainly slept all day. Does feel like I’m working and sleeping my life (and my children’s childhoods) away atm. The vicious circle is that I’ve never got any time or energy to do the things that might make it possible to move, thus gaining some time and energy back. 🙁
Right, Tim’s fallen asleep on the floor now, so I’m going to go make him a coffee and very shortly take myself back off to bed. Think I’ve been up and about for about 6 hours so far today.
ps about Education city – why can’t we get into the Spanish section? Anyone?
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