“a full belly is of little worth where the mind is starved.”

The Prince and the Pauper

Find a link here to my newly completed Blooms Taxonomy unit for The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain.

This story on teachers being expected to toilet train children at school was in today's Canberra Times:

Parents are making Canberra schools responsible for toilet training their children in some cases, putting an extra burden on educators, teachers have reported.

An increasing number of children were starting preschool and kindergarten with toileting difficulties and some parents were expecting the schools to sort it out, the ACT branch of the Australian Education Union said. 

It mirrored a trend that Queensland Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek raised during a budget estimates hearing this month about parents wanting schools to ''do it all''. He said parents should be more enagaged with schools.

"Many people have the expectation that children are going to come to school and they are going to be taught all of the things, including something as basic as speech, manners and toilet training,'' he said.

"That is not the school’s responsibility now. That is why at the early childhood stages it is very important to have parental involvement and, if there is ever a time when you are going to get parental involvement, it is in those early childhood programs.''

Queensland teaching associations supported the minister and some blamed smart phones for children being behind on their language skills because parents did not make as much eye contact with them or speak to them as often as in previous generations.

Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/teachers-being-asked-to-toilet-train-school-starters-20140726-zwv6w.html#ixzz38cZYYWdu

Also check out today's Sunday Age which has a story about some Victorian schools that are ,'crowd-funding to pay for important program's to run in their schools. The story is titled 'Crowd- Funding to make Ends Meet'