Accelerate your child's learning

                                   ... so they can excel at school and beyond

Develop your child's thinking and learning skills through everyday conversations.

  • Discover the most important skills your child should know.
  • Create learning opportunities from your daily routines.
  • Give your child the thinking skills and mindset to succeed.

 

Developing advanced, independent learners

“Bright Talk is unlocking the potential of my child”

Programmes are delivered direct to your phone via WhatsApp. These use a personal coaching approach to build skills using simple techniques. Conversations are easy and fun and do not require any particular skills or additional resources.

Bright Talk also works with schools in the UK, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda.

  • 12 weeks per programme
  • Talk based activities
  • Spiral curriculum from introduction to mastery
  • Interactive personal coaching approach

Message us for further information for you or your school.

Scroll down for more detail on these programmes.

Emotions and Feelings

"If emotional, social or physical needs are ignored, those unmet needs will work against good executive functioning and hence academic excellence."
Adele Diamond, Annual Review of Psychology, January 2013

You will help your child to develop self-awareness and build vocabulary about feelings.  Talking about emotions with your child helps them to understand different emotions and identify actions that give positive and negative feelings.  This helps them to recognise emotions and develop ways to handle these.

 You will talk about ways to build up positive feelings and plan strategies for calming down when angry or upset.  You will talk about emotional problems and ways to solve them.  Older children may be able to brainstorm solutions themselves. 

The programme introduces your child to a restorative justice approach.  This focuses on accepting responsibility and making restitution rather than punishment.  It enables those responsible to understand the impact of the harm, acknowledge it and take steps to put it right.  The programme ends by using imaginary stories to deepen emotional problem solving skills.

  • Topics explored: Noticing feelings, planning actions that make people happy, calming down, being a good friend, solving friendship problems.
  • Techniques developed: Starting conversations, talking and doing, noticing, reporting, storytelling, planning and interviewing.

For young children, many of the problems they face are related to emotions and behaviour.

 

“The most effective leaders are all alike in one crucial way:

They all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence.”

Daniel Goleman, "What Makes a Leader?".  Harvard Business Review

Finding Out

"Curiosity is the engine of achievement"
Sir Ken Robinson

You will share stories and use open questions to build your child’s curiosity and understanding of a topic.   They will then use this knowledge to plan an interview and begin finding out.

The programme builds from simple topics to more complex ones, as your child develops an understanding of different perspectives. Interviewing others helps your child to develop confidence, practice listening carefully, remembering and recalling  answers and noticing patterns in responses. 

At the end of the programme, they will use their social and emotional skills to make decisions and will share their learning with an audience.  They will reflect on how this went and what they learned from it.  

  • Topics explored: Favourite foods, birthdays and gifts.
  • Techniques developed: Starting conversations, storytelling, planning, interviewing and reporting.

Problem Solving

"Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve."
Roger Lewin

You will help your child to identify what a problem is and to understand the sequence of steps that lead towards a solution.

You will introduce and practise the four Bright Talk problem solving steps.  This  gives  your child a framework to use. It helps your child to deal with problems calmly and builds their confidence and independence.

You will practice brainstorming with your child to generate a wider range of solutions and increase the richness of ideas explored. 

By asking others, children find new ideas that they hadn't thought of.

They will learn to weigh up the factors ‘for and against' each solution to decide which are un-workable and to prioritise others.

They will use an imaginary scenario to break down a problem and increase the breadth of solutions.

In the mastery phase, the activities develop your child's creative skills, looking at problems from different angles. They will identify a complex imaginary problem and will come up with new solutions.  Helping your child to think creatively opens up their minds and leads to innovation.

  • Topics explored:  Everyday problems – what to do when things are lost, missing or broken, unexpected or new.  What shall I cook? What if a baby monkey came to tea? My animal clinic
  • Techniques developed: Starting conversations, brainstorming, talking and doing, storytelling, planning, interviewing, deciding.

Children with good problem-solving skills don’t give up or get frustrated when they encounter a challenge.

Instead, they manage their emotions, think creatively and persist to find solutions.

"Every problem is a gift - without problems we would not grow".

Anthony Robbins

“We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way.

Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right - one after the other.”

Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance.”

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