Good Ideas

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What to expect

We live in a world surrounded by all the stuff that education is supposed to be about: machines, bodies, languages, cities, votes, mountains, energy, movement, plays, food, liquids, collisions, protests, stones, windows. But the way we've been taught often excludes all sorts of practical ways of finding out about ideas, knowledge and culture - anything from cooking to fixing loo cisterns, from dance to model making, from collecting leaves to playing 'Who am I?'. The great thing is that you really can use everything around you to learn more.

Learning should be much more fun and former children's laureate, million-selling author, broadcaster, father of five and all-round national treasure, Michael Rosen wants to show you how. Forget lists, passing tests and ticking boxes, the world outside the classroom can't be contained within the limits of any kind of curriculum - and it's all the better for it.

Long car journeys, poems about farting, cake baking, even shouting at the TV can teach lessons that will last a lifetime. Packed with enough practical tips, stories and games to inspire a legion of anxious parents and bored children, Good Ideas shows that the best kind of education really does start at home.

(P)2014 John Murray Press

Critics Review

  • ‘Why curiosity is the key to life . . . inspiring and entertaining and thrilling. Michael Rosen, poet, broadcaster and former children’s laureate, who is so genuinely passionate, so enthusiastic, so in touch with what it is like to be a child . . . has written a book about how to educate kids at home. It’s playful and eclectic . . . about telling stories and collecting stones, messing about with the wires in old plugs and recounting Greek myths.

    GUARDIAN

  • A spirit of enquiry makes learning child’s play . . . Nothing ever seems to have come over as boring to Rosen as he roams cheerfully over his childhood memories . . . Science experiments in the bath, singing rounds, days out, quizzes and puzzles are all recruited as practical ways of discovering more about the ideas, knowledge and culture surrounding us but often simply taken for granted. Rosen includes so many ideas for making family life a springboard for further exploration [that] it would be hard for an adult to come away from this engaging study without at least one very good idea for what to do next when there seems nothing else to do

    INDEPENDENT

  • A truly wonderful book . . . engaging, thoughtful and very, very practical

    Early Years Educator

  • Offers thought provoking advice to parents in how to broaden the minds of their brood

    Press Association

  • My favourite book on parenthood . . . A politics that neither takes childhood and parenting seriously nor can have a laugh in the process deserves to inspire nothing much more than apathy and antipathy. Michael Rosen is the polar opposite to such twin barbs, he cares about children, deeply and is richly amusing . . . extraordinarily good

    Philosophy Football

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