EVER wondered why your child is such a clever clogs? Or would you  like to help him  or her become better prepared for Big School? 

Well, research methods of neuroscientists in the United States have started to reveal the basics of what happens in the brain when we learn something new.
 This means that it may become possible for a Kindy child, prep student   or even an infant to engage in simple exercises to ensure that the child is cognitively equipped for school!
 If ongoing research is successful, reports the latest Scientific American magazine, such interventions could potentially have a huge effect on educational practices by drama­tically reducing the incidence of various learning disabilities.
 Scientists, educators and parents must also beware overstated claims for brain-training methods that purport to help youngsters but have not been proved to work.

By David Macknish
Head of Junior School Ipswich Grammar

EACH day at Ipswich Grammar School commences with a series of exercises and physical activities aimed at exercising the Junior School students’ brains and developing their “brain fitness”.
 Students across all year levels from Prep through to Year 6 commence each school day with a period of physical activity. Building upon skills, fitness and high level activity, these sessions of activity are crucial in the Junior School’s programs which strive for literacy and numeracy excellence.
 Critical elements of the daily physical activity program include:
• Learning Connections program involving laterality exercises, coordination and links between body awareness and brain function
• Finger Gym exercises
• Physical fitness development
• Gross-motor program activities
• Fine-motor coordination activities
• Flexibility development.

 The benefits of physical activity prior to commencing concentrated work requiring focussed brain function are many. Evidence from imaging sources, anatomical studies and clinical data conclude that moderate exercise enhances cognitive processing and increases the number of brain cells. In addition, it has been proven to oxygenate the brain, improve memory and improves the synapse-brain connections (Jensen, E.; “Teaching with the Brain in Mind”)  A research study outlined in “The Human Brain” (www.fi.edu/brain) states that “exercisers showed significant improvements in the higher mental processes of memory and in “executive functions” that involve planning, organization, and the ability to mentally juggle different intellectual tasks at the same time.”
 At Ipswich Grammar School, we have encountered similar experiences through our approach to creating the optimal learning environment for our students. Over the last twelve months of gradual implementation of the program, the following benefits have been observed in the participating classes:
• Increased student focus and concentration;
• Improved handwriting;
• Significant increase in fine-motor and gross-motor skill development;
• Alertness;
• Increased readiness and willingness to participate in learning activities;
• Reduced distractibility.
 Secondary benefits have flowed on to literacy development and reading skills. 
 The benefits have been so distinct that the Junior School commenced implementing the program across all classes to Year 6 in 2007. 

Morning physical activity prior to commencing academic learning will continue to assist the outcomes at Ipswich Grammar School and give the students a crucial “edge” in their learning.

C&K is Queensland’s leading community based early childhood education and care provider.  Since 1907, C&K has been part of the lives of more than one million children and their families.

C&K services offer C&K Building waterfalls teaching and learning guidelines for kindergarten and birth to three years of age. The kindergarten guidelines promote the importance of the early year’s education in laying the foundation for preparing your child’s transition to school.

Each C&K service and team of early childhood teaching professionals are dedicated to your child’s care and education.  All C&K educators’ record how each child learns, interacts and participates, so that parents and families can share and contribute to their child’s ongoing learning journey.

For more information about our early childhood services or to find a C&K service near you, go to www.candk.asn.au.

A MOTHER has been banned from Facebook after she uploaded a photo of her children showing one of them pretending to breastfeed.
Lauren Ferrari of Seattle in the US published the controversial photo on the social networking site.
It displays her five-year-old daughter and her younger sister, report UK newpapers this morning. 
In a few hours, the photo disappeared and Facebook told her it violated the company’s community standards.
She is currently banned for a week. 
US police say it is and example of "poor parenting".
What do you think? Is Facebook playing the role of community police and do they have the right to do this?

MIRANDA Kerr gives her laughing son Flynn Christopher — who was sporting some “bear”-y silly pants – a ride on her hip last week in New York City.
“[My perfect day is] to wake up to the sound of my son saying, ‘Mama, mama!’ It’s the best sound ever,” the model, 29, recently told Harper’s Bazaar UK.
“Then I just love to get him out of bed and he can jump into bed with us, and we have cuddle time!”
The 18-month-old is the first child for Kerr and extremely handsome hubby actor Orlando Bloom.

The ability to generate original ideas;  develop new possibilities; solve problems; learn from mistakes and use failures  to reinvent processes;  put your own “stamp” on a product, or service, to differentiate it from others are all at the heart of what it means to be a creative thinker and traits that are highly sought after. Children are the masters of thinking in creative ways, they are pioneers when it comes to inventing and creating. They are not bound by preconceived ideas, taking a risk is all part of the fun and a failure is not necessarily viewed as a setback, in fact, it is often embraced and opens doors to new ways of achieving a goal. Nurturing children’s creativity is essential and strengthening the ability to think in creative ways will result in gaining many beneficial skills that can be used throughout life. 
Nurturing children’s creativity is something that parents, carers and educators can do on a daily basis. One way to nurture children’s creativity is to provide creative prompts to encourage children to think in new ways. For example, shadows can be an excellent source of inspiration for young children when it comes to drawing. At night time, my children enjoy making shadows on the walls. I have been taking photos of their silhouettes as they perform various actions, for example looking up, down, with arms stretched out. I have printed these photos and glued one photo per page onto paper (if the silhouette image is looking up, be sure to glue the photo at the bottom of the page so children have space to draw at the top). Give children a sentence starter, such as the girl/boy looked up and couldn’t believe she/he was looking at………..(children then draw what they imagine could be above their heads). Another way to use shadows for drawing purposes involves drawing outside with chalk. Someone strikes a pose and others use chalk to draw something onto the shadow figure. Hands outstretched could be filled with chalk drawings of flowers, ice creams, all sorts of clothing can be drawn onto the figure as well as outlandish hats.

Creating with recycled materials lends itself to creative thinking as “working” with recyclables requires users to think of alternative ways to use the items and explore new possibilities which can often involve problem solving, lateral thinking and discovering through trial and error. The possibilities for creating with bottle top lids seem to be endless, for example, secure a piece of contact to a window (sticky side facing out) and use bottle top lids (as well as other craft supplies such as coloured paper, pens etc) to create a picture. Another idea is to set a creative challenge, for example plan a party for some favourite toys using recycled materials to create the decorations and cake. Old newspapers and magazines can be turned into party hats, scraps of paper could be used to make bunting and a box could be transformed into a cake (cover a box in white paper and for a mess free option secure some contact, sticky side facing out, to the box and encourage children to decorate the box with craft supplies (ribbon, pom poms, feathers or natural resources like flowers). Alternatively, children could use play dough to transform a box into a birthday cake.                                          

used to make bunting and a box could be transformed into a cake (cover a box in white paper and for a mess free option secure some contact, sticky side facing out, to the box and encourage children to decorate the box with craft supplies (ribbon, pom poms, feathers or natural resources like flowers). Alternatively, children could use play dough to transform a box into a birthday cake. 
Investing in children’s creativity is vital given the dialogue about creativity and how it is considered to be the currency of the future. This investment involves providing children with a diverse range of experiences that inspire them to problem solve, brainstorm, “think outside the box”, tinker, explore, discover, take risks and learn from mistakes. Children who have developed creative thinking skills at a young age will have a wealth of experiences to draw upon and valuable transferable skills that they can employ throughout their life.

Elise Ellerman is the founder and owner of Creative Play Central and provides several different services to assist parents and educators to provide innovative play ideas and highly creative experiences for young children. The newest service that Creative Play Central is offering (as of August 6) is Imagination Creations which are classes for children aged 3 -10. In these unique classes that have been carefully designed to encourage creative thinking, children use creative prompts to inspire them to think and create in new and original ways. For more details about Creative Play Central’s services as well as details regarding days, times and location for classes please visit the website: www.creativeplaycentral.com.au. Follow us on Facebook for more ideas to nurture creative thinkers.   

Hey mum and dad, would you like to airbrush away your littlie's childhood? A strange offer from a Melbourne photographer is offering just that ... read on ... 

When her three-year-old son's professional childcare photos came home with an offer to airbrush away dirt and bruising on his face, mum Amanda Cox was saddened, newspapers reported today.

The note attached to the photos read: "When we photographed your child there were marks, ie. dirty face, dirty nose, bruising, scratches on their face. If you would like them removed please contact the office for a retouching fee."
Ms Cox said it wasn't the first time photos of her three sons had been offered a retouching service.
"There's obviously a demand for this so they're able to offer the service, which I think concerns me," Ms Cox said.
"There's and an essential part of development. We're already making a lot of really fun stories behind minor injuries that happen when you're a kid, and it's all a part of life and it's all a part of growth. The world around them far too safe and so now when they do bang their heads that gets removed from photos."

The proof shots of her youngest son, Charlie, were too small to see any bruising on his face but Ms Cox said she would never choose to have the marks removed.
"I look at that photo and go 'oh, that's right, he got that bruise when he did such and such', and they're stories that we have."
Melbourne Photo Repair owner Ilona Komersaroff said parents often asked for their kids' photos to be retouched.
"Some people like to see their kid with a scratch on their face or with freckles and others don't," Ms Komersaroff said.
"It's quite common that people want pictures of babies and young school kids fixed up so that it's a perfect photo." Parenting expert Kathy Walker said the trend to airbrush kids' photos was a concerning sign of society's tendency to make everyone look perfect.
"It's all part of the same issue isn't a child having a photo at school or kinder just able to be as they are?
"Some of them will have a bad hair day and some of them will have a cut knee . . . I think that's indicative of how they are and that's the nature of childhood."

WHEN is it OK to airbrush away any "imperfections" on a preschooler's face, to ensure everyone in little Timmy's childcare photo looks uniformly flawless, writes Wendy Tuohy from the Herald Sun.

Never, would be my answer; because not only does that amount to erasing signs of a childhood really lived - a smudge of dirt, bit of grot, a bruise or scratch - it is the top of a very slippery slope.
Start rubbing out the evidence that early childhood is messy and imperfect, and where do you end up?
Shaving 5kg off that awkward teen who fails to resemble Kate Moss in the year 8 school photo? Retouching a girl's whole face to give her Scarlett Johansson skin? Don't laugh, the latter has already happened.
Quite apart from the potential damage to children's self-esteem, childhood is NOT a Country Road catalogue and nor should it be airbrushed into looking like it is.
When a Melbourne childcare centre offered a mother the chance to zap away dirt and other marks on her child's face, as reported in today's Herald Sun, no doubt it felt it was doing the right thing (while making a tidy retouching fee).
But like the firm that removed VCE girls' "messy" ponytails and earrings, airbrushed faces and even changed their ears last year, it could not be more out of touch with community values, or commercial ones. Or with common sense.
To be fair to that firm, it later revealed it had been advised by the Box Hill school to make some changes; in the end the debacle was put down to "miscommunication". The photography provider was very remorseful, and rightly so.
Because, as the editors of the world's biggest magazines will tell you, people have had it up to here with manipulation, unrealistic images of perfection and fakeness, generally. What readers and consumers want is just some healthy authenticity.
We are sick of being told that we - or our children - are not quite good enough; and of having our children marinate in messages that cumulatively pose a serious threat to their mental and physical health.
Only last week six New York teens summed this mood up perfectly when they took the fakeness-fight to the head offices of Teen Vogue.
The girls tapped into the common feeling that the community will no longer tolerate the prevalence of airbrushing trickery, and all the appearance-judgment it implies, and they made world headlines in the process.
The girls presented a petition of 28,000 signatures to the Teen Vogue editors asking them to stop airbrushing girls' images, and start to "keep it real".
This followed 14-year-old Julia Bluhm's presentation of a petition of 84,000 signatures to the US editors of the girls' magazine Seventeen, also demanding the end of airbrushing.
Bluhm secured a historic Body Peace Treaty with the editors, who vowed to avoid retouching photos and to "integrate more real girls into its pages".
Even mature fashion brands, such as Vogue, have realised that pumping out a single definition of digitally enhanced perfection is now considered irresponsible.
Vogue editors recently agreed upon a group-wide Health Initiative to try to promote more realistic and saner images of women. Underweight models will no longer be used, and neither will child models in women's fashion shoots.
"Vogue believes that good health is beautiful," said a company spokesman, intelligently giving customers what he knows they want.
Sure, all this seems a long way from taking the grime and bumps off the image of a three-year-old's face at a childcare centre in Melbourne.
But, as far as encouraging children, young adults and everyone else to have healthy self-esteem, surely the motto should be from little (grotty, imperfect) things, big (healthy) things grow.

Here is their original story:

PREMATURE babies have a better chance of survival now, due to advances in medical technology and knowledge. But sometimes the best medicine lies not in expensive machines but in the simple touch of another person.

The story of twins Brielle and Kyrie Jackson of Westminster, Massachusetts, in the United States made national headlines five years ago and began a revolution in the way multiple-birth babies are treated in their first weeks of life. Not yet a month old, Brielle was losing her fight for life. Born along with her twin, Kyrie, on October 17, 1995, she weighed only two pounds at birth. While Kyrie, three ounces heavier but much stronger, thrived, Brielle's breathing and heart rate were poor and nothing the doctors at The Medical Center of Central Massachusetts-Memorial tried seemed to make any difference.
On November 12, Brielle's condition worsened dramatically. "She was turning colors," the twins' mother, Heidi Jackson, said. "She was getting really worked up. Her heart rate was way up. She was getting hiccups. You could tell she was just completely stressed out."
Nurse Gayle Kasparian, desperately seeking something to help Brielle, remembered hearing about a technique rarely used in America called "double bedding" or "co-bedding." Twins and other multiple-birth babies are put in the same crib, where, like in their mother's womb, they lie close together.

Her pregnancy was shrouded in secrecy, so it’s perhaps no surprise that details are thin on the ground when it comes to Sienna Miller’s new baby.

What we do know: Sienna gave birth to a baby girl, named Marlow, in London some time over the weekend, according to E! Online. What we don’t know: any other details!
Miller and her fiancé, Tom Sturridge, who got engaged in Paris at Christmas, are notoriously media-shy. Miller, who was targeted during the News of The World phone hacking spree, has tried to keep herself out of the spotlight throughout her pregnancy.
The model-turned-actress didn’t share much in the nine months, once saying, "I'm under strict instructions not to say anything as it would completely defeat the point of everything I've tried to achieve in the last eight years," she said.  
Don’t expect to see Miller and Sturridge posing for the cover of a magazine with their newborn (hello, Jessica Simpson!) any time soon then ...

Oh those celebrity folk. They do come up with the most colourful baby names, don't they? Elle Macpherson caused much brow-wrinkling when she named her daughter Aurelius Cy, Gwen Stefani impressed us with a son called Zuma and how could we forget Fifi Trixibell who was at the mercy of Bob Geldof and Paula Yates' name-choosing skills. Yep, a simple Lucy or Anna just won't do. 

Today, the latest celebrity baby name has been revealed. Ladies and gents, meet Marlowe Ottoline Layng. Pretty impressive, no? And who's the proud owner of such a distinctive moniker? Sienna Miller's newborn daughter. Can we call her MOL for short?

The gwageous actress gave birth to her first child with Tom Sturridge last week but there's been no confirmation about the gender, name or whether said child came out looking boho-perfect. Until now.

Earlier today, Sienna's sister Savannah wrote on her Twitter page: 'Marlowe I love you..... ' and Grazia Daily has had confirmation of mini-Miller's full celeb-tastic name. Hmm, were Sienna and Tom inspired by Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe? Or perhaps they took a cue from actor Jason Schwartzman who named his daughter Marlowe Rivers when she was born in 2010?

Either way, this has, naturally, got us thinking about the most bonkers baby names ever so let's take a break and play a quick quiz, shall we? In the gallery above, you'll find eight celebrity mothers and the challenge is to match them to the names of their famous offspring (below). Enjoy!

a. Harlow Winter Kate
b. Sunday Rose
c. Daisy Boo Pamela
d. Apple Blythe Alison
e. Willow Camille Reign
f. Phoenix Chi
g. Nahla Ariela
h. Lily Rose Melody