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This unique interactive website works with maps and globes to transform pupils’ understanding of the world. Winner of a Geographical Association Gold award and a BAFTA award for primary learning, Mapping Our World allows pupils to flatten a globe, turn a map into a globe, and merge different map projections. The nine structured activities come with teachers’ notes and are designed for whole class learning on an interactive whiteboard or PC. The website supports the Geography curriculum and is also ideal for bringing a global approach to Citizenship, PSE and ICT.

It seems that it’s not only possible to make people kinder, it’s possible to do it systematically at scale – at least with school children. That’s what one organization based in Toronto called Roots of Empathy has done. Around babies, tough kids smile, disruptive kids focus, shy kids open up. Roots of Empathy was founded in 1996 by Mary Gordon, an educator who had built Canada’s largest network of school-based parenting and family-literacy centers after having worked with neglectful and abusive parents. Gordon had found many of them to be lacking in empathy for their children. They hadn’t developed the skill because they hadn’t experienced or witnessed it sufficiently themselves. She envisioned Roots as a seriously proactive parent education program – one that would begin when the mothers- and fathers-to-be were in kindergarten.

Here’s how it works: Roots arranges monthly class visits by a mother and her baby (who must be between two and four months old at the beginning of the school year). Each month, for nine months, a trained instructor guides a classroom using a standard curriculum that involves three 40-minute visits – a pre-visit, a baby visit, and a post-visit. The program runs from kindergarten to seventh grade. During the baby visits, the children sit around the baby and mother (sometimes it’s a father) on a green blanket (which represents new life and nature) and they try to understand the baby’s feelings. The instructor helps by labeling them. “It’s a launch pad for them to understand their own feelings and the feelings of others,” explains Gordon. “It carries over to the rest of class.”

Karibu! and welcome to the International School of Tanganyika’s Grade 2 Information Portal. Here you will find ongoing information about what is happening in Grade 2 classrooms, links to IST events, curriculum, student work and much much more. Please check back often and feel free to leave us a message with your ideas, links and good thoughts. Asante!

Posted on 03/05/2011 10:17 am by Simon Davidson Project overview The current project of the inquirers.org team is a research project on the traits of successful people, and how they relate to their educational experience and learning from life outside schools and colleges. The research question is What are the traits of successful people? - What are the underlying common traits that lead to success? - Are they different in different fields/cultures - How do they link to curriculum outcomes and other effects of education? This will be developed into a book and proposals for educational reform. The main authors are Simon Davidson and Lindsey Ferrie.