Author Archives: admin

This is some text.

Who do I tell?

Who do I tell when a child is over anx­ious in its own home? Who do I tell when a 6 month old has legs like jel­ly? Who do I tell when a 2 year old’s lan­guage dis­ap­pears? Who do I tell when a 6 year old has a melt­down over her spelling home­work? Who do I […]

Hugs

I think ‘lack of hug­ging’ is a miss­ing piece of the puz­zle with devel­op­men­tal­ly delayed chil­dren and most peo­ple who are ail­ing. I’ve writ­ten about this, in part, once before talk­ing about touch in one of my ear­li­est posts on March 2, 2007 “The Three Pri­ma­ry Sens­es” Being Eng­lish I didn’t come from a ‘hugging’ […]

The Dark Ages of Education

Do you remem­ber your times table? It serves me well! Not to men­tion recit­ing the alpha­bet when going through the phone book! What else did we learn by rote mem­o­ri­sa­tion at a young age? I start­ed attend­ing a pri­vate Catholic pri­ma­ry school (one of only four protes­tant girls in that year) full time before I was 5 […]

Will You Be My Mummy?

Apart from hear­ing from my broth­er that my father had sud­den­ly died, the most painful words I’ve ever heard are “Will you be my Mummy?” I’ve men­tioned before that the lit­tle girl who asked me that ques­tion was just over 4 1/2 years old. I had cared for her part-time in her home from the […]

Making the Connection

There comes a time when you pick up a book and it just grabs you.  Such a book for me recent­ly has been “The Right to be Human” by Edward Hoff­man, a biog­ra­phy of Abra­ham Maslow, revised and updat­ed in 1999. The title alone hooked me while brows­ing a church fundrais­ing sale when I was in […]

Little things mean a lot

I became inter­est­ed in design, brand­ing, adver­tis­ing and the like, many years ago when my hus­band and I com­piled the first US Edi­tion of Reed’s Nau­ti­cal Almanac. More recent­ly, design and brand­ing have become my son­s’ work and the most inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions ensue; some based on age and expe­ri­ence and oth­ers on mod­ern philoso­phies and […]

‘Fishing’ off Costa Rica

Did you hear about the Tai­wanese fish­ing fleet that fish­es for sharks (and maybe oth­er sea crea­tures) using long lines off the coast of Cos­ta Rica? I too was aston­ished and the film­mak­er inter­viewed implied that such things were gen­er­al­ly hid­den from view.  Since Geog­ra­phy is my favourite sub­ject, just long extinct in US schools (per­haps as […]

Just like a duck!

You know the phrase: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. I guess I have a big bold label on me say­ing – suck­er! Flags go up when each in turn your neigh­bours’ infants are con­stant­ly cry­ing (and you can hear them through closed win­dows); day after […]

Incidental Teaching

As ever, I was for­ag­ing through use­ful pieces of infor­ma­tion the oth­er night. Most of my notes relate to learn­ing about autism in the past 4+ years and it was the term ‘Inci­den­tal Teach­ing’ that caught my eye. Inci­den­tal teach­ing doesn’t mean there’s no plan­ning on the part of the per­son teach­ing. Plans are made but within […]

Point and shoot

We fre­quent­ly use this term when talk­ing about pho­tog­ra­phy. I have been a point­er and shoot­er in my time. I’ve even used throw away cam­eras. But I was think­ing about how chil­dren learn to speak these days. From my own sur­vey 83% of mid­dle class chil­dren under 8 (with a ratio of 3:2 in favour […]