GetAhead Educational Software

By Melanie Loxton, School Teacher November 2011 article This week at my school we held an assembly to honour our ex-Primary school pupils who had gone on to achieve well in their High Schools. They were invited back if they had done well academically, achieved a level in either sport or cultural spheres, or been [...]

By Melanie Loxton, School Teacher October 2011 article Our school was recently very fortunate to have received a visit from well-known and respected educational leader, Gavin Keller. He is a principal at Sun Valley School in Cape Town and often speaks at Professional Growth courses for teachers and parents. I will share some of his [...]

By Melanie Loxton, School Teacher August 2011 article This month I would like to touch on the topic of family time and how it affects your child at school. Now, of course, this topic is so broad that I could not begin to address it all here, and I would need the input of a [...]

By Melanie Loxton, School Teacher July article 2011 This month I would like to pay some attention to Parent Interviews, having just completed a round with my Grade 2 parents. 1.    Be punctual. When 27 (or more) sets of parents have been scheduled for after-hours time, it really is important to arrive on time and [...]

Any form of support is an intervention, whether it be extra lessons, remedial lessons, occupational therapy, counselling, play therapy, a visit to the paediatrician for an assessment, a visual assessment, speech therapy, an audiologist for speech and hearing therapy etc. There are many ways in which a child can be supported at school if their daily classroom input is not enough for them.

We recently covered the concept “Time” in Practical maths. Some learners can already tell time, but not many at age 8. By this age they should know at least the “o’clocks” and what a person might be doing at each given hour of a day.

This month we focus on what skills our children are learning at the start of this new year, and we re-visit our theme of “There’s always one” who is swimming upstream. Each year it takes a number of weeks to get the ‘feel’ of a new class. As a teacher one forms such strong attachments to a class that it takes a while to switch allegiance to the little strangers who now inhabit your class. It also takes more than a week or two to really get to know each child’s individual strengths and weaknesses, so when parents ask us after the first week “how is he doing?” it really is too soon to tell! You might rather ask “how is he settling in?”.

Last month we were checking whether you are the parent who is likely to get things right or likely to forget or be disorganised, either way influencing how your child’s school day will go. We continue with our checklist, this time focusing on food. As with last month, my main point here is that the one or two times that you will do this in your child’s school career is not only understandable, but is to be expected. I even forget my own carefully-prepared lunch sometimes. It is only a problem if this is a frequent occurrence.

We have a reading book in Grade 2 about a class going on an outing to the museum on a bus. As each unfortunate incident happens, the wise old driver chimes, “There’s always one”, because he has had the (mis)fortune of driving many classes on outings. One child is late, one child eats his lunch on the bus and then gets sick in someone’s hat, one child needs the loo as soon as the trip starts even though they all had a chance to go before they left. My question to you: “Is your child always the one?”.