“One of the most common things I get asked,” says Sam Malkoun, “is how do we get children to do their homework?
“Be flexible. Stop trying to cram children’s heads with information, instead try to pull out kids’ abilities. Make the information appeal to them. If they ask: ‘what’s five plus seven?’, go and get five blocks and seven blocks and build a fortress out of them.”
Mrs Malkoun is a good person to ask. She is the founder of Future Kids, an extracurricular educational clinic in Dubai’s Knowledge Village for children aged from six months to six years. It launched eight weeks ago – a matter of months after the entrepreneur moved to the UAE.
In one room in the clinic a wall is covered with a monochrome cityscape, in imitation of a Manhattan skyline, which has been partially coloured in with crayons. Several children have written their own names. Cartoon butterflies dot an adjacent wall. “A day without laughter is a day wasted”, opines a frog on the wall, quoting Charlie Chaplin.
“Sam wanted to make this room as interactive as possible,” explains Genevieve Newell, one of the teachers. “We want kids to come in and express themselves, to use all of the tactile and sensory materials.”
Two books sit on a table: The Right Brain and the Unconscious, and Fat Cat on a Mat.
This pairing captures plenty about Mrs Malkoun’s project.
She follows a learning approach that emphasises the development of the right half of kids’ brains. This means improving a child’s creativity, imagination and focus. Future Kids employs a range of teaching tools that don’t get used in most schools: use of flashcards to develop memory, eye-tracking tasks to improve focus and visualisation exercises, for instance. This is combined with literacy and numeracy, for a “balanced” approach to learning, Mrs Malkoun says.
Those looking to sign up will pay Dh1,620 for a term of nine classes with a free trial.
Once enrolled, their child will learn the same techniques Mrs Malkoun uses at home. “My middle daughter hated bath time, so I did a visualisation exercise with them,” she says. “We’d go to a pink bathroom, with bubbles puffing up – warm bubbles – glitter everywhere, the room smelling of strawberry.” After a while, her daughter couldn’t wait for the evening ritual. “It changed the whole course of bath time,” she adds.
To help fund the clinic, Mrs Malkoun sold her house in Australia. While the fledgling business doesn’t have outside investors, she says the Maldivian government has expressed interest in borrowing aspects of the approach for its educational system.
And the entrepreneur is hoping to launch partnerships with other businesses; Future Kids already partners with nursery classes, and offers a nanny training programme.
For the businesswoman, learning is very much a part of her own life. During an 18-month stint teaching in China, she taught herself Mandarin and after six weeks claims she could speak it fluently. She taught in Weifang, in Shandong province, where she worked with a range of ages – from three years to 60 – an experience that helped clarify her views on teaching.
“I have always believed in a different style of learning. [I involved students in] making magazines, playing games to learn English on the basketball courts, cooking – and all the different ways of learning for the different age groups.”
Then as a new parent to her first child in 2008, she launched her own business, Cabin Fever, in Australia. This aimed to help new parents find activities for their children.
“We wanted to be proactive about education – so that everything we [did] was about learning,” she explains. “We’d go to art galleries, see classical music, see the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra [which has concerts designed for babies and small children].”
Through her work, the mother-of-three discovered an educational clinic in Australia that offered the “right-brain” teaching method.
And when her husband, who breeds Arabian horses, and frequently visited Dubai for work, suggested moving to the UAE, Mrs Malkoun decided she didn’t want to separate her four-month-old son from this learning method. So she began to teach it herself.
“I want my kids to be educated to make whatever decision they want in life,” she says.
Mrs Malkoun’s advice for other start-ups is to be passionate about what they do: “If you’re not, it probably won’t work out. There are too many hurdles – and if it’s not part of your DNA, it’s exhausting.”
The most rewarding part of the job, she says, is seeing changes in children’s learning abilities.
“Going home, one parent’s two-year old twins were discussing Picasso in the back of the car.
“That’s pretty cool,” she adds.
abouyamourn@thenational.ae
