Category: Nonfiction Minute

Excellence for Kids: Free and Online

3/12/2019

In my recent post Why Education Should Always Be Nonprofit I examined some opportunities for corruption. First, in the building of fortunes, like oil, but also in the establishment of for-profit schools where money is siphoned off by realtors and administrators. The product of education is not a commodity that generates enormous wealth, like oil, but a human being who is capable of contributing to society. So where's the payoff for the individual for-profit investor in the school? It's certainly not in the production of educated individuals. Society at large benefits from that investment.

So I started a nonprofit organization to bring the work of the most talented children's nonfiction authors to the classroom. To that end, in 2014 we started publishing the Nonfiction Minute, a FREE daily posting of 400-word essays by top children's nonfiction authors. An audio file accompanies each Minute so that the more challenged readers have access to our content. Millions of page-views later, we caught the eye of Paul Langhorst, the executive of SchoolTube. And today, we have something new to celebrate: We are launching The Nonfiction Minute Channel on School Tube. Each post is the audio file of the author reading his/her Minute and is illustrated with art in a slide show. Paul Langhorst, told me that teachers have been asking for more on quality reading and writing, so here we are. There are links on the School Tube post to the Nonfiction Minute archives so students can read the text of the Nonfiction Minutes if they are so inclined.

In addition, Paul has also given me my own Vicki Cobb’s Science Channel, which is a featured channel under “STEM, Math, Chemistry,” the drop-down menu on the School Tube Home Page. It, too, is free. Here is some information about SchoolTube:

It is just like YouTube, but safe for schools. - verified teachers and their students can join for free. Teachers act as moderators to approve student video uploads, keeping inappropriate videos off their system. Many schools do not give students access to YouTube but SchoolTube is viewable in more than 70,000 schools and gets 30+ million page views a year.
It is supported by advertising that has also been approved for children.
It will take some time for people to find us—School Tube is 13 years old and is HUGE. But Paul is thrilled with the quality of our work, which he says will make us a BIG FISH in his BIG POND.

Like Andrew Carnegie ( who sold a lot of steel) and then spent his fortune by creating public libraries, making knowledge and excellence available free to the public is not a new idea. But we still need great teachers to guide children towards it. Our contribution is designed to get kids into books, that are not necessarily taught in classrooms but are excerpted for the reading passages in the standardized tests.

Meantime, we retain our nonprofit status. If your organization gives through Benevity.com, iNK Think Tank, Inc. is listed.

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Get'em to Read Widely, Help 'em to Read Deeply

10/9/2019

What happens to behavior when living beings dwell in paradise? Where everything an individual could possible want is at hand? Plenty to eat and drink. It's not too hot, not too cold. Lethal danger is at a distance. I saw it for myself when I visited the Masai Mara in Kenya many years ago. Kenya is on the equator but the Masai plains of Kenya are elevated so the average temperature is 75 degrees every day. There are no seasons. Both night and day are 12 hours long. Nature provided this part of the world enough space and food and water for the largest land-dwelling mammals to evolve. For elephants, hippos, water buffaloes, giraffes life exists in a serene landscape that is interrupted every so often with a scurry of activity when a predator gets hungry. But for the most part, it is a peaceable kingdom. Beasts wander through their day, not moving too fast, sleeping when they feel like it. A Kenyan professor told me that there is little or no incentive for the human population in this environment to become inventive or technological. A subsistence life-style is not difficult. People who live in the moderate latitudes were motivated to invent ways to make life more comfortable. That's why those places are the source for innovation and technology.

When I was young, I heard a lecture by Nicholas Negroponte, a futurist and co-founder of what is now the MIT Media Lab. He described a future where people would never have to leave their homes-- everything they needed could come to them with the push of a button. (It was before we knew about the click of a mouse). The only reason to leave home, he stated emphatically, would be to find a mate or get buried. Many skills by which people currently made a living would become obsolete. The picture he painted horrified me. But, I reasoned, people would still need to know how to read.

That, too, is on the decline. Note the graph on the left.   Except for the reading of cell phones, which is definitely on the upswing. Note the graph on the right.  In 2017 the average adult spend 2 hours and 51 minutes per day on a mobile phone.

Reading for pleasure, to fill up the day, has been pre-empted by a plethora of entertaining activities that require little else than watching. It seems as if the human race is devolving into doing the minimum to exist. As per Negroponte's prediction, we are getting fat and lazy. Negroponte went on to found a movement One Laptop per Child, hoping to reach all children including those who live in the third world. It failed for a variety of reasons, mainly because his manufactured product was poorly designed. In recent years, Negroponte has shifted focus and now says: "If you take any world problem, any issue on the planet, the solution to that problem certainly includes education. In education, the roadblock is the laptop."

I'm not sure that's true. I think that the problem in education stems from the lack of reading and thinking regardless of the device. Reading is the only way to get into the minds of educated people who know how to write well and think clearly. Learning to read takes practice. It should not be separated from thinking. That is why my tribe of award-winning authors of nonfiction for children have created the Nonfiction Minute. . We don't just write a readable essay, we also speak it aloud. This exposes less fluent readers the magic of content. The Minutes just happen to be the same length as the reading passages on the standardized tests. But each Minute is a self-contained essay with a beginning, a middle and an end not an excerpt from a larger work taken out of context for the test-taker to struggle with. Our Minutes are not leveled because leveling makes text flat and eliminates voice, the humanity that makes the content come alive. But the Nonfiction Minute is not enough to produce readers and thinkers. They need to tackle fuller works.

For this reason, iNK has opened a bookstore, iNK Books & Media Store. The categories that the books cover are illustrated above. Most of our books are interdisciplinary. They are also beautifully illustrated, carefully designed and edited to make them into learning experiences with the real world. We will be adding books all year. Pick a topic from the icons above that you're required to teach. Help your students discover the pleasure of learning from a good book. Let them build self esteem by doing something that requires effort and perseverance that is also a pleasure. Let them experience the work of people who have spent a lifetime thinking and perfecting their craft of putting words together to make meaning.

Otherwise, writers who think and care about educating children will also go the way of the typewriter manufacturers.

Are You Interested in Working with Us?

17/6/2019

How would you sum up this past school year? First, we made it! At times it seems as if it was too, exhausting, too frustrating, too unfulfilling and way too endless. That's what I'm hearing from my teacher friends who are dedicated to their students, hamstrung by the standards, targets of parents and feeling very burnt out. Their eyes still light up when they recall special moments of rapport with their students.

iNK's mission is to give teachers something to teach that can brighten their day and remind them of why they became teachers. For us it was a very good year. Our numbers for the last month were off the charts. Almost 100,000 page views and our visitors to our site looked at an average number of more than 11 pages a visit. This past year, we were taken under the wing of one of the largest business consulting firms on the planet as a pro bono client. They got us off our rear ends and we've started a podcast. (My last post gave you the link.) We're designing a new website to debut in early September as the next school year rolls around. And more good news about us and our books on the horizon.

But we're worried about our teacher colleagues. The emphasis has shifted to concern about student grades than about student learning. At a time, when businesses say they need creators and innovators, classroom work is standardized with work sheets and flat, uninteresting written material. We hear from the trenches that teachers are frustrated at not being heard by the powers-that-be, are being held accountable for student performance in unfair ways, and have little autonomy in meeting curriculum standards. Many are burnt out, even in affluent schools where they stay because they can't afford to try something else.

How would you like to work with us and bring the joy of learning back to your classroom? iNK authors have written many books that fit into your school curriculum. We can start small, with a curriculum built around one of those books that fit into either grade 4 or grade 8 unit of study. iNK will supply classroom sets of books, work with your curriculum people and teachers to create professional development and teaching strategies that make teachers excited to teach, and help design projects for students with the input of the book's author that make students excited to learn. iNK is a nonprofit, as are schools. There is grant money around that can pay for this. We figure the cost of doing such a program for one unit is $2500 per school, for two-three classes and would include classroom sets of books, 2-3 hour of videoconferencing with the author-- some for PD for teachers and creating the curriculum, some for motivating students. We've done this and we KNOW it works. We're confident that even one unit reading a great book and creating a classroom project with the input of a real author is enough to make the standardized test scores go up.

The summer stretches before us. It will take work to get ready and get funding. If you're interested please contact me. It will make my day!

Compelling Nonfiction for Kids: This Title Has a Double Meaning

11/3/2019

Last week my post "The New Era of Children's Author-Driven Nonfiction" discussed children's nonfiction literature that is finally coming into its own. It had a HUGE response!
I was presenting it as something new but, I must confess, nonfiction children's trade books have been noticed for quite a long time. Who, exactly, has discovered these wonderful books? First, the creators of standardized tests. They excerpt our writing for reading comprehension passages. Second, educators of kids with learning challenges and the gifted. My question is: if these books are used by educators at each end of the learning spectrum, what are the great masses of "average or normal" kids in between compelled to read in school?

Textbooks with worksheets, study questions, and quizzes
Schoolbooks with worksheets, study questions and quizzes.

I put an illustration above from Wikimedia commons to show you what these books look like. Compare it to the picture I used last week. (It's not far; scroll down.)

How come this is happening?

If we're going to give standardized tests to compete with the way kids perform in other parts of the world, we have to standardize education, right?
In order to standardize education we have to make it teacher proof. We have to assume that teachers can't be trusted to seek out their own study materials to fit curricula. We've stopped giving them creative autonomy. (Ask a public school teacher, " So, how's that working for you, lately?")

What happens when you give kids a taste of writing that is compelling, (not compelled)? Let's experiment and find out.

(Drum roll) Presenting the Nonfiction Minute --Short, self-contained essays written by award-winning children's book authors with an audio file so that the more challenged readers have access to content. Make them multi-media by including art and video as appropriate plus information about the author so students can get books at the library by an author whose Minute has whetted their appetite for more.

What are the results?
Five million page views and counting. Lots of letters and comments from teachers and students. We've added a Transfer to Teaching for each Minute (T2Ts), giving suggestions for using the material with students. (Don't know if any real kids actually went to the library, maybe someone can fill me in.)

March is Standardized Test Month. It creates so much anxiety that teachers are given instructions on how to preserve test answer-sheets with vomit on them. We hear our Minutes are used for test prep. That was not our intention.

Reading Aloud to Children

31/1/2019

Here I am at 18 months with a magazine. Obviously, way above my reading level but note that I'm treating the reading material with respect and interest.

Did your parents read aloud to you when you were a little child? Did you read aloud to your children? Do you know why it's important to read aloud to children? I asked this last question to a class of education students and got lots of answers: It stimulates the imagination. It makes children think. It inspires curiosity. And on. Here's what I think. Hearing someone read to you as a child, before you are literate yourself, awakens the concept that books are a portal to other worlds of stories, information, poetry, art, knowledge---unending.

As a child, my parents read to me every day. I must have loved it because they never read to me as much as I wanted them to. Early on, I figured out that books took me places I wanted to go and if I wanted to access what was in them whenever I wanted, I'd better learn to read myself. So I started teaching myself to read. I have a memory of a moment when I was four, visiting an eight-year-old girl named Brucia. We were standing together, looking out a window in New York City, that gave us a view of rooftops below us that were filled with billboards. I asked Brucia, wistfully, "Can you read everything you see?" She assured me she could. My thought, which I never shared was, "If only, if only, I could read everything I saw." It seemed like an impossible dream. But I was motivated and I achieved that goal early in life.

I became a fluent independent reader. I found reading was so effortless that I felt as if I inhaled stories with no awareness of the process of reading. When I was eight, I was in class immersed in a story about a dog carrying messages in a war. He was wounded but still running. I could feel his pain and promptly passed out cold, face down in my book. That year my father, who still enjoyed reading to me, began sharing The Secret Garden.  I so identified with Mary, that I became terrified of what would happen to her if she were discovered trespassing in the secret, locked garden and I made him stop reading the book to me. When I was ten, I decided I had to face my fears and read the book myself. So The Secret Garden represented a milestone in my personal development. Many years later, as an adult and a children's book author, a newly illustrated copy of The Secret Garden arrived at my door. I had just returned from a trip to Yorkshire and reread the book in one sitting. It amazed me that Frances Hodgson Burnett had included a Yorkshire dialect in the speech of some of the characters. Some would think a strange dialect would be a stumbling block to an American child. But I have absolutely no recollection of that. Clearly it didn't stop me from meaning-making of the story because I read the book so many times as a child. When a new world is opened to a child through a book, she doesn't need to understand every word. There were some people who felt that American children wouldn't have a problem with the British version of Harry Potter.

February 1, is World Read Aloud Day.  All over the world adults and children will be sharing books by reading them aloud. They are adding the human voice to the voices of authors. The best children's authors know how to "speak child." This doesn't mean that they water down the language. Indeed it is just the opposite-- they use carefully crafted, rich language. When we authors of iNK Think Tank write our Nonfiction Minutes, we create an audio file so you can hear our real voices reading our work aloud. That way their fascinating content is available to children who are challenged by reading, including children for whom English is a second language.

February 1 is also the beginning of Black History Month. So you can listen to Emmy award-winning author,  Janus Adams read aloud her Nonfiction Minute, "Why is February Black History Month?"  Just click on the player. We are also including her reading and a couple of others in the brand new iNK Nonfiction Minute Podcast. So you have a choice; you can read along with Janus on the Nonfiction Minute or you can download our first Podcast from the iTunes Store. Both are free for your enjoyment.

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Excellence for Kids: Free and Online

Get'em to Read Widely, Help 'em to Read Deeply

Are You Interested in Working with Us?

Compelling Nonfiction for Kids: This Title Has a Double Meaning

Reading Aloud to Children

Vicki Cobb

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Excellence for Kids: Free and Online

Get'em to Read Widely, Help 'em to Read Deeply

Are You Interested in Working with Us?

Compelling Nonfiction for Kids: This Title Has a Double Meaning

Reading Aloud to Children

Vicki Cobb

​​​​Archives

​Categories

Links

Company

Contact

Archives

Categories