It was good to welcome so many parents, children and friends of Edge Grove to the school on Saturday to share in and be a part of the Christmas Fair; a popular and keenly anticipated annual event.
On behalf of all, my sincere thanks to Nargis Robertson, Michele Liberman and Kim Chan and their FoEG committee for the hard work and the labour of love that went into bringing the Christmas spirit alive on Saturday. It was an occasion that was enjoyed by all, with loads of laughter, plenty of festive fun for the children and much for parents and other family members to take away with them. Thank you, too, to the members of staff who played important roles in adding to the carnival atmosphere on the day and to our wonderful Year 7 & 8 pupils who had worked hard in recent weeks to prepare special fun activities and entertainment that the other children could enjoy. Their funds as raised will be going towards various worthy charities of their choosing.
The latter point is worth elaborating on given that our Year 8 group are making such a positive contribution to the daily life of their school in this their senior year. During the opening assembly on the first day of the school year, each member of the Year 8 cohort was awarded a Certificate of Commissioning. The thinking behind such an award is that, having ‘earned their stripes’ as Edge Grove children over the years, they have now reached one of those all-important milestone years in their educational journey when individual and collective levels of responsibility begin to align for them as pupil leaders.
As those involved with these fine young people, the Year 8 teachers have been impressed with the important new levels of maturity, self-determination, and confidence that each member of the group is demonstrating as they have embraced so much of the enhanced Year 8 Edge Grove Baccalaureate curriculum.
In my weekly meeting with Shona Mistry (Head Girl) and Henry Murray (Head Boy), I asked them to share some of their reflections on the first term in their respective roles.
A few of their highlights reflect well on how the Year 8s have gelled as a group and are developing in so many ways that add real value to their learning experiences :
Handing out pupil-council badges to the Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 children who had been assigned these roles … service, connection and example;
Being involved in the various IGNITE challenges which have stimulated, amongst other things, imagination, creativity and cooperation;
Inter-house hockey and football matches which brought to life youthful energy, house spirit, healthy competition, and a chance to support the younger children;
Bonfire Night and the Fireworks display provided for the Year 8s as a group a special time of togetherness, unity of spirit and loads of fun;
Watching England’s first World Cup football match against Iran with so many other Edge Grove children and staff. This promoted excitement, unity and plenty of shared support for England;
During Saturdays’ Christmas Fair, the Year 8s, having planned and prepared well for this important fundraising opportunity, enjoyed much that encouraged acts of service, putting the interests of others before themselves, giving without expecting anything in return.
The Edge Grove Community would like to invite you to help us keep this year’s Christmas Jumper Day green and budget friendly!
You are welcome to bring your child’s current, perhaps too small, jumper and swap it for another. The exchange points will be set at the Apthorp Building foyer and Pre Prep foyer. You can bring your pre-loved jumpers and leave them there and take one that your child can wear Monday to Wednesday, during the last week of term. The exchange will start on Monday 28th November and end on Friday 2nd December.
We would also like to invite you to join us in our contribution to Save The Children. £1 will be donated on your behalf and added to the end of term invoice (unless you have opted out of this).
This year the UK government has promised to give the same amount as you for Christmas Jumper Day!
For every £2 donated to Save the Children, the UK government will give £2 as well:https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/christmas-jumper-day/how-you-help
These last few weeks of November always signal for us the beginning of the final lap of a given year. Like most other institutions of learning, our preparations for the many end of year functions and happenings that will serve to bring closure to an action-packed first term are well underway.
Please use our Edge Grove app to stay alert to what is coming your way during the final two weeks of term. The following are worth noting, in particular:
Year 3 and 4 Pantomime - Wednesday 30th November and Thursday 1st December
Ed Balfour speaking to the Year 5 and 6 parents - Tuesday 29th November
Year 1 Nativity - Friday 2nd December
Year 2 Nativity - Friday 2nd December
Year 3 to 8 Carol Service - Thursday 8th December
Reception Nativity - Friday 9th December
Pre-School Nativity - Friday 9th December
The old adage, 'it's not an exact science', clearly applies to raising children, and particularly in a subdivision of society in which our children are privileged to be on the receiving end of so much. As parents who have worked hard to get to where we are and who naturally delight in being able to share some of the fruits of our labour with our sons and daughters, we are often faced with a dilemma over the establishing of boundaries.
It's clearly not rocket science to recognize that such is the nature of the human conditioned response, the more one gives, the more is expected, and especially when others, as in the peer group, are setting trends that our children are exposed to each school day.
It's no wonder then that, unless we make a concerted effort to establish an intentionally different set of norms and values, a subculture of selfishness and entitlement often creeps in. This in turn can lead to the children interpreting these hidden messages in subliminal ways that can result in them becoming too wrapped up in themselves and, resultantly, uncaring of others.
Richard Weissbourd, a Harvard psychologist with the Graduate School of Education, together with the Making Caring Common Project have come up with recommendations about how to raise children to become caring, respectful and responsible adults (The Washington Post). You will find this at the end of this section of the newsletter and I encourage you all to read it when you have time.
With the December holidays just around the corner, what has been shared in this article might well offer some sage advice to us all. It comes, as you well know, in an age when the true Spirit of Christmas, the generating of hope, humility and happiness that this time of Good Tidings still brings, and the simple message of the shepherds, can sadly often be lost under an avalanche of commercialism, tinsel and trappings, and too much Christmas pudding.
Stay warm, stay in touch and God bless you all into these last two weeks.
Richard StanleyInterim Headmaster
Richard Weissbourd and the Making Caring Common Project (published in The Washington Post)My Excuses are totally legit:
The cobalt-blue sports car roars up beside me, swerves into my lane, then races ahead. “Seriously?” I grumble. “Idiot!”
Just then, he hangs a quick left, right by a big sign that says, “Hospital Emergency Room Entrance.”
Oh. Right. (Well played, Universe. Well played.)
When someone cuts us off in traffic, shows up late or otherwise offends us, we often reflexively attribute it to an intrinsic characteristic of the person, yet when we inconvenience others, we generally blame outside forces (e.g., he was in my blind spot). This Scrooge-like tendency is so universal that behavioural scientists have a name for it: the fundamental attribution error.
How can parents use an awareness of this tendency to their benefit? The next time we’re at a restaurant and the children are moaning, “Where is our food? This waitress is terrible!” we can point out that maybe the kitchen is backed up and she’s doing her best. Maybe she’s covering extra tables for someone who called in sick, or this is her second job and she’s been up since 4 a.m.
“Just talking about ‘How do you think that person is feeling?’ is so important,” says Amy McCready, a mother of two and author of “The ‘Me, Me, Me’ Epidemic: A Step-by-Step Guide to Raising Capable, Grateful Kids in an Over-Entitled World.” “It’s a way of un-centring our childrens’ universe and getting them thinking outside of themselves.”The curse of the chocolate-chip pancakes
It’s Saturday morning and you’ve just set fresh pancakes on the table. Your sweet children take a bite and then stop chewing. “No chocolate chips?!” they say, affronted.
Behavioural research shows that humans can become acclimated to almost anything if they’re exposed to it frequently. It’s called “hedonic adaptation,” and it’s why Justin Bieber is always buying more outrageous cars, why the kitchen we just remodelled suddenly needs a new backsplash and why lottery winners, after the initial thrill of winning, end up about as happy as they were before.
What does this mean for children and parents? Anything we provide or do regularly will become the new norm, whether it’s postgame milkshakes or a certain brand of clothes. And not doing things can also become a norm: If our children have gotten used to having their beds made or dinner table set, they’ll come to expect that, too.
“I really think about it as ‘What’s the default that I’m setting up?’ ” says Tess Thompson, a mother of two in Webster Groves, Mo. “My children’s summer day camp is set up for their nonstop entertainment, so naturally they thought summer Saturdays would be, too.” Thompson had to reset their expectations. “Once the special outings weren’t every Saturday, they actually felt like treats.”
‘You know this isn’t normal, right?’
Six-year-old Allison McElroy invited a friend over to play, but her playmate kept peering around the house. Finally, puzzled, the friend spoke up. “Is this a mini-house?” she asked.
Allison’s mom, Cheryl, tried to keep her voice level. “Uh, no, this is a real house. We live here.”
“Her tone was like, ‘Is this all there is?’ ” recalls Cheryl with a laugh. Her daughter’s new friend lived in a neighbourhood of soaring foyers and echoing great rooms, different from the lovely ranch house the McElroys live in. “I really think she’d never been in a one-story house before,” Cheryl says.
The little visitor was experiencing what behavioural scientists call the “availability bias,” which causes us to overestimate the prevalence of something if we see many examples of it. So if everyone at our children’s school wears $150 sneakers, our children are going to think that’s normal, not because they’re spoiled monsters, but because it’s what they see every day.
“It’s really challenging, because we’ve chosen to send our children to nice private schools, and the other children are coming back from spring break saying they went skiing in Aspen or Jackson Hole, and our kids start to get the impression that’s the norm,” says Josh Wright, a father of three in Takoma Park and executive director of behavioural consulting firm Ideas42. “So we’re always telling them: ‘You know that’s not normal, right? It’s just one little slice of the world.’ ” To give his children a sense of the wider world, Wright regularly takes them to volunteer at a local soup kitchen; he also chose to live in a socioeconomically diverse neighbourhood so his children would be exposed to a broader range of experiences.
‘Girl, age 6. Wants: Undershirts.’
The paper angel in my daughter’s hand read, “Girl, age 6. Wants: Undershirts.” The angel in my son’s hand read, “Boy, age 7. Likes: Dinosaurs.” My lectures about faraway starving children had previously fallen on deaf ears, but on that December day, my children, then aged 5 and 8, eagerly dashed around the store to find just the right gifts. “I think she’ll like these! They have princesses on them!” “Can I get him a sweatshirt, too? I don’t want him to be cold!”
Of course, it wasn’t my fabulous parenting that finally got them thinking. It was what behavioural scientists call the “identifiable victim effect” — the human tendency to respond more empathetically to the plight of a single individual, rather than a large group.
For instance, as behavioural economist Dan Ariely illustrates in his book “The Upside of Irrationality,” you might consider sending a few dollars to victims of a tsunami far away. But if you were walking through a park and saw a little girl drowning in the river right in front of you, you wouldn’t hesitate to plunge in to save her. The vivid, nearby individual always trumps the vague, faraway many.
An awareness of this tendency can help us choose more effective ways to engage our children with those in need. “For children to internalise it, it needs to be about individual people,” Wright says.
Quid pro whoa:
“Come on, everybody, heave!” With a final shove, you and your new neighbours wrestle their piano up the steps and into their house. The husband goes to the kitchen, where you assume he is getting you a beer, and comes back instead with his wallet. “Here,” he says, slapping $20 into your palm. “Thanks for the help.”
Suddenly, oddly, your warm fuzzies fade, and your desire to invite them over for pizza later fades with it. But why? Research indicates that we are more motivated to do things as part of a social transaction than a financial one. When Ariely asked students to move a couch either as a favour or for $10, more students were willing to do it as a favour than for the money: Once money was involved, Ariely writes, they started thinking: “Is this really worth my time? Is $10 enough? Is this guy stiffing me?”
This suggests that paying our children to do chores isn’t necessarily going to turn out as we hope. True, it will probably work at first, McCready says, and it’s no problem to pay for occasional, large tasks. But for everyday chores, “at some point, you’ll ask them to unload the dishwasher, and they’ll be like, ‘Ehh, I’m good. I don’t really need the money today,’ ” she says. Or, the children will start negotiating: “How much will you pay me to carry these groceries inside?”
Instead, McCready suggests framing chores as needed contributions to the functioning of the family. “I know cleaning the bathroom isn’t fun, but if we all get to work, we’ll have the house clean by lunchtime. [Hand a child a sponge.] Thanks for the help!”
Clean house, warm hearts, generous children.
