Sarah, age three, is cooking with her mother. They are making bakes, a Caribbean staple made from flour, cornmeal, salt and water that isn't baked at all but fried until golden brown. They get to the step where they are kneading the mixture when Sarah suddenly shouts: ‘It looks like dough!'
Without demanding too much in time or resources a learning exchange has taken place: Sarah has learned how to make dough; her mother is now aware that she knows this.
The effect of family learning can be deeply profound, even life-changing, as mum-of-two Julie Williams discovered. She says it was a family literacy activity at their local library that inspired her to take a new direction in life by enrolling on a hairdressing course at college.
‘Without going to that event I would not have realised what I could do,' she says. ‘I felt more confident afterwards. And my daughter Kerry has become more interested in reading. Even her teacher has mentioned her new confidence. She loves visiting the library, something we never did before.'
When eight-year-old Martin Dunston started misbehaving at school his mother's presence in the classroom, assisting her son as well as other pupils, had the effect of settling him down and giving him a new interest in his lessons.
This seems to back up research which tells us that simply modelling a respect for learning - by asking what they have learnt at school, by cultivating a learning environment at home, by engaging in adult learning ourselves - can boost your child's progress in maths and literacy by between 15 and 17 per cent. Given that 85 per cent of what our children learn takes place outside of school we really are our children's most important teachers, as the oft-quoted research by Exeter University professor Charles Deforges has found.
Learning as a family is clearly important - and the good news is that we don't need to find extra time to cultivate it in our lives, says Juliette Collier, head of Family Learning at the Campaign for Learning.
‘The worse thing parents can do is beat themselves up about lack of time,' she told my child. ‘There are lots of everyday normal activities, even chores that you can integrate family learning into, so it's not necessarily about making extra time, but when you do everyday things, making them learning activities.
‘The quality of ‘at home' communication is said to be crucial by Deforge's research; it is not about whether parents have a degree or even understand what kids do at school. It is about valuing learning, communicating, being interested and having dialogue.'
Juliette says that simply by ‘working or studying you are demonstrating that ethos to them. And everybody needs to eat. This need not remain as a function but can become a point for discussion or dialogue about what you've been doing throughout the day.
‘It is a different approach to having to find another hour a day when you really haven't got it,' she adds.
In October, Campaign for Learning will run its annual Family Learning Festival to encourage families to learn together and hopefully discover a lifelong desire to learn. It is a week when libraries, schools, museums and other public funded venues stage learning activities for everyone from grandparent to grandchild - whether it's a storytelling session with a fishy theme, dressing up like an Anglo Saxon while exploring a life-sized replica of a typical hut of that era, or even the challenge to use a desktop publishing package to produce a family newspaper.
‘The Family Learning Festival is about having some time out to enjoy learning together,' explains Juliette. ‘The fundamental thing is to stimulate curiosity in children, get them asking questions and get their minds working in what ever you do. If you want to support your children the most crucial thing you can give is an appetite for learning.
‘A colleague of mine spent 20 minutes working with her children and the children of a friend inventing game which involved a dog and a football; and they have been playing and talking about it for three weeks. It shows you that you don't need large amounts of money or time to do something special.'
But, crucially, family learning benefits everyone involved. ‘The delight of discovering things for the first time, lost long ago by most adults, can be recaptured when adults and children learn together', says Maureen Banbury in her book Special Relationships. She says advocates of family learning have no doubt about its intrinsic worth: children and parents learn more about themselves and each other, it raises the achievement of everyone involved, whatever their age and, for those for whom school was a negative experience, it acts as an effective means of re-engaging learning.'
