If I can find something that will interest her for half-an-hour then that is really good

“If I can find something that will interest her for half-an-hour then that is really good. I do think parents should help at home, especially if a child is in difficulties, but the books have to be well produced and cheap to buy They are the ones which are not so easy to find”n. Susan Goodman and Sandy Hammer, two professional mothers in Oxford, had no idea what they were starting when they decided to produce their own books for Key Stage 2 children because they were so dissatisfied with what was available. Susan is a science graduate with a passion for making her subject accessible. She has produced television programmes and taught in primary schools. Sandy is a designer, with three children under eight, who was persuaded to turn her talents to computer graphics. The result is Action Books, a home-learning series for 8- to 11-year-olds, produced on a home computer with all the colour and pizzazz that children are used to on television and video.
With the innocence of beginners, they decided that their books should be cheap and fun, and available in supermarkets rather than traditional bookshops.

“We wanted to get to parents who would not go into a bookshop, and entice children into enjoyable learning,” Susan says.The formula was so successful that the first print run, all managed from Susan’s home, where she set up an office in the sitting-room, sold 100,000 copies in six weeks.As the series title indicates, the books are designed for active learning and are closely linked to the content of the national curriculum. There are lots of word games and quizzes, and facts likely to catch the attention of children in junior school.The first four in the series offer a mixture of English and maths. The aim is to lure children into maths even if is the subject that they or their parents are most nervous about. The latest books in the series, out this month, concentrate on science.”We were not professionals when we started, and we tried everything out on teachers, parents and children before we went ahead. We also went out marketing with our proofs, and found enormous interest in the mass market.

Then we went to our bank manager,” Susan says.The aim now is to keep the prices low. “There is nothing wrong with parents helping children, but what they don’t need is to grind through test papers or spend a lot of money. If it’s going to be done at all it should be fun and make learning exciting,” says SusannAction Books are published by New Look Books, PO Box 864, Oxford OX3 9YD. Teachers have little time for politicians these days. Westminster is seen as such a pit of corruption and double standards that when our elected representatives start pontificating about the teaching of morality, teachers tend to turn a deaf ear.

Those teachers who can be bothered to join in the debate rightly ask: which moral code should we be promoting, and should we be laying down hard and fast rules?

Lying, or “dissembling” as it has become known in parliamentary circles, is a case in point. Time and again we see examples of MPs lying for their own self-interest, yet we can be certain that truthfulness and honesty would be at the centre of any moral code they suggested for teaching in our schools.
However, we should not be too harsh on our politicians in the light of new psychological studies which suggest that we all lie at least once a day, and often more than that. So should teachers have to promote the idea that all lying is wrong, even when the evidence suggests that the truth on every issue is hard to deal with?Not all lies do damage, and our society is governed by a complex set of principles that determine which lies are permissible and which are not. Children begin to learn this from a very early age.What schools need to do is openly to teach their pupils the rules of the lying game, so that it becomes as much a part of normal development as telling the truth. We need to help children to distinguish between acceptable, “white” lies and those which damage the credibility of individuals and hurt them in consequence.Children are subjected to acceptable lies from a very early age. Their parents lie about the existence of Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy. Dentists lie to children about the non-existence of needles and injections for numbing pain.

These lies are always found out at some stage, presumably without damage to those who have been told them. But if teachers start to question this natural order of things there could be friction between families and school.The research into lying suggests that we all lie to maintain good relations with other people. Bella DePaulo and her colleagues at the University of Virginia and Texas A and M University have shown that most of the lies that we tell arise because of our need to enhance our status, to protect ourselves from embarrassment or disapproval, or to prevent arguments. A quarter of the lies we tell are to protect the feelings of others.Children often observe adults telling lies to good effect, to protect others. They hear their parents telling friends that they like a new item of clothing they may be wearing, and then quietly saying the opposite when the friend has left.