Some of the greatest minds in human history have waxed eloquent about the pleasures of boredom (‘fruitful monotony’ in officialese!!). In his 1930 classic The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell insists that children be allowed to experience boredom because it encourages imagination and inventiveness. Summer Holidays So what about the long summer break when children are entertained at chess camps, art school, cooking classes and tennis lessons? Not all child development experts are happy with endless summer activities. “If parents spend all their time filling up their children’s spare...

THE EPIDEMIC Myopia has always been thought of as a hereditary trait. However, recent studies indicate that environment and lifestyle may have an equally important role to play in the onset of myopia in children.. (Myopia is the inability to see distant objects clearly. Also called nearsightedness/shortsightedness.) The revelation is comes at a time when an epidemic of juvenile myopia is sweeping through Asia. As reported in the journal ‘Lancet’, up to 90% of young adults in China, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and South Korea are myopic. Worse still, 10% to 20% of these schoolchildren suffer...

Spend at least ten wildly happy minutes every single day reading aloud. Read at least three stories a day: it may be the same story three times. Children need to hear a thousand stories before they can begin to learn to read. Read aloud with animation. Listen to your own voice and don’t be dull, or flat, or boring. Hang loose and be loud, have fun and laugh a lot. Read with joy and enjoyment: real enjoyment for yourself and great joy for the listeners. Read the stories that the kids love, over and over and over again and always read in the same ‘tune’ for each book: i.e. with the same...

Thus far, 7 blog posts on reading. After each post, I think to myself – there, that’s done with.  Apparently not! So how many surveys and legislations and propaganda pieces does it take to get this simple point across? Obviously a lot more than I have managed to squeeze into 7 blog posts. Well then, here goes… Yet another study books – this is how they work. A survey of 4th Graders, undertaken by the University of Maryland, revealed that engaged readers from economically disadvantaged homes routinely outperformed less engaged readers from richer families. “Based on a massive sample, this...