Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
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The Home Library Background

6/5/2020

 
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Have you noticed the background behind many pundits who are broadcasting from their homes? Some, of course, use green screens so that are speaking in front of the capitol building or a cityscape of Washington DC.  I haven't taken a tally, but it seems as if most of them are speaking in front of books on a shelf.  It is done unconsciously, since a home library is a repository security- blanket of accurate, vetted reference material that is not easily found with Google

I took a picture of part of my home library, above.   I am not a neat person, yet, years ago, I had an assistant, Ned Stuart, who took it upon himself to organize my books, which he arranged by category and assigned a permanent place on one of three walls of bookcases.  Note that the right wall shelves (not in the picture) have books written by me.  The main purpose of this incredible organization is that I can find what I'm looking for.  Mine, as it is for many educated people, is a working library.  I read a lot of fiction, but I don't have room in my working library for more than a shelf of fiction. 
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The top part of the framed directory to my three-walled home library as organized by Ned Stuart.
The books that  I return to over and over again are about science. Some books are from college and grad school. Some are books I bought as reference when researching a new project.  There are travel books, cook books, even some history books.  Below is a book from my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin.  It was the book that made me a scientist and is now spineless.  
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Some books have been added since Ned did his work but I could always find a place to squeeze them in, even if they had to be sideways. 

A few years ago I heard that new homes are being built without bookshelves. My grandchildren are doing their college work online.  I just listened to an audiobook on a subject I need to know more about.  I enjoyed it but it's still faster to scroll through a printed book to find what you noted on first read and what you didn't remember you were looking for that turns out to be a gem.  People who have home libraries undoubtedly had a home library of books as children.  Studies have shown  that:
 
  • The single most significant factor influencing a child’s early educational success is an introduction to books and being read to at home prior to beginning school. National Commission on Reading, 1985
  •  Having books in the home is twice as important as the father’s education level. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2010
  • The only behavior measure that correlates significantly with reading scores is the number of books in the home. The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions, 1998
  • An analysis of nearly 100,000 U.S. school children found that access to printed materials is the "critical variable affecting reading acquisition." JMcQuillan, J. (1998). The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions.Heinemann.
  • Children growing up in homes with at least twenty books get three years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation, and class. Evans, M. D., Kelley, J., Sikora, J., & Treiman, D. J. (2010). Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 28(2), 171-197.​
There is a lot more on the site I reference.

In this time of forced reflection, I find comfort that so many smart people with opinions on TV have their books behind them.  Their books are not for show business.  They are an organic part of who they are, thoughtful people who have learned from past generations of thoughtful people who wrote books.  

​

A Reading-Maker Book Festival

7/10/2019

 
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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.
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    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!!!

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

10/9/2019

 
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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.  

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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. 
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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.  

     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.


    Disclaimer: All opinions, typos, and grammatical errors are my own,  especially small word omissions which I often don't notice in my fervor.  

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iNK Think Tank, Inc. is a nonprofit with the mission of using nonfiction children's literature in classrooms

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