The last one month has been tough all round. Friends, family, colleagues, children, their parents - every other household has a Covid story to tell. Someone in the family has Covid, you yourself have covid, perhaps a neighbour, a loved one - no individual is left unscathed. Either you are convalescing, or you are managing a household with Covid, or you are dealing with the loss of someone close, or if by the grace of God you are not dealing with any of the three, then you have been a Samaritan to those who need help. Morning Glorie has been no different in this regard. MG family is suffering too - some of our team members are dealing with Covid - either personally, or in their close families, so are our children's families. Things have been difficult - parents are struggling at home as they have small kids to take care of, while the teachers are managing their health too. It is in times like these that MG family truly feels like a family. The outpouring of love and support from all...

  "My child does not recognize certain alphabets" "My child tends to shy away whenever we have guests at home" "My child does not show interest in number recognition, but loves to mess around in sand" "My child loves to speak, but when I ask her to speak vocabulary with a particular alphabet, she goes silent" "My child understands shapes, but is unable to find them in his surroundings" Notice the difference in the implications of these statements - they represent some examples of the difference between what we call concrete vs abstract learning during the early years at Morning Glorie, play school in Gurgaon, and online homeschooling in India. All too often, we tend to focus on learning which can be measured, which is concrete. What we tend to forget is, every experience, new or repeated, is a learning - this is truer during the early years of life, though it is something to ponder on and incorporate in our own lives irrespective of age...

I was always amongst the youngest in my class, and for some reason, it filled me up with a lot of pride. If you asked me why back then, I had no idea, other than maybe the fact that despite being the youngest, I could outperform my peers academically. After all, we come from the generation when performing well academically was more important than anything else.   This was true however only right up till the time I went to b-school, and realized that my batchmates, who were older and had more experience were by and large more worldly-wise than I was (not true of all for sure, there were batchmates younger still who thrived in the environment). The point is, I eventually reached a stage where I felt that it was important to gain more experience before being thrown at the deep end of something I was potentially unprepared for, and it also gave me the chance to introspect what I had missed out during my earlier journey. For instance, while I was a good student, I missed out on a...

My mother, who is also my partner at work (this may seem odd, but we do complement each other in our skillsets, this makes us a good team), takes some of the batches in our online homeschooling in India program. These are live and interactive sessions, where parent and child attend together and are part of small groups of children for guided learning sessions. She also handles communication with the parent body, something we have learned is a very crucial aspect - at times, it is our responsibility to give the right guidance to parents as much as addressing queries which they may have. So two instances happened in the last couple of months, where a concerned parent called us up to tell us that their child was only interested in some of the activities, which seemed more fun in nature, while they tended to either show disinterest, or run away from some of the other activities.  Their query to us had two dimensions -  1. Should the nature of activities be changed? 2. Were we push...

A few weeks back we had done a blog post on sending your child to daycare in the Covid era . Today, we go one step ahead in that. A child is the most precious being in any parent's life. Parents spend months preparing for their arrival, and then spend the next few months to years creating the most secure and loving environment for them. However, there comes a day when the child must leave the security of that nest. For some, it happens as early as six to eight months, when they go to daycare, for some, it happens a little later, when they go to preschool. At this stage, every parent and child goes through what is known as separation anxiety. We have witnessed that over the years at Morning Glorie, preschool and daycare in Gurgaon. For any parent, this can be a particularly tense experience, handling it right can lead to a rewarding outcome. Understanding Separation Anxiety First up, it is important to understand why separation anxiety occurs. For this, we need to put ourselves in t...