Educational Series Aims to Tap Children's Hidden Talents
Posted on: Tuesday, 13 May 2008, 15:00 CDT
By GUILD, Victoria
Some of the world's richest entrepreneurs didn't do well at school. In fact, folklore would have us believe none of them got School Certificate, a single O level or graduated high school, depending on which country they were "educated" in.
It's pretty well a given that none of them would have even been able to spell entrepreneur, but somehow they succeeded while the average pupil went on to become, well, average.
It's no secret that the education system takes a mass teaching approach to a wide range of individuals in the hope of giving most of them enough of the skills they will need to get through life adequately.
Some thrive in this structured learning environment, others don't. They slip through the cracks.
These are the children psychologist Bernadette Tynan of Make Your Child Brilliant (TV3, Wednesday nights) plans to catch, to show us that an "ordinary" child can be "brain-trained" into achieving at a far higher level than they, or their parents, ever imagined.
Bernadette started at a primary school in Leeds, selecting five children from the playground for further investigation.
After setting each of them tasks and watching how they responded, she drove around for a while in her little red Mini until she decided nine-year- old Nicholas warranted special one-on-one training.
He was what she described as a hands-on, or "kinaesthetic" learner and struggled with English literacy.
He was instantly appealing after the very first exercise in which groups of children made a go- cart, decorated it, then had to convince the teachers that theirs should be the winner. Nicholas offered to throw in a month's free insurance - is he a natural, or what?
There was no doubt Nicholas was an ideas man. He could see the big picture but not the smaller details. He had difficulty expressing his ideas both in writing and descriptively to others.
His task was to invent a toy, develop a prototype, then present a pitch to a toy company within two months.
Bernadette set about training him by using visualisation techniques, storytelling using everyday household objects, and practice by selling fruit at the local market - "I'm not getting told off for yelling," a gleeful Nicholas told us.
She used a "hands-on" method to teach spelling by using plastic letters, or diving for tile letters in a swimming pool. The physical approach helped Nicholas to learn and was more effective for him than learning by rote, where he would quickly lose interest and lack concentration.
Mum and dad weren't big on rules, an approach which encouraged Nicholas to express himself, but was sure to land him in hot water once he got to secondary school.
Their opinion was that you only had one chance to be a kid and had plenty of time to follow the rules once you became an adult.
Bernadette got around this by explaining the rules as part of a game, like chess, and by playing the game you had a chance of winning. She even got dad into it by getting him to teach Nicholas how to play chess.
His teachers noticed an improvement at school. He'd really "come along" at spelling, for example. "He got 21 out of 21 the other day," his dad said.
Then came pitch day. Dad couldn't fit all the gear in the car, then road works caused a delay and everyone started to get a bit nervous.
Nicholas fronted up to three toy company managers and barely put a foot wrong. They were impressed, his parents were tearfully proud and Bernadette had backed a winner.
He'd gone from a kid with a million ideas, to a kid with a million ideas and way of expressing them. I wonder if my son would like diving for tile letters? I'd better teach him to swim first.
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(c) 2008 Nelson Mail, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Nelson Mail, The
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