EDUC ATION
produces a measurable increase in spatial reasoning. So seek out an instrument that will nourish your darling son or daughter’s mind and soul, and make your home intolerable during practice time.
DOUBLE UP Most London schools are attended by children who speak many languages. Naïve parents might think this is a good way for their child to pick up a few foreign words. Wrong. Instead, you want to aim for a nursery where they speak two languages deliberately, rather than lots by accident. French never hurts, and there’s a good number of French bilingual nurseries in London. To be extra chic, brave the waiting list for a place at the Azbuka Foundation’s Russian nursery in Richmond.
THINK OR SINK What could be more important than a five-year-old getting special help dealing with the things that are most fundamental to the history of Western thought. Most tots are struggling with whether ‘i’ comes before ‘e’. Get yours worrying instead about whether existence comes before essence. The P4C Co-operative (philosophy for children) – a worldwide educational movement launched in 1972 by the American professor Matthew Lipman — offers, for a modest subscription (£35), a range of philosophy-teaching online resources for kids.
ACT UP Drama lessons are very important for building confidence, imaginative play, empathy and those healthy feelings of hating six-year-old Amelia because she beat you to Cordelia in the school production of King Lear, so you ended up having to play Goneril. It’s tough out there: best get them used to it early. The media yummy mummies of Crouch End swear by Perform and its high-energy productions: each term builds to a full ensemble 1 4 8 SEPTEMBER 2 0 1 7
performance, backed by bespoke apps and a swishy online costume shop.
“Drama lessons are very important for building confidence, imaginative play, empathy and those healthy feelings of hating six-year-old Amelia because she beat you to Cordelia in the school production of King Lear”
LEARN THROUGH PLAY There’s oodles of research supporting it. Chess, of course, teaches basic game theory and pattern recognition. And Scrabble offers vocabulary and simple maths. But bridge, as well as being an opportunity for parents and children to bond, encourages complicated strategic thought, memory and communication skills. Andrew Robson’s bridge club in Fulham does children’s lessons.
TEST TASTES As they say in computer science: garbage in, garbage out. It’s all very well making sure that your children eat well at home, but what about when they’re with other children? Unless your child is properly trained, they could easily be tempted to accept Haribo Tangfastics, Dairylea Triangles or worse. So educate your progeny early to question the provenance of food — a friend’s child, for instance, politely declines supermarket sausages and expresses a preference for Parmesan over cheddar.
HOMEWORK IT Everyone knows that the key to learning is partnership. It’s no use leaving your little darling to struggle through writing a poem or drawing a dinosaur without guidance — especially when he/she thinks Triceratops and Trilobites lived at the same time and were both pink, or that one sentence in two merits an exclamation mark. Here’s the chance for your child to watch — little brain soaking it all in like a sponge — as you build a diorama of a Pre-Cambrian habitat or correct that dear little sonnet from Shakespearean to Petrarchan.