News THE WEEK
www.theweek.co.uk
Britain’s leading current aff airs digest rounds up the main education stories exclusively for First Eleven magazine
What the scientists are saying...
Is junk food bad for the brain?
Knitting is a mystery to most modern children. But one school in Kent has brought it back to the classroom – and it has had a revolutionary eff ect. More than a third of pupils regularly attend Worth Primary School’s knitting club, and the impact on behaviour has been such that knitting has been incorporated into lessons. Children learn how to make medieval clothing in history, and work out knitting patterns in maths. “Instead of playing on their phones or computers, the children talk to each other,” said headmistress Lynne Moore. “T ey have proper conversations.”
Why it’s OK to um and er Wit & Wisdom “That men do not learn very much from
Parents who stumble over long words may be helping their children to learn, reports T e Independent. Researchers have discovered that sentences peppered with “ums” and “ers” are easier for children to follow – because they create natural pauses, giving them time to absorb what they’re being told. Moreover, a pause often suggests the parent is searching for a new or diffi cult word, which signals to the child that he or she should pay attention. T e team, at the University of Rochester in New York State, showed a group of pre-schoolers two images – one of a familiar object, such as a ball, and the other of an obscure one – as they sat on their mothers’ knees. A recorded voice talked about the objects, and when it stumbled, the researchers noted that children were far more likely to look at the unfamiliar one than the familiar one. “We’re not advocating that parents add disfl uencies,” said study author Celeste Kidd, “but I think it’s nice for them to know that using these pauses is OK.” .
OF THE WEEK STATISTICS
of British children over the age of 11 own a mobile.
97% Prospect 10 FirstEleven Summer 2011
the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
Aldous Huxley, quoted in T e Wall Street Journal
Most of us know that feeding toddlers a diet rich in junk food is liable to be bad for their physical health – now it seems it damages their brain power, too. Tests carried out on 4,000 children from a long-term study of 14,000 have revealed that those who eat a diet packed with sugars, fats and processed foods before the age of three have a markedly lower IQ fi ve years later than those who eat plenty of home-cooked foods, fruit and vegetables. T e diff erence between the 20% of children with the best diets and the 20% with the worst was as much as fi ve IQ points, say researchers from Bristol
University. T eir fi ndings, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community
Health, took into account factors such as social class, breast-feeding and maternal education. Poor diet after the age of four, however, appeared to have no impact on intelligence. “T e brain grows at its fastest rate during the fi rst three years, and good nutrition during this period may encourage optimal brain growth,” Dr Pauline Emmett, one of the study’s authors, told the Daily Mail.
VIEWPOINT Healthy reading
“Michael Gove’s aspiration that every schoolchild should read 50 books a year is an excellent one. But why stop at children? T e government has no hesitation at all in setting targets for alcohol consumption, or the eating of fruit and vegetables. Let them stop thinking of reading books as part of ‘education’, and more as part of a healthy existence. If they can set a target of fi ve fruit and vegetable portions a day for adults, why can’t they set a target of 20 books a year? Why shouldn’t the GP, faced with an aimless, purposeless, depressed patient, not inquire: ‘Are you reading enough?’, just as they might say: ‘Are you eating sensibly?’” Philip Hensher in The Independent
www.fi rstelevenmagazine.co.uk
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