Care for your loved ones on carenearn

Past two months I was off the writing and got busy with the school of great repute! This time it was class X and IX! This is the first year when the board exams start for class X after a gap of good seven years. This is a panic situation for the parents and teachers who have not dealt with the board exams earlier. Teaching these classes was an eye-opener for me. In these ten years when I left school teaching to coaching the class XI and XII students made my perception different. There are few inherent weaknesses that have cropped in in these few years! Many issues have cropped up. In my opinion, it is initiated with the status symbol- a full-time maid! Well, many a time the maid is responsible even for feeding and making the food for the child. The child grows more in the shadow of the maid who is hardly educated rather than parents or grandparents. The most impressionable years of the life and the age of maximum rate of learning is molded by an uneducated person. Next, as the ...

I was getting ready after an hour of the refreshing swimming and got into the conversation with a lady who was probably in her late sixties. She was wearing a sad grey colored suit and was apparently unhappy looking after her granddaughters. She was almost dragging herself to complete the chores. I could only feel sorry for her. I think she was a lonely widow. But the swimming pool is an area for the encounter of many, the next one was a lady in a happy mustard collared suit and taking a keen interest in her granddaughter. She was enthusiastic and excited to see the progress of her granddaughter. As I got into the conversation with her I was in awe for the strength she has. She had a grandchild who was physically challenged and had lost a 26-year son to cancer. The source of her happiness was clearly the healthy relationship between grandmom and the grandchild as well as rest of the family! I believe the happiness has a lot to do with the strength of relationships in life. But with...

I recollect one of the most intriguing memories of my life when my four-year-old son would always ask me almost infinite questions to the limit that I used to get tired of answering. So one evening we were in a shop busy looking at certain items and my son, as usual, was full of questions and I was trying to reply. So one event set the things right. The shopkeeper suggested to my son, why don’t you think over this and find the reason. This was my ‘Eureka moment’! Initially as a respite from a volley of questions and later I realized that he will use his brain in finding the reason rather than a no-brainer spoon fed information. Now, what is essentially science? In a simple language, I would say it an observation made which is legitimized by logic and reason. So what is it that we can do imbibe the scientific nature of our kids? As a basic step, the children should be encouraged to observe as much as possible and give them a conducive environment. Let the childr...

The Digitalisation of the classroom Today most of the schools have computer-aided teaching aids and I personally is a big fan of these methods of teaching, but still, somewhere there are issues in the learning outcomes. This bothered me and I researched on the reasons.  I will quote a personal experience. Teaching the chapter sound, it was almost impossible to explain the meaning of pitch, quality, loudness, and timber etc. The best would have been an alive experience. But the next best is the reproduction of the qualities and their graphical representation using computerised teaching aids.  All this sounds perfect!  But, there is a glitch? The students did not recollect or analyse and synthesis the learnings. So looking for the reasons I stumbled upon research done by Prof Pauk Walter, Cornell and many more. Here I am giving the simple outline of a bit of his work. Let's see what happens when one write...

Childcare by grandparents or the daycare or the Nanny/maid MAKE INFORMED CHOICE: Leaving your precious baby with a caregiver can be an anxious time for mothers/parents.Read our tips on finding a provider you can trust and avoiding separation anxiety. Let’s explore the options do we have and what is the expected result of the action we take. We will generally have three options. Leave the child, 1. in the day care homes. 2. with the grandparents. 3. with the maids at home. Daycare centers There are daycare centers with a limit of 10 to 25 children, all mixed up age group. Types of daycare facilities • The daycare centers may be like an organized school where the caretakers are well-trained people. • The other type is more personalized where the childcare is run out of the provider's home, often as she cares for her own children at the same time. Steps to choose a daycare center: • Do your research. Get recommendations from other ...