This centre for Orang Asal (OA) children is being run by a semi-retired couple. It works something like a boarding school. The children are from various kampungs around Malaysia with parental consent and endorsement of the local native leaders.

The purpose of the school is to provide basic primary education i.e. reading and writing for OA kids. In addition, the children are taught discipline, responsibility and life skills. Since joining the school, there has also been marked improvement in the hygiene and health of the children.

The couple relies on donations from friends and contacts for things such as rice, books, stationery, and clothes. Most of the funds come from the couple’s own pockets. Right now they occupy a space at a community retreat venue that is available for most of the year, rented out to the couple on a ‘payable when able’ basis. The space houses around 10-15 children.

Read more about this at KL Raleigh’s Facebook page.

The site was created by Helen Spencer last year in memory of her late mum. May her mum lives forever in the beautiful white place shown below!!!

Emerald Lake, Tongariro National Park, New Zealand

My intention and plan after reading the article is simple: register for the free 100Mb space and chronicle my next journey as a postgraduate student in a local university starting this Friday.

I am a magazine freak, having also collected and bound Montessori Today’s magazines from UK from the year 2003 until 2007. After that year, it was simply difficult to get my hands on any Montessori related magazines around the world, until this opportunity came.

So, once the parcel arrives, I will celebrate the images with you. Yeah, I’m sorry, you can only look at them, while I smell the crispy pages, touch and flip the festooned publications, cling on every single word and picture in the mags from dawn till dusk! Oh, however, while you wait for the advent of the mags, charmed yourself with the view below.

Thor's Well, Cape Perpetua, Oregon

This year the conference along with a new theme- ‘The hand is the pathway to the brain – neuroscience today’ will be held at the Institute of Education on Saturday 24^th March 2012.  It will focus on the latest neuroscience research on how to effectively support young children’s learning and development. Renowned experts attending are: Sally Goddard Blythe, Charles Fernyhough and Susie Pearl talking about ‘Is Every Child Ready to Learn? Assessing and Developing Neuromotor Skills to Support Learning Success’, ‘How Little Minds Lead to Big Ideas’ and ‘Creating Our World Through Frames of Happiness – New Roads for Empowerment and Success in Learning and Development’ respectively.

Tickets cost £40 instead of £50 (regular price) for MSA members for booking before 31^st January 2012.  Tickets cost £80 for non-members.

On another completely different note altogether, the picture below is a mind-blowing view of a playground equipment in Vienna. I simply wish this picture can inspire you to make the trip for the conference as well as a tour to Europe. Austria has one of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth!

The world’s highest chained carousel, located in Vienna , at a height of 117 meters.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 17,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012!!!

Verse 1: “Growth comes from activity, not from intellectual understanding. Children and even adults learn best when they are actually doing what they have learned. You can only get better in writing by writing everyday, and not by reading about writing skills from books. You can only calculate better, if you practise counting using the skills you have learned, and not only by reading about how to calculate faster. So teachers and even lecturers, talk for less than 30 minutes, and let your students ‘work on’ the other one hour.

Verse 2: “Prenatal period: forming the body/

0-3 years old: forming the mind/

3-6 years old: forming the character and society.”

I was lucky to witness the births and lifes of my niece and nephew. Today, my niece is 4 years 3 months old and my nephew is 1 year 5 days old. Even though I am not living with them, but every time I see them, they change a lot. My niece is going through another new phase of initiating conversation with strangers, singing and creating dialogues or stories on her own. She certainly has a flair for words and rhythm, and it scares me to think about the misdirection adults might put on this gift from God. My nephew is busy practising motor skills that make everybody’s lives go berserk His bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence outgrows every adult at the moment, as he is working on muscle strength and agility

Yes, we love children. And yes we love ourselves too. Looking after very young children is like working on a 6-years project at a period of 3 different frameworks, with each framework taking 3 years to be completed, and the good news is these frameworks are mini projects which are continuous and inter-related. At the end of the mega 6 year project, extend the contract for another 6 years. And you know what, don’t bother to re-sign or call for a memorandum or proposal resubmission because your project’s contract is automatically renewed. :0        What is your current project?

Draw up a list of the likes and dislikes of the children in the kindergarten. Dr. Montessori made the list below to guide her in the application of her principles—->

1) What they liked:

Repetition of the exercise, Free choice, Control of Error…

2) What they rejected:

Rewards and punishments, Spellers, Lessons in common…

Let’s see what is your list!!!

Organising the way each child is to use a piece of apparatus doesn’t allow enough room for imagination, creativity and spontaneity.

The introductory method on how to use a particular didactic materials serves as a starting point for young children in order to help them to establish a certain concrete pattern in their mind. Once a child knows how to use a material in a safe and appropriate way, often a child will freely work with the materials, experimenting with the equipment or challenging themselves in a playful manner. For example, a child can only understand the value of the numbers (1-10) after working repeatedly with the concrete materials in the early mathematics area, and carry on to explore large quantities of numbers (hundreds and thousands) with the golden beads, without feeling fearful, embarrassed or discouraged.

Montessori learning is an experimental approach, and the auto-educative materials are a sparkle that will strike the child’s inquisitive and logical mind to make sense of the world around him/her. Whilst you ponder on this, enjoy the TED talk below by Sir Ken Robinson on education and creativity.