It takes effort and imagination, but the benefits are many. from www.shutterstock.com Contrary to the belief we Aussies are a nature-loving outdoor nation, research suggestswe’re spending less and less time outdoors. This worrying trend is also becoming increasingly apparent in our educational settings. I have devoted the majority of my teaching and […]
Moral growth is promoted when we allow little ones to act on their instincts. By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn commons An all-too-common belief in our culture —often held implicitly rather than explicitly — is that babies come into the world as either asocial (the “blank slate” belief) or antisocial (the “original sin” […]
By Idzie Desmarais, I’m Unschooled. Yes, I can write This post originally appeared on my Patreon in March ’17. Occasionally I’ll share an older Patreon post on the main blog, but most of them remain accessible only to patrons. Join me there to see all of them! I talk a lot about ways that […]
Encouraging children to make and use a range of maps helps develop their spatial skills, great if they want to read an x-ray, design a building or put up flat-pack furniture later in life. jeshoots.com/Unsplash When we read maps, pack the car for holidays, assemble flat-pack furniture or cut cake […]
Failure is a gift disguised as a bad experience. from www.shutterstock.com In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to protect children from failure in order to safeguard their fragile self-esteem. This seems logical – failure is unpleasant. It tends to make you look bad, you have negative feelings of disappointment […]
By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Monitoring, structuring, and protecting reduce children’s activity and health. Most of my writing about children’s free play has been about the mental health benefits (e.g. here), but in this essay I’m concerned with the physical health benefits. Children are designed, by nature, to play often in physically vigorous ways. That […]
By the time children are five, they should show preference for a particular hand and be able to work with others. from www.shutterstock.com Parents often have different expectations for their three- to five-year-old children when they attend an early learning centre. Some parents expect their child to engage in academic […]
When it comes to self-directed learning, one of the biggest concerns brought up by those not practicing it is the perceived lack of teaching: people can’t learn things on their own, goes the common thought, they need to be measured and tested, they need that feedback! Of course, people can learn things on […]
The message from autistic activists is clear: “nothing about us without us”. Philosophographlux/flickr Autistic people have been routinely misunderstood, ignored, and excluded for decades – including from campaigns designed to promote awareness of autism itself. But this is beginning to change. Autistic self-advocacy organisations and autistic activists have long criticised […]
Reading aloud to children can encourage a love of reading. Shutterstock Reading to your child is one of the most successful ways of instilling a love of reading in them. But in our recent study, more than one-quarter of primary-school-aged respondents claimed they were never read to at home. Children typically […]