Kids in Chon Kemin

Recently I heard a world service programme: an Australian woman and her two year old checking out the child care services in Fiji and China. In China some children from a very young age, as old as her child, are in 24 hour nurseries, five days a week. They have fabulous resources, and are usually used out of necessity but some parents like them for socialising their child and because they offer things like karate and languages. The alternative was a grandma in Fiji, who watched TV and left her 9 grandchildren to just play outside, they got no schooling.   The interesting thing was the 2 year olds response to these two models. Apparently through out the visit to the Chinese school she refused to leave her mother's side, but in Fiji happily abandoned her mother.  I think in Chon Kemin that we might have a nice mix of these two models. Children spend the whole day outside even in the winter, (helped by the sunshine) unsupervised, when school is out and a lot of the time after school but seem to have a genuine interest when in school to bend to the system for the knowledge it brings. The most frustrating thing as a teacher is that we cannot always push these educational opportunities as far as possible, owing to time money, etc, but that is the same in the UK.

Children in Chon Kemin out sledging.