Methods of Reading – It’s All About the Child

Written by admin on August 5, 2011 — Leave a Comment
Further to the discussion on reading methods, I’ve found this answer from Paula Bright very refreshing. From my own experience teaching technical skills, mainly one on one with adults, I find this approach works best too. Whilst a student who learns easily can be taught by any method and will still succeed, a struggling student is the challenge, and, in my own experience and field, a the ultimate challenge of a good teacher is to adapt to meet the child’s needs so the learning outcomes are achieved in the shortest time. This also leaves me wondering as to what levels and higher capabilities all children could achieve if they all received this type of training. Of course this may not be possible in the main stream school systems, however, like the continual drive for zero accident rates in my (aviation)  profession, we can all, as parents, teachers, and writers, and facilitators, play our part in working towards this ideal.

 

This is what Paula has to say about learning to read:

 
I’ve found that anyone saying that one thing works and another doesn’t hasn’t met the kids who are truly lost and struggling to find meaning. Or if they have, they didn’t know it.

• I’ve used images in letters to help some succeed.

• I’ve used motion and action (kinesthetic) to help. Dancing, arm motions, bending into shapes, creating body words with other children.

• I’ve used finger signals to conquer it.

• I’ve used drawing to overcome difficulties.

• I’ve used music to make the difference for some children.

• I’ve used a typing program that teaches reading at the same time to beat the failure, causing the brain to relate to the fingers, to the sound. This is one of the MOST amazing to me! I advocate this program with all my heart. It works so QUICKLY!

• I’ve used discussion and finding what the child doesn’t “get” to solve the problem. Not everything is as difficult as we sometimes assume. :)

• There are many other ways. My students now are all non-readers, kids who fall through the cracks, kids who can’t keep up with peers, and kids with a huge variety of other reading issues. I teach them online.

My point? To advise ONE method for struggling readers is never the best solution. Learn them all. Use them all. Something will click, and there’s not always a way to know in advance which that will be.

I know that not every teacher can do this. We all have lives.

As a classroom teacher, I spent a lot of time at night preparing things for the non-readers and poor readers.

Now, because I was injured and partially blinded, I was lucky enough to invent my own online reading studio! I’m in heaven. I work from home, as I must, and yet am still teaching. Happiness!

I was a classroom teacher, and I know the difficulties. Yet to proclaim that one knows “the” way to address issues? It’s ignoring the fact of the extremely wide variations between kids and learning styles.

People assume so much when they believe fervently in something. I never, ever had a class where EVERY child could learn from phonics, or where EVERY child could learn from whole language and all that accompanies it. They’re both vital, and both play a role in creating a well-rounded reader.

I do not mean to offend with this post! I hope you’ll take it in the spirit it is meant: The more a teacher knows, the more children will succeed and triumph.

If a teacher is married to his or her beliefs, they will lose some kids along the way.

I hope I can find more teachers like Paula in my children’s schools, and as a parent I’m glad to have learnt a little more about reading approaches from her.

More of Paula’s reading resources can be found at http://yourchildwillread.com and http://www.facebook.com/yourchildwillread.

 

Posted in Free Kids Books News

Methods of Teaching Reading Skills

Written by admin on July 17, 2011 — Leave a Comment

My daughter is now approaching learning to read age, and it’s an exciting time for me.

After posting a query about learning letters at  LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/groups/What-do-people-think-about-1483117.S.52638577?qid=fa002577-a7f3-40a8-a076-db5d80cde5b2&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmp_1483117, and also http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Id-love-discuss-lifelong-reader-1483117.S.57821186?qid=fa002577-a7f3-40a8-a076-db5d80cde5b2&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmp_1483117

Through this, I’ve been involved in some great discussion that opened up some really interesting ideas. This also led to the discovery there is a huge debate about the different methods of learning to read.

As a result, I’ve just added a link to http://www.phonicsinternational.com/, and a sample file from their website, which explains complex sounds, many of which I’d completely forgotten about.  And to http://www.rrf.org.uk/resources.html where there are some really great resources there, which explain more about phonics than I ever remember learning. These resources are really great for parents and children’s writers to become familiar with.

I’ve also done some more research into the whole word method, and Glen Doman – who’s foundation promotes starting whole word recognition as a baby. The important thing I’ve learnt, primarily from his adversaries is, it may or may not work, but as long as it’s fun for you and the child (which is a primary aim of the method), and is backed up later by a solid phonics program, it can do no harm. You will know as a parent whether it works or not. And backing up with phonics is also an element of the reading method posted previously, as far as I understand.

I personally feel the words may work much better with very young readers who don’ understand the abstract concept of letters, but have the ability to recognise a pattern, but I also think that regardless of initial method, readers need to learn the letters and the sounds, i.e phonics.

I also think as a parent, you can work on a special method of combining what works for your child with fundamentals, to support the education they’re receiving. A situation that only works for one on one training, where what the enjoy most and learn most from can be used more often.

But regardless of what you do, any help you provide is not only quality sharing time, it has to be better than leaving them at the mercy of an underfunded and overcrowded education system.

Anyway, this approach has seemed to work for us so far, and also led to a new idea for an alphabet series, The Happyface Alphabet….my daughter has given it the big thumbs up, which to me is the most important thing, and also feedback so far very positive, so watch this space!

Posted in Free Kids Books News

Reading by Whole Word Recognition

Written by admin on June 14, 2011 — Leave a Comment

I asked a query recently on a literacy forum about letter recognition, as my understanding was it is the first step to reading. This lead to a whole lot of new discoveries. One is the ‘whole word recognition’ concept.

Helena Rogers, and expert in this method, provides resources on her site, www.reading revival.com, here’s what she has to say about the method.

“When I started  teaching in the 1960s, the method of choice to teach children to read was through ‘whole words.’  There were lots of reading schemes with this approach to choose from in those days and I might add that reading levels were so high that people from all over the world sent their children here to be educated. (I think they are more likely to send them to Korea now!)  We expected a child to be able to read within their first term at school and to be fluent within a year. The only children leaving Primary School unable to read were ‘Special Needs’ children who went on to special schools for specialist help.

I have been using this method of teaching reading ever since and when all the ‘whole word’ reading schemes died out, I developed my own – but I improved on all those original schemes, ironing out any problems,  so that my scheme now works very efficiently with all children – even those with special needs.  It is now available to anyone via our web site: www.readingrevival.com .  My aim is that we get back to the days when all children could read within a term of entering school – and it can be done with Reading Revival.”

Further reading on the topic led me to discover Glen Doman and his work, who I believe popularised the concept to main stream in the 60′s, supporting what Helena says above, after developing the methods from studies into assisting brain injured children. More on this soon.

However in the mean time, from what I’ve read and seen, although the technique initially surprised me,  proof is in the results, and in this I have to support Helena and her initiatives, and ask -why are children now leaving the education system with inadequate reading and writing skills? And what can we as parents do to help our children?

I think Helen’s tools are a great way to start, and a small investment for a right to reading competency.

It would be great to hear from anyone out there with personal experience in this method.

 

 

Posted in Free Kids Books News

Reading Methods for Children

Written by admin on June 14, 2011 — Leave a Comment

I’ve been delving into literacy resources, as my daughter approaches ‘traditional’ reading ready age, and found a few really interesting concepts out there.

Here’s a summary of a couple of the sites I found interesting:

http://icanreadsongs.org – Learning using songs as an anchor.

http://www.newparadigmreading.com – Letter recognition using kinetics (hand signals that match the sound, for example – saying the sound “mmmm” while rubbimg tummy for learning ‘m’. The program includes games and music. Looks very interesting.

http://www.readingrevival.com – Teaching by word recognition prior to letter recognition, I’ve stumbled onto some research on this, so more about it in another blog shortly.

I say ‘traditional’ reading ready, as I figured she’s ready since she can recognise complex shapes, pays attention and understands the that the squiggle next to the apple is a letter, but really research I’ve seen says they were capable of this a lot earlier than we think.

This site is aimed both at supplying fun and quality reading resources, and promoting literacy, so on the second note, more soon on the learning to read.

 

 

 

Posted in Free Children's Resources

Learning Island

Written by admin on May 15, 2011 — Leave a Comment

Here’s another new website I’ve found –

http://www.learningisland.org/

They have a large range of mostly educational books which are free to print both private and school use. It looks like a wonderful resource of reading material.
I’ll add them to my links list, which I will also transfer to the links bar now that it is working properly soon.

Posted in Free Kids Books News

A Useful ClipArt website

Written by admin on May 11, 2011 — Leave a Comment

I’m often looking for free clipart for the literacy files and worksheets.

I recently found the following website really useful:

Clip art

First as it’s got some great free clipart images, second as they are free, with none of the irritating sales site stuff you often find attached to these type of sites. Their terms of service are 10 items per project, and a link back to the site.

Some of the latest images in our alphabet and number card worksheet courtesy of www.DailyClipArt.net

Posted in Free Kids Books News | Tagged

New Files Tab

Written by admin on February 20, 2011 — Leave a Comment

I’ve just put up a new tab called ‘files’, this is for sharing resources for kids related to reading and literacy that are not books. There are two files there each in pdf and odf to start off.
The first one is an alphabet study booklet, which can be modified to suit your child’s interests (eg my daughter loves cows, so there’s a C for Cow, but you can change the clip art for example to a picture of C for Cornelia if that’s you’re childs name, or a M for Mom with a picture of you etc).
The second file contains printable writing worksheets for all the letters and numbers to help with learning to write, also in odf in case your computer does not like the embedded pdf font (this can happen!).

Posted in Free Kids Books News | Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Why Free? – How Giving Away Your Books Helps Sales

Written by admin on February 2, 2011 — Leave a Comment

“The biggest threat to a writers livelihood is not piracy but obscurity!”

This quote, attributed to Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media -an advocate of open source and free digital rights, has been echoed by a number of great authors, creators, and publishers, and summarises the main concept behind free, that is, it’s publicity you just cannot buy.

Seth Godin provides another favourite quote of mine: “Distribute something digitally for free, if it’s good, it will spread, and if it does spread that publicity will give you untold opportunities for reaping financial returns.” Seth Godin states that he has built his career on this principle, and so has a whole industry of open source software professionals – many who have put just as many hours, if not more, into their work as an author would have on a book.

Supporters of the ‘free is good’ concept include best selling authors Seth Godin, Paul Coelho, M.J. Rose, and many more. Chris Anderson, editor of  Wired, and creator/author or The Long Tail, is so passionate about the economics of ‘free’, he wrote the best selling book ‘Free‘ about it.

The fact remains that making something available free has been proven to increase sales. Here’s a short excerpt from Wikipedia about Paul Coelho which best proves  this. (Note: This story has been told in a variety of ways with minor differences in the translation,  I have chosen to post the Wikipedia version since it’s most likely to contain mainly fact).

“Paulo Coelho is a strong advocate of spreading his books through file sharing networks. A fan posted a Russian translation of one of his novels online. Sales of his book jumped from 3,000 to one million in three years, with no additional promotion or publicity from his publishers.Coelho took to pirating his own books on Pirate Bay. Coelho provides free translations of many of his books. He was caught by the head of HarperCollins, Jane Friedman, who noticed that one of the unauthorized versions Coelho linked to had notes from his own manuscript.The two reached a compromise: each month a new novel can be read for free on the publisher’s website.”

Regardless of the version, the fact remains in all accounts, that with no additional promotion, Paul’s print sales picked up immediately after the book was made available for free.

“I don’t understand why publishers don’t understand that this new medium is not killing books,” Coelho says. “I’m doing it mostly because the joy of a writer is to be read. But at the end of the day, you will sell more books.”

Peter Workman, the owner of top independent publisher Workman Publishing, has stated that “For every one book you give away, you sell three.”

M. J. Rose notes ”Haven’t we had this debate before? Over and Over? Haven’t enough writers proved it not only helps introduce new readers to the writers but that it does the opposite of cannibalizing sales? We found we were selling more, not less, copies of the books we were giving away.”

Cory Doctorow gives away digital versions of his books online, and invites people to modify the format to provide more value to the free version, yet his sales on the free books have consistently outperformed his publisher’s expectations. And many downloaders demanded to leave a donation.

These examples demonstrate that ‘free’ works financially – but not only that, no one was lured by sales jargon, and ended up feeling dissatisfied with the purchase of a product that didn’t meet their expectations, returns are less -and it feels good too!

But, there are still people out there that believe free is bad. Why?

Asides from the fear of sales being affected, personally I feel people are still sold on the 1950s concept of ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’, that is everything you give/receive must be paid for/worked hard for, if it’s not there must be some trick or trap. Well, it’s not the 1950s any more, and with the consumer driven mass market of the internet, where small companies and individuals can skim a few cents of each transaction, making millions on seemingly nothing, more people choose to ‘pay it forward’, giving away more to receive, and, since it’s a win win for everyone in the direct market loop, the economy is supporting them. (You don’t believe me, anyone reading this using google, firefox or facebook right now?)

My main reason for giving my books away free is the same as Paul’s – that is, I like getting my books out there and read for the fun of reading, but I also subscribe to Seth’s theory, that is I want to let the public decide, I don’t want to push a bad product, and if it’s good it will spread and reap rewards.

I’m convinced it’s the right financial model for me – it’s been proven to work, and and it abides by the universal natural laws- give to receive.

Try it!

And remember,

GOOD things in life are FREE!

 

This post was written by Danielle Bruckert,  author of Gecko on the Wall, and the Mac and Dipper series, and Creator of Free Kids Books.


Posted in Free Kids Books News

Free Kids Books Downloads

Written by admin on December 24, 2010 — 1 Comment

We’ve reached just over 10,000 downloads!

Just wanted to share with everyone out there, as I think this is really great for a start, since the site has been running around 6 months, and still in the development phase for much of that. I hope you’ll join me here to give Free Kids Books a pat on the back, as pheeewwww… it seemed like a lot of work!

I am continuing to search for more good quality picture books to add to the content here, all things in time!

Posted in Free Kids Books News

Links to Children’s Books and Resources: A Summary of Online Sites

Written by admin on November 18, 2010 — 1 Comment

The following is a list of free books, free book sites, and a variety of other children’s resources we think are useful.

As it is becoming more and more difficult to sift through the oceans of information on the internet to find the good parts, I have attempted to list sites in order of quality (amount and type of content and usability), from our perspective.The ones at the top of the list in each category are the ones we found most useful.

Books that can be Downloaded

http://www.getfreeebooks.com/?cat=21 – Get Free Books children’s books category, including a large number of downloads in various forms, mostly pdf, many collected from other free to list sites – Smashwords and Manybooks (as detailed in their submission requirements).

http://www.learningisland.org/ This site has a large range of books categorised for Grades 1 to 5. Primarily aimed at assisting with learning goals there are many interesting non-fiction titles. The books are free to use in their printed form for both private and school use.

http://www.allbooksfree.com/childrens.htm The children’s category of All Books Free, a collection of free e-books via links to the download on the books’ website.

http://manybooks.net/categories/CHI – The children’s books category at the Many Books site. It mainly contains public domain classics from the Gutenburg project and similar sites. There are lots of other free books there too, they have a slightly more user friendly interface than Gutenburg, and reportedly accept author submissions for free books.

http://www.smashwords.com/books/category/61/newest/0/free/any Smashword’s free children’s books collection, Smashwords is a free to list e-selfpublishing site with a variety of books, free and paid.

http://www.bibliotastic.com/genres/8 This site has a variety of original books, easily downloaded in different formats with editor and reader ratings to help choices. The link takes you directly to the  juvenile category (children), there are only a few there at the moment, but the site is still young and numbers of books are steadily growing. The site is primarily aimed at exposure for new and establishing authors, there are some great reads there.

http://www.lulu.com/browse/books/children/7/LULU00004/?cid=us_home_browse A self publishing  site with a variety of free books, many of which are available for free download, this link takes you to the children’s category, where you can use the site search.

http://www.weread.org/kids/download.asp A small collection of children’s books and resources, available for download, or as online reading, also available with audio, unfortunately some links appear broken at the time of writing.

http://ebooksubmit.ebook88.com/1ilraryy/?c=3 – Ebooks88 free children’s books category, a variety of children’s e-books in various electronic formats, again unfortunately many links appear broken at the time of writing.

http://www.kidstory.org/index.html A collection of downloadable chapter books for children by Nick Creech

http://www.tikiri.com/e-kathandara.html A large number of books by respected Sri Lankan author Janaki Sooriyarachchi available for free download, in English and Sinhala.

http://www.kidsbooksfree.com This site has a large number of books by Mark Griffin, all available as pdf downloads, primarily centred around characters called ‘The Little Squirts’ and similar creations.

http://www.seriousstories.com A collection of stories by Michael J Oswald, containing real life lessons, in online and pdf version for free download, with a link to the hard copy buy pages.

http://www.kidsenglishbooks.com Collection of simple children’s books for download, read online and audio.

Online Books

http://www.childrenslibrary.org An large selection of children’s books, with a user friendly interfaces, a variety of sorts, and easy search. Available for reading on line only.

http://www.magickeys.com/books/ – A nice collection of free children’s stories and links, in online versions only. The site appears to be inactive.

http://istorybooks.getacustomsite.com/home.html A collection of well presented childrens books to read online, including some very nice non-fiction books about sea creatures, trucks, and dinosaurs. Some are available for free download in mobile apps.

http://www.sundhagen.com/babbooks/ – A nice collection of free children’s stories, in online versions only. They have some nice links – see further down the page.

http://www.astrop.net – A large collection of good quality books written by John Astrop.

http://www.rodcockle.com A large collection of children’s stories written by Rod Cockle

http://www.meddybemps.com A collection of stories games and activities around the Meddybemps series, inspiring creativity and learning.

http://www.bedtime-story.com/ A large collection of stories for online reading in text with some pictures.

http://www.storytimeforme.com: A collection of free animated read-online books.

http://www.storiestogrowby.com/stories – A collection of farytales and fables from all around the world, in text only, where children can add illustrations. Nice for cross-cultural exposure and some nice writing and drawing activities for older children.

http://hardgrove.freeservers.com/echo01.html The Echo and the Pixie, a cute story about friendship and bullies, sadly we can’t locate the author or we would try to find out if we can post the story at the site.

http://thesmugglerscaves.blogspot.com/ and http://theghostlygirl.blogspot.com/ are two young adult fiction books by Fiona Cullen-Skowronski, set in the Hastings caves, a tourist attraction in the UK, and available to read for free, by chapter in chronological order.

Note on free book sites: Most of the free book sites are either not displaying books in the format that we accept (pdf), are not in a fully formatted book form, we have not established contact with the authors, or from our perspective the quality was not acceptable, which means they don’t qualify for inclusion in our site, but there are still some great books and stories people can enjoy.

RESOURCES and BLOGS

http://www.fastq.com/~jbpratt/education/mypages/free.html Free teaching resources for teachers and parents, from Pratt’s Educational Resources website

http://www.coloringpages24.com An extensive collection of colouring pages (thousands of pages) for printing or, for older children to colour online, and some cute online puzzles and learning games for children.

http://www.lil-fingers.com Lil’ Fingers is a storybook site for toddlers with educational games, animated online storybooks with audio, coloring pages and lots of useful links.

http://imaginationsoup.net/ This is a parenting blog, but there are some really great ideas and resources there and some well written articles.

http://www.toddlercraft.net A blog site with lots of great resources and crafts for toddlers, great for parents and teachers.

http://inklesstales.com/forgrownups/archives/category/crafts A page containing several great craft ideas in blog post format, with easy to understand instructions. There are also many links to other parenting resources.

http://giraffian.com An educational website for children and parents with lots of resources, laid out in a visually pleasing user friendly way.

http://www.wigglyword.com/ A blog with some useful reviews of children’s books and some good resources for children’s book authors.

http://mybabymonsters.com/ A cute site where children can build their own stories. Also some really great fun and edcational classic online games.

http://www.yourbedtimestory.com A site with online text stories which can be customised instantly for your child, great for an older child that can read, and books have some associated colouring book images.

http://first-school.ws/ An educational resource site for parents and teachers with lots of useful suggestions for educational games, exercises and crafts.

www.wisdomebooks.com A free ebooks site with links to some educational books.

Public Domain

A large collection of public domain children’s books are available at www.gutenberg.org, in a variety of formats.

http://www.childrensbooksonline.org This site has a really large collection of antique children’s books, helpfully categorised by reading level. On initial investigation they appear to be mainly public domain books. The books are also in jpg format for page by page viewing.

Lists of Links for Kids /Parenting and Teacher Resources from others blogs:

http://www.educationcu.com/teacher_resources.shtml A list of teacher and parenting resources from credit union.

http://www.sundhagen.com/babbooks/links.html A collection of links to children’s books, resources for children, and children’s websites.

http://beginningreadinghelp.blogspot.com/p/reading-resources-to-share.html  A Collection of learning to read resource sites.

http://beginningreadinghelp.blogspot.com/p/links-to-online-stories.html A large collection of links to online storiesand online story websites.

Other Kids Resources Sites:

The following are not free resources – but sites we thought they are good value:

http://www.allaboutmepublishing.com A site that has a variety of children’s books and gifts which are relatively cheap and customised with your child’s name/picture/details in the product. It is amazing what print on demand technology can do, I sure this is a novel gift for a child, which may stand out among all the other books he/she has.

http://www.storyresources.com A Site with some fun magnetic stick on activity books, aimed at early learning,  for toddlers-preschool children.

I’ll keep adding to this list as I find time to research the links and find more good quality resources. Any reader suggestions welcomed.

Posted in Free Children's Resources | Tagged , ,
« Older Entries Newer Entries »

RSS Syndication

  • Books by Movie

  • Children's Book Review

  • Children's Books for Sale

  • Foreign Language Children's Books

  • Free Children's Activities

  • Free Children's Books Download Links

  • Free Children's Books Online

  • Literacy Charities

  • Literacy Resources

  • Publishing Sites and Author Resources

  • Red Sky Ventures

    • © 2010 Free Kids Books Blog