Product reviews for Parents First

This is a timely publication in that schools are beginning to take on board some of the recent findings from brain research which confirms what many educators have known all along ” that the how of learning is far more important than the what. As the title suggests, it is targeted at parents and is basically a well-informed and entertainingly presented introduction to accelerated learning and its related fields.

As such, it is likely to be of interest to parents who are open-minded about how children learn, and are willing to explore their own attitudes to learning. The authors rightly acknowledge the importance of the emotions in learning and chapter one is all about developing confidence and self-esteem. OK, those words have become so over-used in schools that they have almost lost their meaning, but that says more about the process of education than it does about what those words represent. There are lots of useful, easy to implement practical suggestions that can be introduced in a casual, informal and ” dare I use the word? ” fun way; for example, by asking the child in what ways Spain is like Greece, and then extending the activity by asking for connections between things that appear initially to have nothing in common.

Much of the material will be familiar to old lags like me (I used to use the nine dots problem in maths teaching in the early eighties), the reason being that this isn't really new, its just about teaching children to think. There is a chapter devoted to developing thinking skills, using lateral thinking type puzzles which really do appeal to the vast majority of children. There are games that can be played in the car on long journeys, like we used to do long ago before they started selling cars with TV screens built into the backs of the front seats. It is a real strength of the book that the activities are not only good for developing thinking and self awareness, but I would imagine could be extremely helpful in developing family bonding.

The section on memory again includes lots of practical and entertaining ways of improving memory skills, using mnemonics and visual, auditory and kinaesthetic associations.

Forward thinking schools will, I hope, buy lots of copies of this book and sell them on to parents. I would suggest to the publishers that this would be the most effective means of getting it to parents; an evening for parents about Learning to Learn with copies of this book for sale would certainly have been pencilled into my autumn term diary if I was still a head teacher. The rub lies in how well up the local school is on all this; if they aren't then they should be asked why not.