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 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 [...]

By Melanie Loxton, School Teacher Right, so a blind trial is done. IF the child is not bright enough, ie. they are struggling because their IQ is low, not because they cannot focus, then a drug like Ritalin will make NO difference. It cannot enhance brain ability. I have seen trials done in my own [...]

By Melanie Loxton, School Teacher Welcome back to the medication debate: for or against? Two articles ago we looked at the various interventions that pupils may need, and last month we honed in on a common, contentious one : inattention and concentration issues. Please refer to these previous two articles for some background as they [...]

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.

I would like to return to one of my previous ‘pointers’ seeing as it is presenting a great problem for me at this present moment, and recurs yearly with one student or more. I want to highlight my concerns in case ‘that one student’ is your child! My current bugbear is that of chronic absenteeism.

This month I thought I would explain a little bit about the process of assessment, seeing as we have had a very stressful time trying to fit an extra two weeks’ worth of teaching and assessing into this shortened term. On a similar note, and with tongue in cheek, we teachers receive a lot of ‘jibes’ around holiday time. the assessment process is quite elaborate, even for the junior children. I must stress here that this only applies to the schools that are being properly run. We do hear true horror stories of certain schools where teachers do not know pupil from pupil, where exams are written “communally” and where there is no honest system of genuine assessment, or where standards are so low that results do not hold up in the real world.

This month we deviate from our normal format and discuss a few topics in answer to the question, “Does your child …?”. Some of these questions are adapted from a first term Life Skills assessment that we set for our Grade 2s. Older children should definitely be able to do the following …