Better Reading: Children's Educational Magazines in English, French and Spanish

Educational Magazines in English, French and Spanish for Children From 3 - 6 years, 6 - 9 years and 9 -12 years

Reading Can Be Fun!

"It’s vital that children’s reading development is supported at home." says Simona Sideri, Editor in chief. 

"Our magazines are designed with beautiful illustrations, stunning photographs and a variety of writing styles for children to learn and have fun!"

Click on the picture to view some Story Box contents

Click on the picture to view some Adventure Box contents

Click on the picture to view some Discovery Box contents

If you are a parent or a teacher who wants to make further enquiries about any of the magazines shown, you can visit the website here or if you live in the Netherlands you can contact Isabelle Lopez by email.

Isabelle is a charming and professional representative, speaking French and English, she addresses the needs of the International community in Netherlands via the schools and parent groups.

Phonics, Whole-word And Whole-language Processes = Reading Speed

Reading specialists have often pitted phonics against holistic word recognition and whole language approaches in the war over how to teach children to read.

However, a new study by researchers at New York University shows that the three reading processes do not conflict, but, rather, work together to determine speed.

The NYU study, by professor of psychology and neural science Denis Pelli and research scientist Katharine Tillman, measured the reading rates of 11 adult readers. It examined how three reading processes contribute to reading speed:

1) phonics, in which words are decoded letter by letter;

2) holistic word recognition, in which words are recognized by their shape; and

3) whole language, in which words are recognized by the context of the sentences.

Readers in the study read passages from a Mary Higgins Clark novel. The text was manipulated to selectively knock out each process in turn while retaining the others.

Whole word shape was removed by alternating case: "sHe LoOkEd OvEr hEr ShOuLdEr." To knock out the whole language process, the order of the words was shuffled. To knock out phonics, some of the letters were replaced with others.

Pelli and Tillman's results show that letter-by-letter decoding, or phonics, is the dominant reading process, accounting for 62 percent of reading speed.

However, both holistic word recognition (16 percent) and whole-language processes (22 percent) do contribute substantially to reading speed.

Remarkably, the results show that the contributions of these three processes to reading speed are additive. The contribution of each process to reading speed is the same whether the other processes are working or not.

"The contributions made by phonics, holistic word recognition, and whole-language processes are not redundant," explained Pelli.

"These three processes are not working on the same words and, in fact, make contributions to reading speed exclusive of one another."

Dyslexic Specialist Corinna Shepherd Launches Her First Children's Book

My Dog Nick is the first of a new series of creative and interactive learning books aimed at inspiring young children with dyslexia to read and write.

Dyslexia, the hidden disability, affects at least 10% of the population, 4% severely. This equates to 6 million people in the UK, at least 1.2 million of them school children.

The author and creator of the Dancing Kites Creative Learning brand, Corinna Shepherd, has been assessing and working with dyslexic children and adults for several years. She was prompted to create Dancing Kites and to write My Dog Nick because, whilst many books currently exist that relate to the problem of dyslexia, it was evident that very few had been written to address the actual problem of helping children engage with and decode the written word, particularly as it affects young children.

Corinna’s response was to set up her own company, Dancing Kites Creative Learning, in order to create unique interactive learning programmes to identify and correct problems with dyslexia and other learning difficulties, in children particularly. My Dog Nick is the first in Step 1 of a series of books to be published.

Importantly, the Dancing Kites Creative Learning books are the only books available based on spelling ages, rather than reading ages, and designed to appeal to a broad age range. By concentrating on the child’s spelling age, problems related to dyslexia and other learning difficulties may be detected and corrected earlier and more effectively.

Corinna says “The books are designed to support and supplement school work. You do not need extra resources to help with the activities – a pen or pencil and a sense of humour are all that is required to help the child complete the activities! They have been developed to be used by specialists, classroom teachers, learning support staff, as well as by parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and carers at home – in fact anyone who wants to help children engage with the written word.”

Dancing Kites Creative Learning Books are structured in three Steps or levels that correlate to the nationally recognised and used Alpha to Omega scheme with its stages 1 to 3 in terms of language progression and spelling age bands. They are designed to appeal to the 5-15 age range.

The books can be purchased for £7.99 from the Dancing Kites website http://www.dancingkites.co.uk/ or from Amazon and all good booksellers ISBN 978-1-907706-00-4.

About Corinna Shepherd
Corinna Shepherd has worked with children and adults, who struggle with dyslexia, for several years. She has set up three Indirect Dyslexia Learning (IDL) Centres in Buckinghamshire, where she offers assessments and remedial help with reading and spelling. Corinna set up Dancing Kites Creative Learning in 2008 to make the written word accessible and fun to children with specific learning difficulties. She is passionate about helping unlock potential in people through learning and creativity.

About Dancing Kites
Dancing Kites Creative Learning books are designed to make the world of words and imagination accessible to these children by using words, illustrations and activities together in a unique and fun way to encourage and inspire children to read and write.

The content is a combination of illustrated poetry, puzzles and activities. The rhymes and rhythms of the poems help children remember what they have read and the illustrations, together with the supporting interactive activities, engage their attention and reinforce learning. Moreover, the illustrations are specifically designed to give clear visual clues to the reader about the related words. The books are designed and written so that the words and illustrations work closely together to create a memorable association and to be fun.

For more information about My Dog Nick and the other books in the series, please visit the Dancing Kites website http://www.dancingkites.co.uk/ or on LinkedIn http://uk.linkedin.com/in/corinnashepherd or contact the author, Corinna Shepherd direct at corinna@dancingkites.co.uk

Multisensory Teaching

Studies from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development have shown that for children with difficulties learning to read, a multisensory teaching method is the most effective way for these students to learn.

 

Multisensory teaching means the teacher must tap into all learning modalities – see it (visual), feel it (tactile), hear it (auditory) and move with it (kinesthetic).

 

Here are a few suggestions on how to make spelling lessons fun, creative and engaging.

• Trace words with a pencil or pen while spelling the word. Then trace with an eraser. Get up and do 5 jumping jacks. Now write the word and check for accuracy.
• Write the words by syllables in different colored markers.
• Pair up with another student and write words on each other’s back with a finger. Have the partner guess what the word is.
• While sitting on a carpet, write down each word directly onto the carpet with two fingers.
• Trace over each word at least three different times in different color crayons so that the words look like rainbows.
• Pair up with another student and take turns jumping rope while spelling the words out loud.
• Clap your hands to each letter as you spell the words out loud.
• Type each of the words in 5 different fonts, colors, and sizes.
• Bounce a ball to each letter in the word.
• Practice writing the words with neon gel pens on black paper.
• Write the words on individual chalkboards using colored chalk.
• Finger-paint the words using frosting on wax paper or paper plates.
• Spell the words using alphabet manipulatives such as magnetic letters or letter tiles.

Differences in language circuits in the brain linked to dyslexia - VUCast: Vanderbilt University's News Network

Differences in language circuits in the brain linked to dyslexia - VUCast: Vanderbilt University's News Network

Children with dyslexia often struggle with reading, writing and spelling, despite getting an appropriate education and demonstrating intellectual ability in other areas. New neurological research from Vanderbilt University has found that these children’s difficulties with written language may be linked to structural differences within an important information highway in the brain known to play a role in oral language.

The findings were published in the June 2010 issue of Cortex.

Vanderbilt researchers Sheryl Rimrodt and Laurie Cutting and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and Kennedy Krieger Institute used an emerging MRI technique, called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), to discover evidence linking dyslexia to structural differences in an important bundle of white matter in the left-hemisphere language network. White matter is made up of fibers that can be thought of as the wiring that allows communication between brain cells; the left-hemisphere language network is made up of bundles of these fibers and contains branches that extend from the back of the brain (including vision cells) to the front parts that are responsible for articulation and speech.

“When you are reading, you are essentially saying things out loud in your head,” Cutting said. “If you have decreased white matter integrity in this area, the front and back part of your brain are not talking to one another. This would affect reading, because you need both to act as a cohesive unit.”

Rimrodt and Cutting used the DTI technique to map the course of an important white matter bundle in this network and discovered that it ran through a frontal brain region known to be less well-organized in the dyslexic brain. They also found that fibers in that frontal part of the tract were oriented differently in dyslexia.

“Finding a convergence of MRI evidence that goes beyond identifying a region of the brain that differs in dyslexia to linking that to an identifiable structure and beginning to explore physical characteristics of the region is very exciting,” Rimrodt said. “It brings us a little bit closer to understanding how dyslexia happens.”

Rimrodt is assistant professor of developmental medicine. Cutting is Patricia and Rodes Hart Chair at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development and an investigator in the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development. The researchers completed the work at the Kennedy Krieger Institute with their colleagues there before moving to Vanderbilt.

The research was funded by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine General Clinical Research Center, the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Learning Disability Research Center and F.M. Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging, the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

For more information about Vanderbilt’s Peabody College, visit http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu

A pioneering new way to face up to dyslexia - Times Online

A pioneering new way to face up to dyslexia - A.A. Gill - Times Online

A.A. Gill is a professional writer and author of high repute. In this insightful article he expresses his feelings and experiences around his dawning realisation of dyslexia and how he lives with this condition. He describes himself as;

A dyslexic who writes a lot — 1,500 words, give or take, a day. And if I let the spellchecker get its bureaucratic little pince-nez within squinting distance of any of them, it would say 1,000 are spelt wrongly.

I am a grammar cripple, a functioning illiterate. Literally. I write for a living and, like blind mountaineers and limbless golfers, I am a straw to be clutched at by these quietly desperate and bravely determined people whose lives and dreams for their children have been overwhelmed by 26 characters in search of an orthodoxy.

I have taken several extracts from the article to illustrate his depth of feelings on the subject and his concern for parents and children alike. Those who suffer criticism, exclusion and isolation because of the ignorance of others.

He describes a local meeting of the dyslexia group;

The parents, mostly mothers, their faces taut with worry and incomprehension, listen intently. One or two have brought their children, who sit with their heads down, drawing, trying to be invisible. I’m with them.

The outcome of this meeting, like so many others, is disappointing from the parents' viewpoint and consequently, for the children with dyslexia.

After too long, the meeting closes. It has answered all the questions with more questions. Doors have opened to reveal corridors filled with more doors.

It has helped only to concern the concerned, whose anxieties mostly revolve around statements.

Children with learning difficulties need to be statemented — that is, given a series of tests by a professional that take a long time and are, if not arbitrary, then not altogether precise, a bit like a Cosmo quiz for the semiliterate.

They are useful, and they are craved by the parents of children who are failing.

He brings to life the growing panic and exclusion that comes from dyslexia and other learning difficulties. Although confident in his adult life, in the face of an enthusiastic teacher, he finds himself falling back into his fearful past;

I can feel myself regressing, the panic begins to constrict my chest. I can’t follow what Mr Taylor is saying. I don’t understand.

Millie (a young pupil) leans across and helps me, not as a politeness to a grown-up who’s older than her dad, but with the fellowship of the impaired; another word-blind, number-paralysed school sufferer.

It all rushes back over me: everything falling off my brain, like hearing through double glazing, the fog of incomprehension, the panic of being left behind.

I’d completely forgotten the loneliness of classrooms where it all makes sense to everyone else. I look down at the page and my handwriting belongs to a child. I get it all wrong. “Never mind,” says Millie. No, never mind.

This is the most salutary of lessons. I had utterly buried this feeling, until now: being here in this place.

His opportunity to evangelise to a young audience is full of humour and human feelings of doubt, self awareness and passionate belief. It's his passion and belief that come through in his writings.

I stood in front of this sea of blameless little faces, knowing that behind each of them there was already a room full of low esteem, full of catalogues of failure, a great weight of parental concern, and I wondered again at the horrible obstacle course we make of other people’s childhoods after we’ve f***ed up our own.

And I caught sight of Zinzan, and I felt the anger, the hot fury for the wasted, tearful, silently worried, failed years of school, and I had a Spartacus moment. I started talking, rather too loudly.

I told them this was their language, this English, this most marvellous and expressive cloak of meaning and imagination. This great, exclamatory, illuminating song, it belonged to anyone who found it in their mouths.

There was no wrong way to say it, or write it, the language couldn’t be compelled or herded, it couldn’t be tonsured or pruned, pollarded or plaited, it was as hard as oaths and as subtle as rhyme.

It couldn’t be forced or bullied or policed by academics; it wasn’t owned by those with flat accents; nobody had the right to tell them how to use it or what to say.

There are no rules and nobody speaks incorrectly, because there is no correctly: no high court of syntax.

And while everyone can speak with the language, nobody speaks for the language. Not grammars, not dictionaries. They just run along behind, picking up discarded usages. This English doesn’t belong to examiners or teachers.

All of you already own the greatest gift, the highest degree this country can bestow. It’s on the tip of your tongue.

And then I caught sight of myself, standing like a declamatory ticktack man, bellowing like a costermonger, and I stopped and stared at the faces staring at me with expressions of utter, dyslexic incomprehension.

From the back of the room, a teacher coughed.

A Personal YouTube Video: i am dyslexic

ok this has taken a lot of curage to uplod i cept puting it of however i got another comment on my aporling spelling so i thort that i need to explain, not for simpethy but for understanding and to spred the nowlage of the dificultys faced by many people who are dyslexic.

i was diagnosed as being saverly dysleixc at the age of 8 and had a re diagnose last summer that comfermed that i am still savialy dysleic, the saverity of someones dysleixa is not yust a test to see how well someone can reed or spell it is a test to mesher up someones inteligence agast a persons reading, spelling and short term memary, so if someone had aporling spelling, reeding and sort tearm memary but the IQ was above average then they are the ones with siverar dyslexia, inother words we are not thik!!! thanks for woching and spred the word dyseliax deosn't = stupidaty!!!

Katie