Category: Literacy

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!!!

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.

A Reading-Maker Book Festival

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

Vicki Cobb

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A Reading-Maker Book Festival

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

Vicki Cobb

​Archives

Categories

Links

Company

Contact

Archives