Parenting For Excellence

By K.T. Gatti

Novelist, poet, short-story writer, essayist, playwright, educationist, linguist.... author of over 90 books in Kannada as well as English.

M. A. (English), B.Ed. from the University of Kerala; L.T.C.L. Diploma from Trinity College, London; A.C.P. Diploma from the College of Preceptors, Oxford; Taught English for 15 years in India and 9 years in Ethiopia; Published four books in the teachingof English language, grammar and Phonetics; Published in Kannada 45 novels, 3 anthologies of short stories, 4 anthologies of essays, 2 anthologies of poems, 18 plays, and a travelogue; Published in the Tulu language a novel and a collection of poems translated from English.

• Language: தமிழ்
• Publisher: Pustaka Digital Media
• Release date: Aug 30, 2017

Book preview

http://www.pustaka.co.in

Parenting For Excellence

Author:

K.T. Gatti

For more books

http://www.pustaka.co.in/home/author/kannada/kt-gatti-novels

Digital/Electronic Copyright © by Pustaka Digital Media Pvt. Ltd.

All other copyright © by Author.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Table of Contents

1. How Shall We Begin?

2. Parent-Child Relationship

3. Parent as Teacher

4. Who Creates Problems?

5. Handle with Care!

6. Listening and Thinking

7. Thinking and Speaking

8. Creative Reading

9. Creative Thinking and Writing

10. Scientific Thinking

11. Creativity and Textbooks

12. Basics of Communication

13. Stories and Plays: The Best Tools in Teaching Language

14. Morality: Concepts Behind Rules

15. Language Activities

1. How Shall We Begin?

We must develop and practise a passion for living. Without it, creativity is impossible. Passion for living is interest in everything. Pablo Picasso marvelled at everything. I look at flies, at flowers, at leaves and trees around he said, I let my mind shift at ease, just like a boat in the current. Sooner or later, it is caught by something"

The larger the island of knowledge said the late American clergyman Ralph Sockman the longer the shoreline of mystery surrounding it. And somewhere behind the shoreline, pushing it towards the horizon, its our power of creativity- F. W. Harvey

Watching and listening

You notice that your child has started repeating your utterances. Your words are clear and complete, but his is broken and incoherent. Don’t tease him or force him to speak like you. Don’t imitate him as many parents do for fun. You must continue speaking clearly and distinctly as you always do. The reason why a large number of children do not speak clear enough is because they did not get a good model for imitation. Many brilliant boys and girls speak so fast that you cannot make out what they are saying. It is really unfortunate that many parents do not realize the psychological and linguistic need of talking slowly and distinctly with their child.

Parents must bear in my mind that the child is capable of pronouncing every word the way you pronounce it. He may just take a few days or weeks to pronounce the consonants in clusters. But he will find a great pleasure in pronouncing them correctly often without knowing what they mean. There is no word difficult for him when he starts speaking. Listening to you, he goes on assimilating unfamiliar words, and, in his own way, without your effort, he will grow familiar with all the words you speak. Some children are a little slow. But it has nothing to do with their intellectual capabilities. You may make him listen to nursery rhymes. It is good if he hears them from your mouth. Remember he has to watch you a lot in order to pronounce syllables and words as you do.

Nursery rhymes do not teach anything but train the speech organs. The child does not have to understand what each line in the rhyme means. The child does not have to know the meaning of a nursery rhyme. Nursery rhymes are for instilling the pleasure in listening and speaking. The child has to watch all the variations of your mouth to produce sounds. Let him watch you. A recorded rhyme can only be of use only after he has pknown by watching how the vowels and consonants are produced. Imagine a dumb mother teaching her child language through a tape recorder. The child may be able to hear and remember, but cannot speak!

So speak to your child and sing songs before him. Sing and dance before him and let him see the movements of the lips and limbs. Let him watch all your expressions. Remember not to teach him much. He learns all the time without your being aware of it. Just be careful enough not to give him wrong models either in speech or in manners because he is such an imitator that you will have to feel ashamed for doing what you should not have done!

Listening as a discipline

A child naturally listens to his parents. He listens to others, too. He is interested in all sounds. He enjoys listening to sounds and words again and again if he finds them interesting. But later, the child becomes indifferent to what people say. One reason for indifference is that what he hears may be of no interest to him. Another is that he may have learnt the indifferent behavior from others.

Listening is the first step in acquiring language and continues to be vital until the child starts reading. Listening is important throughout an individual’s life. Therefore listening discipline should be taught. For this, none else but the parents alone are teachers.

To be a good speaker, one should be a good listener, and, to be a good listener, the first thing is that one should be interested in the speaker. If you are prejudiced against the speaker or have developed some dislike for him, your listening will be defective. You must cultivate the habit of listening whoever the speaker is. The speaker may not be good-looking, may be what he says is not very interesting, or may be you know about him that he is not a man of character. But you must accept the fact that you have come to listen to a person. So you must love what you do. And this is for our own good that we should develop this discipline, and the child needs it from the beginning. We must try to understand the meaning of the saying, Listening is love.

Listening is learning. We must cultivate in children the habit of listening with self-esteem. Tell the students to listen with a free mind. Even the best teacher cannot teach unless the students are willing to learn. One with a creative mind may find a grain of knowledge in a ton of chaff. We listen to news everyday. What do we get? What is that we find interesting in it and for what use? What do we learn from hours of idle talk and idle listening? Why can’t we patiently listen to somebody when it is impossible to quit the place? But if we really feel miserable and could leave gracefully, we must do so. Perhaps we can put our time to better use!

No doubt, we cannot like or accept all that we hear, but we can find elegance in our demeanor in the way we conduct ourselves. We must teach children this very art of being charming in being disciplined.

Take him out

The child’s life does not begin with the alphabet chart, or with books of colourful pictures. Books of pictures to teach the alphabet with words beginning with pa to pz are silly and totally useless. Such a book or a chart is a blind belief. It is an insult to the child’s innate ability to learn from the world around him.

Have you ever asked yourself a question, Why should each letter of the alphabet be introduced to the child as the first letter of a word? When the child looks at the word p‘Apple’, doesn’t he see all the letters in it? Doesn’t he see that one particular letter appears twice in that word? Are his eyes supposed to catch only ‘A’ and not the other letters?

The child is bound to get into confusion when he meets the next word, p‘Bag’. Can he understand the ‘A’ in ‘Apple’ and the ‘a’ in bag are one and the same? Haven’t you ever in your childhood experienced the confusion arising between the two sets (big and small) of letters of the alphabet? Why should the child know the letters and their peculiarities before he knows English? Does any child learn his own language in this fashion? Don’t you agree that when the child has learnt to identify four words papple, bag, cat andp dog, he already knows pa, p, l, b, g, c, d, o and pg- nine letters of the alphabet. Is there a rule in the learning of the language that each letter of the alphabet should be learnt in a separate word, and, in the alphabetical order? Does anyone learn his own tongue in this fashion? If a child faces difficulties in the reading and writing of his own tongue, there is no other reason but the never-dying devil of a system practised by old fossils of teachers and similarly fossilized parents! If parents are really serious about their child’s learning of a language, which is going to be the base for all learning, they should not begin it with colourful charts and books. They should begin with their own voice and handwriting. Either mother or father, or both, should be the author of the child’s first book with equal amount of collaboration with the child.

Introduction of just a few words and a couple of sentences are enough to start the child on reading and writing. In a few sentences all the letters can be introduced. What he should learn first is the meaning of the word correctly pronounced. But more important point in learning is that he should get the word in a sentence. In the beginning, he will know the meaning of a word only by knowing the object it stands for. Later with the help of pictures, he will be able to learn some words. Then from the context in which the words and sentences are used, he really understands the meanings of words and sentences. Even much before he reaches the age of two and a half years, his mother uses a large number of words that no picture can show. He learns the meaning of many actions by performing them. His mother may use many words that stand for quantity and quality, which cannot be shown by pictures. He understands their meaning from the context when they are repeatedly used. This is how we learn our tongue.

There are many other things that a child learns and that he pshould learn. It is not just ‘language’. It is language and ‘education’ together. When he sees the picture of a rose he does not see its swaying in the wind. He does not see the cluster of leaves around it. The buds in various stages of growth are not there. He does not see the thorns. The bush, the butterfly, the fragrance, the nameless weed and grass and other plants around it- nothing is there in the picture.

There is no teacher greater than nature. When the child has started speaking, take him out, if possible every day; if not, whenever you can. Take him to the park, to the playing ground, to the riverside, to the grove, to the seashore. But not to the zoo! A child should not be taken to a zoo until he is able to understand what it is. A zoo is not a natural place. It may be painful for the child to see animal in captivity. The sights of animals and birds in cage may raise many questions in the mind of the child. You may not be able to give correct and satisfying answers to his questions.

Show him the tree and say, This is a tree. Let him repeat your sentence. Show him a leaf and say, This is a leaf. Show him the bud, the shoot, the tender leaf, the grown leaf, the old leaf, the fallen leaf, and the dry leaf. Talk about the colour of the leaves. Show him everything and talk about it. If you say, This tree is tall and This tree is short, he will gradually understand what you mean. But when you say, This flower is beautiful he cannot understand it quite easily. He will probably form a vague idea about ‘beauty’ from the way you say it. So language is not just the spoken thing. It includes the bodily expressions that go with words and sentences.

Show him sand, stone, moss, mud, ice etc. Let him touch everything that can be touched. Let him watch the birds in flight. Let him hear the sounds they make. Show him what a small plant, a creeper, a big tree etc. is like. Let him associate the bird with the sound. Let him smell the rose and other flowers. Let him associate the smell with the flower. You just have to see that pollen or an insect doesn’t get into his nostrils. Do you know why most of the urban children are allergic to a number of plants and flowers? Because of their not being exposed to them while they are young. One who grows as a child of nature does not sneeze at the flowering of every tree around.

Sunshine and Open air

Taking the child out is not just to teach him,