Our youngest children are full of questions, rich with curiosity: gifts that are lost to many adults. We work to preserve and strengthen our children’s questioning and thinking skills. From the earliest age, we give them the essential tools of knowledge and understanding but we aim to give them more. We teach them critical thinking, we discuss with them what is a good question, we ask them what questions they would like to ask, even what topics they would like to investigate. By the time they are eight, we are teaching them philosophy and how to be philosophers themselves.
Our children need knowledge. Knowledge is good. It anchors us in our world. But knowledge will fade. Few of us will recall Latin vocabulary we learned when we were nine. Knowledge can be gained and lost. What stays with us for life, and what is vital for our children’s futures, is the habit of learning we acquire and carry with us. Our children need to become independent and they need to collaborate. They need to be able to find focus in silence, to hear and to listen, and they need to communicate. They need to grow in knowledge and they need to develop the skills that will be the foundation of their future learning and success.
In Study Skills lessons, our children learn about how they learn, how they remember, how they can organise and manage their knowledge. We encourage children to assess their work themselves, to respond to written advice for improvement, to discuss their experience of their learning, and so to take possession of their learning and themselves, to become independent learners.
