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Don't fence me in! (Not Alfie)
Alfie Aldridge lasted a few hours on his first day of preschool before deciding he’d had enough.
The three-year-old took matters into his own hands and staged a break-out.
As the Huffington Post reports, Alfie, of Surrey, England, “ditched his teachers, scaled a 3-foot-tall wall, crossed a busy street, and eventually made it to his front door.”
You can imagine 27-year-old Samantha Aldridge’s surprise when she opened the door and saw her little guy standing there. Continue reading »
Is there anything you can’t do on the Internet? You can order a pizza, pick your hairstyle, and even find the love of your life. And these days, it turns out, you can even be a hero without having to leave the comfort of your parents’ basement. In fact, a 17-year-old girl from England managed to foil the rape of a five-year-old North Carolina girl, thanks to the internet.
According to a new study from the United Kingdom, one quarter of boys have trouble learning to talk, and one in six babies of both sexes do.
A YouGov online survey of 1,015 parents found that 34 percent of girls versus only 27 percent of boys had said their first word before the age of nine months, and most children said their first word between the ages of 10 and 11 months. Only 4 percent of children had not said their first word by the age of three. Continue reading »
If you’ve got a smart kid, one who is capable of learning far beyond the norm for his or her age, what sort of education would you want for them? Would you want them to be taught as much and as quickly as they could handle? Or would you prefer they be given the same work as their peers, so as not to stand out? I know someone who is strongly opposed to the gifted program, primarily because of the unhappy experience he had as part of the program. In his case, the gifted designation served to ostracize him from his peers.
The folks at WalletPop UK, noting that a survey commissioned by the Optimum Population Trust indicates that nearly a third of people in the UK would support a cap on the number of kids a couple can have, took a look at the financial implications of family size. Their conclusion? Although kids are expensive and do cost the taxpayers money, they do pay that back when they become adults and begin paying taxes. Furthermore, the author notes that at some point in the future, the current crop of parents will be grandparents (Get off my lawn!) and we will need those kids to support us and care for us.
Continue reading »
It’s a great tradition that, I’m sure, builds self-esteem and reinforces positive behaviours. “Two pupils from class one and two are pulled out of the hat each week to be a VIP,” says Chris Thompson, acting headteacher of Hallbankgate Village School in Northern England. The students “can wear their own clothes, are introduced to visitors to the school, and they are entitled to bring in their most precious possession.”
Sometimes, though, well-intentioned policies such as this can really come back to bite you. Consider Thomas Bell. When he was chosen, he decided to bring his most prized possession, a pet named Hallbankgate Dragon to share with his mates. It turns out that Dragon is a load of bull. Literally. Hallbankgate Dragon is a Charolais Bull, weighing in at 900kg — nearly a ton of beef. Continue reading »
I know how to get people to pick up their dog’s poop: make posters of kids eating dog s—. Oh wait, that’s a horrible idea. Not so, says the UK. Continue reading »
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