Do you push and shove your children?  Or just let them get on with growing up?  I can’t work it out.  I mean, Mozart would be a nobody if it weren’t for his ultra-pushy dad, making him practice from an early age.  And would Tiger Woods or Serena Williams have made it into the sporting pantheon without their dads’ discipline?  Even if you recognise this, you’ll also know that living a fulfilled, meaningful and happy life has nothing to do with extreme achievement.  The monster swots at school rarely distinguish themselves later on.  Even those genius children who pop up in the newspapers for getting into Oxford to read Quantum Physics at 12 sometimes grow up to find life difficult down the line.  So what’s the goal with your kids?  A love of learning, of knowing stuff, of finding out about things – to me, this is what gives a life its richness and texture.  And the more learning that’s done outside the classroom, the better.  Pen in hand, behind a desk, it can all seem rather B-O-R-I-N-G unless you have an inspirational teacher.  But through books, films, kitchen experiments, trips to museums, interesting chats in the car – you get my drift –  you can really help develop a curiosity about the world and an enquiring mind.  And this stays with you for a lifetime.  A nice thing to give your children, I think.

Table talk.  What’s yours like?  Sometimes fascinating chat round the table with children just happens.  But often, especially if you’re eating out, children might be more interested in digging your iphone out of your bag to play games on.    I’ve tried politics, plants, what-would-you-do-if? games and which-would-you-rather? tests (shark attack or death by strangling).  Lately a table discussion we call  ‘what’s it made of?’ has turned out to be good while waiting for the waiter to bring the pizza.  The table?  That’s easy.  Wood = trees.  The napkins? Cotton = plants.  The knife and fork?  Everyone knows it’s metal.  Or more precisely steel, made from iron.  Where do they get it?  How do they make it?  Check out http://www.xomba.com/where_does_steel_come for a brief and clear answer.  The glasses? Well, made of glass but how? Answer – melt sand, soda ash and limestone.  The plate?  Clay. The menu? Paper = trees again. And once the pizza’s in front of you, well then it’s easy – tomatoes, cheese, dough, salt, oil, pepper and so on.

Recently I read about children who didn’t know that chicken nuggets come from birds. But do many kids know that chocolate comes from a plant?

Simple questions.  Interesting answers.

Anyone with computer-addicted boys ?  Why not harness this wonderful addiction, the impressive stamina they show in front of the screen, and make them learn something useful?  Get yourself a copy of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator ‘A Century of Flight’ from www.amazon.com. Invest in a joystick.  Position son in front of screen.  Leave to play for 3 hours.

Now, when I call the kids for dinner, my son inevitably shouts back, ‘hold on Mum!  I’m on final approach to Miami/Hong Kong/Vancouver (insert preferred city) and the landing gear’s down and there’s heavy crosswind.’  And while we are having breakfast, he is mid-Atlantic en route from Frankfurt to Las Vegas – he’s mastered the autopilot so as to fit in a bowl of cornflakes.

And we are now obliged to be the last passengers off any real-life flight, so that he can chinwag with the pilot about altitude, flaps, engine size,  call signs etc etc.  He now spells his name Juliet-Oscar-Hotel-November.

The volcano.  Eyjafjallajokull.  Can you pronounce that!?  I gather it’s ay-yah-FYAH’-plah-yer-kuh-duhl. Anyway, thanks to IT, we drove back to the UK after Easter, instead of flying.  And instead of breakneck speed, our plan was to stop on our way at the Normandy beaches.  Have you been yet?  I hadn’t, and I’m 44, so I thought my children should see them a bit sooner than that, especially as World War II is such a key history topic.

Doing this without any background context would have been fatally.. terminally BORING for my kids.  How to prepare?  We rented ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and imagined what it was like to be in one of the first boats that landed on Omaha beach on 6 June 1944. We looked at a map of the coastline and wrote in Gold, Sword, Juno, Omaha and Utah. We booked the Overlord tour (www.overlordtour.com) which includes Omaha beach, the German battery and the American cemetery at Coleville-sur-Mer where 10,000 Americans are buried. And we listened again to Horrible Histories’ Woeful Second World War (www.amazon.co.uk) in the car.  And for a first experience, it all fitted together.

Now my son is angling for a trip to Pearl Harbour but I think it’s for the surfing.

Is anyone feeling like going back to pen and paper ? To throw out (or put away) the computer for a week? To drop the iPhone in the bath? It’s a contrarian approach, definitely, but everyone must need a break from technology sometime.
If it annoys you to see your child’s nose glued for the nth hour to the computer screen (don’t get me wrong – there’s a lot of interesting stuff on there) throw it under the bed and consider sending them out on a walk.
Uuugh!
Mission – collect 3 leaves and 5 flowers. And then identify them.
Take a look at the subheading Flowers/Plants at the website www.theteachersguide.com. Primary children get into flowers during science so a short spot of botany will be useful and could actually, possibly be quite FUN!?!!

People-pleasing.  What a terrible affliction.  It may make you liked (but not always) but man, do we miss a few tricks!  From Rosa Parks on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama to the brave few who stood up to Nazi outrages, down to the man who stands up to the neighbourhood bully, these are the people who leave their mark.

Fitting in is not something I admire.  I like the guy who dares to stand out, who questions stuff.  Take Galileo in 1600.  His idea was that the earth goes round the sun and not the other way round.  And of course, he was told to shut up.  But he didn’t.  He wrote his book.  And caused a lot of trouble.  Charles Darwin did the same thing with his outrageous idea – although he took a lot longer to publish ‘The Origin of Species’.

How do you encourage this in children?  If you know, please tell me!

X Factor winner Joe (how long will he last?) sings about the uphill struggle, viz ‘ain’t about how fast I get there, ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side………it’s the CLIMB.  Now that’s a good attitude for children to pick up.

But I am not sure Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay (first men up Everest, 1953) would have agreed.  No oxygen and 29,000 feet can’t be that much fun.  But what counts is the tenacity and the determination, qualities that are still totally admired today.  Making films about famous figures who’ve shaped the world, as we do, I’ve become really aware that they all share these qualities.  Marie Curie, tired and sweaty, boiling up rocks to find her radium, Columbus hawking his ‘what’s-across-the Atlantic?’ idea until he found a buyer, Rembrandt still painting flat-out when bankrupt and weeping for his dead wife – the universal message?  Don’t give up, keep going.

Do you, like me, feel the pressure to make lists, achieve goals, aim higher, do more?  And if yes, does this get transferred to your children?  Try harder.  Do your best.  Get stuff done.  Never slouch around.

What’s striking about the lives of the great thinkers, inventors, artists and pioneers is just how many of them spent a good deal of their time just bumming around, wondering about stuff.  Isaac Newton’s story, apocryphal or not, is an example.  If he had been rushing around, fixing the plumbing or frantically chopping firewood, he’d never have had the time to sit in that garden at Woolsthorpe under the apple tree and ask why.  ‘How do you come up with these great ideas?’ you might ask.  ‘By thinking unto them’, he said.  And for that, you’ve got to be chilling, not writing lists.

I’m loving  How to Fossilise Your Hamster by Mick O’Hare.  It’s a series of hilarious experiments you can do with your children when it’s pouring outside – and they all prove some scientific principle.

Take this as an excellent example:

Question: is it true that you can measure the speed of light using nothing more than a chocolate bar and a microwave oven?

All you will need is:

• a bar of chocolate
• a metric ruler
• a microwave oven

Tell me, how could you NOT want to try this out?!

O’Hare has had the brilliant idea of dividing up his experiments into rooms.  ‘In the Kitchen’. ‘In the Living Room’.  ‘In the Bathroom’.  Wherever you are, there are experiments to be done.

Cheryl Cole – a sage for our times.   After listening to ‘Fight For This Love’  for the thousandth time (‘turn it up, Mum’) I’ve got the message : ‘Anything that’s worth having is sure enough worth fighting for.  Quittin’s out of the question – when it gets tough you gotta fight some more’ .  That’s what I call a positive approach to life.  Nelson Mandela, Ernest Shackleton, Charles Darwin, William Wilberforce, the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae – there’s a ton of legendary figures for whom quittin’ was out of the question.  One of our films is about Galileo, the 16^th century Italian scientist and astronomer.  He was up in front of the Grand Inquisition for what he believed in (the earth goes round the sun) and he didn’t’ give up.  The uphill struggle stiffens resolve, obviously.