Most teachers use television incidentally in their lessons, if only to reinforce or illustrate some point. Many will have noticed a reluctance, almost an hostility, by the children towards discussing their favourite shows. Children learn quickly that too much discussion and analysis destroys the pleasure they get from television-while teachers ...

Alison is shy and finds it difficult to meet new people. She habitually stands back a little when approached, seldom looks people in the eye for long, and masks many of her emotional expressions. Her new classmates misread her nonverbal cues as lack of interest in their friendly overtures. Margaret ...

The young people who are the subject of the National Child Development Study are now aged 25. For most of their lives they have been monitored by the National Children's Bureau and described in 19 books and 200 chapters and journal articles. Many of the books have dealt with very ...

Several years ago I compiled a 'starter' list of books that I had read to children and we had enjoyed together. This year, conscious that many exciting childrens' books have been published recently, I surveyed teachers in ten schools to see which books they chose to read aloud to their ...

Essays written in a 'good hand' get better marks than those written in a 'poor' hand. That was discovered over 50 years ago. Perhaps the computer will eradicate the influence of handwriting on the marks awarded to written work, once we can all type and all have the hardware. Then ...

Handwriting is a skill very similar to playing tennis or Space Invaders. It is complex and strategies need to be learnt if you want to do it well. But for fun, learning handwriting the conventional way, with sitting-up-straight and copying-tasks, comes nowhere near a game of tennis or a dollar's ...

A flowchart can describe what happens when we set out to copy a sentence; the factors and skills which operate during this task. The model is not about 'meaning' or 'word choice' or 'self-expression'. These things are part of the larger and more complex, less mechanical task of 'expressing one's ...

During the 1960s there was a dramatic increase in the amount of both experimental and theoretical work devoted to the topic of short-term memory. The field had become enormously complicated, so in an attempt to clarify this increasingly complex picture, Graham Hitch and I decided to ask the simple question ...

Children know a great deal of mathematics before they come to school. They have a variety of ways of interpreting and solving problems about quantities, but of course there are wide differences in how effective they are. Counting appears to play a central role in the child's mathematics learning during ...

Discipline is only one aspect of classroom management. It tends to loom large in the eyes of young teachers because the potential for trouble is large, many problems can arise and some are difficult to deal with. However,
there are many ways to prevent discipline problems from even beginning and ...