Category: Empowerment For Children

A Reading-Maker Book Festival

7/10/2019

Here I am, for the seventh time, at the annual Chappaqua Children's Book Festival. I'm holding a poster for my two newest books in a series called STEM Play. They are literately "hot-off-the-press" and this was my first view of the finished books. What a thrill! Chappaqua, in Westchester County, NY, is a town that values education and reading and attracts the same kind of crowd at their Festival. Last year we had 7,000 visitors, but there were more this year and it was a joy to meet so many families with the interest and money to invest in their children's education.

The public schools here are excellent and the students take the standardized tests. Even so it creates anxiety for good readers. At the end of the Festival, Alexandra Siy and I presented a program on "Slaying the Standardized Testing Dragon." We made a bookmark with the help of our pal Jan Adkins. And we prepared a handout with a strategy for creating life-long learners who love to read books. I'm hoping that you find this useful.

iNK Think Tank’s Strategy or “Secret Sauce”

*Go to www.nonfictionminute.org
*Scroll down the “Categories” on the right to find a topic that interests you.
*Choose a Nonfiction Minute to read. If you are not a strong reader, click on the arrow on the player when it is blue and listen to the author read his/her Minute aloud.
*Plan to keep reading Nonfiction Minutes on a regular basis.
*Click on the T2T icon to see what the Minutes can teach you.
*Make a list of the subjects you have to learn at school.
*Go to iNK Database and register. Use the database to search for lists of books on the subjects you have to learn about in school. http://inkthinktank.org/search/register.cfm
*Go to the library and take out books on those subjects. Read the first paragraph. If the book doesn’t grab you, don’t read it. Pick another.
*Only read books you like to read even if they seem hard at first.
TO BECOME A READER, YOU MUST READ WIDELY (NONFICTION MINUTES) AND DEEPLY (BOOKS ON SUBJECTS THAT INTEREST YOU).

Reading is the most intimate way to connect your mind to another person’s mind. In time, reading will become a life-long habit that you cannot live without. The standardized test will become easy. No sweat at all!!!

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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.

Are Children Losing (or Never Acquiring) Social Skills?

1/11/2018

Source: pixabay.com

Over the past ten years I have experienced worrisome interactions with teachers and students. Last summer, when at a conference, a fourth grader was explaining a school project to me. I had to request that she make eye contact with me when she was talking to me. After the request she managed to do so but there were intermittent drifts of glances to some place over my shoulder.

The other day I had a video conference with some college-bound high-school seniors. I gave them a number of links to read and asked that they formulate questions for me prior to our meeting. Only one student had a prepared question and when I asked them questions I was greeted with silence. Not one hand was raised.

In a coaching session with young teachers on how to teach the solar system I asked them, “How do we know about the solar system?” They looked at me with blank fear and then at each other. I could easily imagine them frantically thinking “what’s the right answer?” I didn’t want to embarrass them, so I said, “We look at the sky” and followed up with, “and what do we see in the sky?” “Clouds?” one teacher tentatively responded. Since we were discussing the solar system, I could only surmise that she was not following the conversation. I could go on and on with my interactions where any question I asked generated panic that interfered with truly hearing my questions. I wasn’t testing them. I was trying to engage them in a conversation where I wasn’t doing most of the talking. But it wasn't working.

I’m self-reflective. I worry about my own inability to engage. Then I talk to my teacher friends in affluent school districts who tell me that kids only care about getting good grades. They demand instruction on only what they need to do to score well on tests. There is little or no enthusiasm for learning or content. When given choices, students respond by asking the teacher to choose for them. They fear making an incorrect choice as simple as one between colored pencils and markers for an art project. And their parents have become helicopters on steroids, protecting their children from any form of failure by intimidating teachers. Teachers are told not to put anything that suggests improvement of a student to the parents in writing. The threat of lawsuits hover over classroom interactions. I did an afterschool program through a public library designed to generate creativity. Instead the students just copied what I modeled for them. Professors at a school of education in Florida told me about their latest students, whom they called F-Cat babies—students who had experience standardized testing every year since kindergarten. They feared that these students only knew the testing environment for their own formal education thus becoming obsessed with testing, not with teaching others how to learn.

Is there evidence out there that supports my anecdotal experience? Yes! I’m giving you links. More than I ever imagined! So I've done a little curating to give you a variety of vantage points. The Common Core Standards want students to listen, speak, read and write. Instead, they are addicted to screen and are obsessed with social media. They don’t know how to have a conversation, make eye contact, even listen to stories. Here are linke to recent articles from reliable sources. I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know. But the next question is what do we do about it?

How Too Much Screen Time Affects Kids' Bodies And Brains by Alice G. Walton in Forbes

Limiting children's screen time linked to better cognition, study says by Naomi Thomas of CNN

Here’s an instructional You Tube video on how to have a conversation by taking turns speaking and listening. I found the conversation somewhat stilted but maybe it’s useful.

Back-and-forth exchanges boost children’s brain response to language by Anne Trafton- MIT News

Protecting your kids from failure isn’t helpful. Here’s how to build their resilience – The Conversation

How Parents Can Foster Autonomy and Encourage Child Development by Eva Lazar, PhD- Good Therapy

Supporting the Development of Creativity by Laurel Bongiorno –NAEYC

The importance of eye contact in young children, and how to teach it as a social skill Rainforest Learning Centre.

Have you ever noticed how infants make eye contact? Why do they lose that skill?
Talking to babies: How friendly eye contact can make infants tune in -- and mirror your brain waves by Gwen Dewar, Ph.D-Parenting Science

Why is storytelling important to children? -BBC

Chelsea Clinton: A Real Children's Book Author

6/10/2018

Children's librarians have often told me that they resent having to spend some of their precious new-book budget on celebrity books. Frankly, they find that these books have a very short shelf life. Those of us who have made a career of writing for children are skeptical of children's books written by amateurs, especially when they are famous and their name will earn their publishers much needed revenue. But we do understand why they do it. I review only nonfiction books I like from the point of view of their value to the reader. Chelsea Clinton's Start Now! You Can Make a Difference has a lot going for it.

The premise is empowering. Children know their vulnerabilities. They wonder how they will ever learn to cope with the adult world. Many of them are aware of problems and feel that they are not competent enough or old enough to take action and effect change. Clinton shows them how. Every chapter ends with check lists that are resources for young readers to address issues and problems that are now obvious to everyone.
Chelsea Clinton has done her homework. She defines 5 serious problems with a well-researched chapter on each: clean water, conservation and endangered species, health, nutrition and hunger, and bullying. Her work is accurate and has obviously been vetted.
The information is embellished with interesting anecdotes. She writes of seven-year-old Isiah, who lived in Virginia, and started a campaign to raise money for hand sanitizers for the children of Flint Michigan; of Haile, who learned how to make nutritious foods for her diabetic father and created You-Tube videos to share what she learned; of Christian, who helped spread the idea of a "buddy bench" where a classmate who suffered from bullying could sit and someone would soon join him/her. There are also brief historic stories, including the cure for scurvy, the discovery of vaccines, and more. Such stories are engaging, concrete evidence for children.
The writing has "voice." Clinton's tone is accessible and informal. She is not preachy; she includes humor often, and occasionally refers to herself by using the personal pronoun "I." She assumes little or no prior knowledge of issues and concepts on the part of the reader without sounding patronizing. She has skillfully woven big ideas to individual actions.

In Start Now: You Can Make a Difference, Chelsea Clinton has introduced a very broad scope of issues and concepts with many particulars of how a child can make a difference. This is no easy task. Her voice is a welcome addition to the world of upcoming children's nonfiction authors.

A Reading-Maker Book Festival

Reading Aloud to Children

Are Children Losing (or Never Acquiring) Social Skills?

Chelsea Clinton: A Real Children's Book Author

Vicki Cobb

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A Reading-Maker Book Festival

Reading Aloud to Children

Are Children Losing (or Never Acquiring) Social Skills?

Chelsea Clinton: A Real Children's Book Author

Vicki Cobb

​Archives

Categories

Links

Company

Contact

Archives