opinion - Magus Education

on Oct 10, 2020

We all know that confident readers make stronger learners in the early years. Later on, reading is one of the best ways for a child to expand their general knowledge and improve their creative writing. But how exactly do you encourage a love of reading in children? It all starts at home. Here are seven tips to get you started. Do not confine story time to just before bed. Often this is actually the worst moment to launch into a book as your patience wears thin post dinner and bath routine. Not every working (in-and-out-of-the-home) parent has the energy for a lengthy bedtime story and that’s perfectly fine. Instead, try to find a special time during the day or the week when you actually enjoy it. In our household, weekend mornings work best: our children are invited to snuggle under the blanket as soon as they rise and I don’t mind going through a long pile of books if that means...

4+ assessments and multilingual children

on Jan 3, 2020

Many bilingual and trilingual families get increasingly nervous as the 4+ assessments approach. The prospect of their multilingual child being grilled in English by a native speaker — and the richness of their budding vocabulary being evaluated on the basis of their answer to questions such as what is the colour of your mom’s hair*–is undoubtedly daunting. For many such families the approach of the 4+ marks a shift in priorities. They start to doubt themselves. During the first years of the child’s life, they have often devoted a significant amount of time and energy to embedding their mother tongue(s) in the child. Perhaps they have hired a nanny who speaks the “minority” language(s), opted for a bilingual nursery, spent the bulk of their holiday “back home” or invested in a large collection of books and DVDs in the language(s). In these committed early years, many parents...

Schools – Where to Start?

on Jan 9, 2017

This article was commissioned to Magus Education by ParentVille. We republish it with their permission. This is how it goes. You pee on a stick. Small hurrah. You bite your nails for the next 12 weeks before sharing the news. Toast. Sorry, mocktail for you. Flash- forward a few weeks — you have yet to hit check out on that flattering maternity dress in your Seraphine basket — when it starts. A whisper from a colleague here, a flash of panic across a well-meaning friend’s face there, a schools’ special in Parents magazine. The chorus of voices becomes deafeningly loud, the same question repeats again and again: have you put your unborn child’s name down for nurseries? Schools? Universities? You laugh it off at first; they can’t be serious. But they are. And soon you laugh no more, because the whisper has built to a terrifying roar of third-hand horror stories along tales of creepy...

4+ : Our tips for the day

on Jan 4, 2017

Christmas trees, stripped of their shiny ornaments, are shedding their last needles onto the pavements. Night falls fast and early. Fresh Moleskine diaries are bursting with New Year resolutions. That can only mean one thing: 4+ assessments are coming right up. And while three-year olds up and down the country, still mesmerised by their Christmas haul, are blissfully unaware of what is about to happen, the same cannot be said about their parents. Behind a serene front, many will have spent the holidays fretting that their child is not quite “ready,” or worrying that the mid-nap slot they have been allotted will harm their chances. And who can blame them? The process of letting anyone “assess” the character and academic potential of one’s child is daunting. Even more so when you factor in that it all happens in an allocated 45-minute timeslot, amid strangers, in a completely new...

Show, not tell

on Nov 10, 2016

The political outcomes witnessed on both sides of the Atlantic this year show two of the world’s most influential countries turning inward. The winning rhetoric on both occasions has been one of individualism and protectionism, of us before them, or worse, against them. One article in the Huffington Post Tuesday asked: What Do We Tell the Children? We believe the answer to be in the showing rather than the telling. Before all else we must show profound respect for democratic outcomes, whether we agree with them or not. Next we need to embed in our children the civic values we have inherited, and sadly often take for granted: the rule of law, protection of minorities and vulnerable members of our society, tolerance for diversity and rejection of bigotry. Last we need to teach our children the unglamorous facts about how our democratic institutions work and to clarify for them...