Blog
Learning a New Language: An Easy Guide
Learning a new language can be intimidating. When you hear all those people on YouTube speaking at one-thousand miles an hour, it seems impossible to start, let alone reach that level of fluency. If you remember only ‘Comment ça va’ from 5 years of French lessons at...
10 Books To Read In Quarantine
Having been at university for the last four years, I forgot about my love for books. It was just as much not wanting to read as well as not having the time to read. After full days of placement, lectures or madly revising, the last thing I wanted to do was pick up...
How To Prepare For The 11+
You’ve found the dream secondary school for your son or daughter! You are thrilled to flip through the school brochure and see all your boxes ticked - but you then discover that in order to gain a place at the school, your child has to sit the 11+. But is your child...
Should Schools Teach More Practical Skills?
Would you rather learn about the wonders of budgie ancestry or how to balance a budget? Put yourself in my position. It’s a sunny Thursday afternoon outside. I’m in a stuffy, low-ceilinged room. There’s a dog-eared textbook on my desk, open at a geometry revision...
The Hidden Pattern
For many people during the recent lockdown, establishing a successful homeschooling routine has proven a hugely challenging task. Could a better understanding of our brains’ daily emotional patterns help? Last week I received an email from a teaching colleague titled...
The History of zero
The Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9…) that we still use today were introduced to Europe at some point around the 12th century. They were introduced via Arab culture, hence the name Arabic Numerals (although they actually originated in India), and were...
Morning Larks and Night Owls: What Kind of Bird Is Your Child?
It’s perhaps the oldest cliché in the parenting handbook: teenagers like to stay up late and sleep lengthy hours into the morning. Of course, this isn’t the case for every adolescent. Yet in the age of tablets, PS4s, streaming platforms and global social media...
History the Curriculum Hasn’t got Time to Cover: How Tutoring can Help Create Historians for Life
Did you know that in Medieval Iceland, some people were judged guilty or innocent through trial by turf, in which they would walk underneath a piece of turf, being declared guilty if it fell on their head? Or that women in the Victorian era used a metal tong device,...
The Fish that Learned to Climb the Tree
Albert Einstein allegedly said that “if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” It’s actually not certain that Einstein ever said this. But whoever did, clearly tried to make a point: not everyone is...
Back to School Guide for Parents in the Age of Covid
Even though the return to education is an important step, the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly changed the way things are going to work for the time being. Not only will COVID secure measures stay in place to reduce the risk of transmission, schools are also being...