After 17 years working with babies and toddlers, Kerry Mortlock is heading up the new Baby Education and Daycare Centre at King’s College Madrid, which will take little ones from the age of 16 weeks and nurture the first precious 10 to 12 months of their life with “lots of cuddles” and exploration based on…
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For obvious reasons, Christmas is the most exciting date on the calendar for small children. But teenagers and adults also place great importance on a season that brings light and warmth to the darkest months of the year in the northern hemisphere and sun-kissed family time south of the equator. At International British Schools overseas,…
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Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg and her Fridays for Future have done more to change our perspective on the environment than all the world’s politicians put together in what is being dubbed by the media as “the Greta Thunberg effect”. Guest of honour at high-profile global events, the 16-year-old powerhouse had the red carpet…
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In her autobiographical novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the famous 20th century American novelist Betty Smith writes about her experiences in a grim state school in New York, describing the visits from a couple of Art teachers as “the gold and silver sun-splash in the great muddy river of school days.” The joy and…
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Try thinking of a leader who has inspired you. It’s harder than you might think, perhaps because we initially try to conjure up someone of the calibre of Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi. But on a more modest scale, there are a number of figures who serve as role models, perhaps ones we…
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Click here to read this article in Spanish / Click aquí para leer el artículo en español At the start of this century, social media as we know it was still in its embryonic stages. If someone had said back then that politicians would communicate via tweets, most of us would have dismissed the idea as…
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Infants arriving at King’s College Chamartín on a sunny autumn morning in Madrid found themselves transported instead to the jungles of Africa. Met by the call of the wild from the Swinging Safari’s Wimoweh, it didn’t take them long to get into character, dressing up as alligators and lions and hammering out a number of…
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There’s a bit in Zoe Heller’s shortlisted Booker Prize novel Notes on a Scandal when the protagonist Sheba says, “It’s probably a good thing that your kids turn into difficult adolescents. The feelings you have for them as infants are much too intense, too enervating, to sustain.” She is referring to her 17-year-old daughter Polly…
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“This is the first time we’ve talked to each other,” says Sophie. “It’s because we are doing an activity. In the other sessions no one said anything, though a couple of the younger students have stopped to say hello to me in the corridor.” Sophie is a prefect and she is one of several…
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Every 40 seconds someone takes their own life. That is the shocking statistic that the World Health Organisation wants to focus on this October 10, World Mental Health Day, 2019. With poor mental health particularly prevalent among teenagers and suicide the second leading cause of death among 15 to 29 year olds around the world,…
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