A Community Book Collaboration Reeker, Bob
School Arts,
11/2022, Volume:
122, Issue:
3
Journal Article, Trade Publication Article
In Lincoln NE, they are fortunate to have a nonprofit grassroots organization called Teach a Kid to Fish (TKF); whose mission is to empower Lincoln families to get outside, eat healthy, and be ...active. TKF's executive director, Dr. Karla Lester, has three children who attended the elementary school where Reeker teaches. She, along with TKF employee and children's book author Rick Helweg, came to him and his principal to discuss having a book illustrated by their young students. The six books planned for Helweg's series focus on the characters of young Mookie, his sister Syd, and their dog Joe. The trio explores many ways to be healthy, including food choices, drinking water, and sleep behavior. Through a collaborative discussion, they assembled a group of students to complete illustrations for the first book, Mookie's Mission E! for Energy.
This study aims to examine whether a maths-unrelated reading intervention can improve children's mathematical performance and to compare the effects of maths-related and maths-unrelated reading ...interventions. Furthermore, this study examines whether the effects of reading interventions are moderated by individual differences, including gender, pre-test maths performance and general cognitive ability. One hundred thirty-four second-grade Chinese children were recruited into three different groups. In the control group, the children received business as usual teaching, while in the two experimental groups, the children received a maths-related or maths-unrelated reading intervention. The results showed that the maths-unrelated reading intervention could significantly improve children's mathematical performance, and the beneficial effect did not differ from the maths-related intervention. Moreover, the effects of the two reading interventions were not moderated by children's individual differences. These findings support the function hypothesis of language for mathematics.
Teachers’ sharing of picture books is a quintessential activity in early childhood classrooms, and has been found to be predictive of children’s language and literacy skill development. Although most ...research, to date, has focused on the manner in which preschool teachers share text-based books with their students, recent work has recommended that teachers include wordless books as part of their classroom book sharing routines. Yet, little is known about how the absence of text might influence teachers’ discourse styles. The present study, thus, explored the discourse styles used by preschool teachers of Latino dual-language learners when sharing both text-based and wordless picture books with their class. Results showed that, while there were common features across both book types, when sharing wordless books teachers tended to adopt a more co-constructive style, by asking questions and supporting children’s participation in the sharing of the story. At the same time, they were more likely to elicit predictions and analyses from the children. The findings highlight the importance of including wordless books in preschool classroom book sharing interactions, especially in classrooms serving dual-language learners.
Children's early understanding of mathematics provides a foundation for later success in school. Identifying ways to enhance mathematical instruction is crucial to understanding the ideal ways to ...promote academic success. Previous work has identified mathematical language (i.e., the words and concepts related to early mathematical development such as more, same, or similar) as a key mechanism that can be targeted to improve children's development of early numeracy skills (e.g., counting, cardinality, and addition). Current recommendations suggest a combination of numeracy instruction and quantitative language instruction to promote numeracy skills. However, there is limited direct support of this recommendation. The goal of the proposed study is to compare the unique and combined effects of each type of instruction on children's numeracy skills in the context of picture book reading. We randomly assigned 234 children (ages 3-5) to one of four conditions where they worked with trained project staff who read picture books targeting: (a) quantitative language only (e.g., more or less), (b) numeracy only (e.g., cardinality, addition), (c) combined quantitative language + numeracy, or (d) nonnumerical (active control) picture books. Results revealed no significant effects of the quantitative language only or numeracy only conditions, but mixed effects of the combined condition. These findings indicate that more work is needed on how mathematical language and numeracy instruction should best be delivered to preschool children.
Educational Impact and Implications StatementSignificant research has highlighted the importance of quantitative language in children's early mathematics development. The findings from this study raise questions as to how to best implement such interventions. Namely, in contrast to prior work, the current interventions targeting one of the two domains did not exhibit positive results. However, mixed effects were found for the condition that combined both domains. Future work on how to best structure combined instruction is needed.
The children’s experience of reading is enhanced by visual displays, and through picture book experiences, young children expose themselves to develop socially, personally, intellectually, and ...culturally. While a sighted person’s mental imagining is constructed mostly through visual experiences, a visually impaired person’s mental images are a product of haptic, taste, smell, and sounds. In this paper, we are introducing a picture book with multi-sensory interactions for the visually impaired children. The key novelty in our concept is the integration of multi-sensory interactions (touch, sound, and smell) to create a new reading experience for visually impaired. Also, this concept is highlighting the lack of appropriately designed sensory reading experiences for visually impaired children. We have conducted a user study with 10 educators, and 25 children from a special school for visually impaired in Malaysia, and our evaluation revealed that this book is engaging and a novel experience of multi-sensory interactions to both children and educators.
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