There is a Chinese saying, “To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one.” So this summer make the most of your holiday and read stories that will open up new vistas of adventure, fun, mystery and laughter.
It’s summer again, and my bookshelf is filled with all the books I wish to read during the vacation. Through the year, I collect books and then during the holidays I park myself on my favourite chair in front of my bookshelf and read!
I have picked up some rather interesting books by Indian and non-Indian authors. There is a book called The Burmese Box. It was written by Lila Majumdar in Bengali and translated into English by Subhadra Sen Gupta. Actually it is a novella with two short but rather exciting stories. One, of course, is about the Burmese Box and the other is Goopy’s Secret Diary.
I have a collection of books by Ruskin Bond. What I would read first is Escape From Java and Other Tales of Danger. It is a collection of five stories, all about danger and adventure.
Have you heard of an author called Pseudonymous Bosch? His books are very different. Of course Pseudonymus Bosch is not his real name. But that’s the name under which he prefers to author his books. He has written the Secret Series. Five books, each dealing with one sense. His first book The Name of This Book is Secret is based on smell, the next If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late is based on sound, This Book is Not Good For You is based on taste, This Isn’t What It Looks Like is based on sight and the last one You Have To Stop This is based on touch. I couldn’t get all the five, though I did manage to pick up This Book Is Not Good For You. It’s all about chocolate — but believe me, it’s not sweet and syrupy!
Great variety
I managed to find a book called Attacks of the Volcano Monkeys by Wiley Miller. I really don’t know much about it but it does promise a lot of action.
It’s not only new books that fascinate me. Sometimes I go back and re-read my old books. And the ones I plan to read again this summer are The World’s Funniest Folktales, Just So Stories, Tales from the Arabian Nights, Pride and Prejudice, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and of course The Wind in the Willows. A friend gifted me with a book called The Pearls of Wisdom. It is set in the water world and there are characters like a Black Magi and a Secret Service vampire agent called Count Drunkula, Va- Suki a thousand headed serpent and more. Should be fun I think.
I wonder if you have heard about Feluda? He is a detective created by Satyajit Ray. Feluda and his cousin Topshe stumble upon one mystery after another. Feluda with his super-sharp brain usually unravels the secret and finds the truth. There are a number of Feluda books. The Emperor’s Ring, The Curse of the Goddess and Trouble in the Graveyard some of them. Don’t miss the Feluda series. They are amazing. Satyajit Ray has also written short stories. Words cannot describe these stories, as they take you away from the mundane every day life into something not only bizarre but sometimes even scary. He has trees that eat flesh and people who make friends with aliens.
R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days is always a favourite summer read. Set in sleepy Malgudi it takes you through the days of Swami and his
friends. It’s good to have a mix of genres and so Wordygurdybook! The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray, could provide a few laughs. Scary stories are fun too. I have with me Jerry Pinto’s The Puffin Book of Spooky Ghost Stories. Thirteen stories of hauntings, frightening creatures and spirits.
The last shelf of my bookcase has all the old favourites. Gullivers Travels, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, Black Beauty, King Arthur, Doctor Dolittle, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Best of Tagore – Kabuliwalla, The Scarlett Pimpernel…
I have also nicked some books from my mom’s childhood collection – school stories, mystery stories and adventure stories too. Most of them are by Enid Blyton. And I also found a couple of worn copies of books by Angela Brazil. My mom says they are school stories and she loved every one of them. I also have a few from the Chalet School series. These books were written by Elinor Brent-Dyer. It’s all about a girl called Jo and how her sister starts a school in Austria. These books are simply fantastic.
So that’s my reading list. Let me get started.
By
NIMI KURIAN
Courtesy: http://www.hindu.com
Filed under: Reading Tips, Reading, reading habit
AUGUST 15, 2010 • 6:30 AM 0
5 Ways That Paper Books Are Better Than eBooks
Note: this isn’t an ‘either/or’ argument, my main point in these posts is that each format (paper / electronic) has its strengths and weaknesses. Having said that, it may not be too far into the future when we begin to think of this as an either/or proposition. Remember that the future of paper newspapers is now seriously in question, so it may not be long before the same happens to paper books.
1. Feel
Paper books just feel good in your hands – even the best designed eReader is a cold, lifeless steely contraption by comparison. Paper books are also seen as "more personal," which was a comment that a number of people made on the previous post. You can become attached to a copy of your favorite novel, or a well thumbed book of poetry. I own a worn copy of the novel ‘Catch-22,’ which I have read a number of times since my University days – and no eBook could ever replace the memories it evokes whenever I pick that book up.
How can eBooks match this in the future? They may never do, but perhaps we will find that the features I listed in my previous post assume greater nostalgic significance instead: highlighted text, notes that you made back in your University days, and the ability to search and find all of this very easily.
2. Packaging
I bought a poetry book for Kindle on iPad last week, but it turned out that the eBook was missing half of the image of an obscure painting that adorned the front and back covers of the paper edition. The eBook just had the front cover art, not the back cover art. This is one small example of how paper books can have a more beautiful package than eBooks.
We could similarly point to book binding and typeface, both often carefully selected by publishing companies for their paper editions. It can make a big difference to one’s reading experience.
If eBooks are to challenge this feature, it will need to be with something unique and native to the electronic format. For inspiration, we can look to what Arcade Fire did with the electronic release of its latest album. As a way to try and match the album art and booklet available on CD, Arcade Fire came up with an artistic package it called "synchronised artwork." This enabled listeners to access imagery, lyrics and links on their iPod or iPhone while listening to the album. Some might say that it still isn’t as good as a CD package, but this is the challenge for electronic mediums – to come up with alternatives that offer something equally compelling, perhaps even more so.
Skip Knox summed it up well in a comment: "We need a new generation of authors and publishers who will create new art forms around the technology. We’re still at the point analogous to the early years of movies, when all they could think to do was essentially film a stage play."
3. Sharing
I noted in the last post that receiving marked up books from a friend is something that can’t be duplicated by eBooks – yet. Also, you can’t lend a copy of an eBook to someone else. DRM (Digital Rights Management) or incompatible eBook formats prevent that.
However, I have to think that both of those features – personal notes and sharing eBooks – will get figured out by eReader manufacturers sooner or later. There is no technological reason it can’t be done, it’s more a matter of navigating the always murky DRM waters and people getting used to new kinds of ‘reading’ functionality. Just as we DM people on Twitter or send email, sending messages or notes to another person via an eBook is a feature that would be useful and eventually well used.
4. Keeping
On the topics of DRM and eBook formats, not only is this an issue for sharing – but for your own future accessibility of books. As Adrian Lafond eloquently noted, "If I "buy" an e-book, read it, put it in storage, and try to re-read it in 10 years (since I "own" it) it’s anybody’s guess whether there will exist a platform or device on which that will be possible for that particular e-book format and DRM scheme."
Gwyn Headley added, a little cynically, that eBooks are great for books "you know you will never want to read again."
To be frank, I think the same risks apply to paper books too. I have misplaced favorite books over the years or lent them to people and not had them returned. However, eBook and eReader manufacturers certainly need to address this issue before consumers are truly comfortable buying them over paper books.
5. Second-hand books
A few people noted that eBooks are still too expensive and that you can’t get cheap second-hand copies. Or for that matter, expensive first edition copies.
Similar to previous points, eBooks won’t necessarily be able to match this ‘feature’ of paper books. However, the price of eBooks will likely drop over time and become more flexible. Indeed, I picked up a copy of the full works of Emerson and Thoreau this week for a few dollars – cheaper (and much lighter) than I could’ve gotten anywhere else for a paper copy. We’ll see more of this type of pricing as the eBook market ramps up.
In summary, there are pros and cons for both paper books and eBooks. The eBook market is ripe for innovation and breakthroughs in how we read, so eBooks will only improve over the coming years.
In the final analysis though, the real value of any book – whether read via paper or electronically – is in the words.
Courtesy: http://www.readwriteweb.com
Filed under: Reading Tips, books, E-Books, Library
MARCH 12, 2010 • 5:54 PM 0
Children Teach Themselves to Read
Freedom to Learn
The roles of play and curiosity as foundations for learning
by Peter Gray
Even within the same family, different children learned to read at quite different ages. Diane wrote that her first daughter learned to read at age 5 and her second daughter learned at age 9; Lisa W. wrote that one son learned at age 4 and another at age 7; and Beatrice wrote that one daughter learned before age 5 and the other at age 8.
None of these children has difficulty reading today. Beatrice reports that the daughter who didn’t read until age 8 is now 14 years old and "reads hundreds of books a year," "has written a novel," and "has won numerous poetry awards." Apparently, late reading is not inconsistent with subsequent extraordinary literary ability! This daughter did, however, show other signs of literary precocity well before she learned to read. According to Beatrice, she could recite from memory all of the poems in the Complete Mother Goose book by the time she was 15 months old.
The message repeated most often in these stories of learning to read is that, because the children were not forced or coaxed into reading against their wills, they have positive attitudes about reading and about learning in general. This is perhaps most clearly stated by Jenny, who wrote, regarding her daughter (now 15) who didn’t read well until age 11: "One of the best things that came out of allowing her to read at her own pace and on her own initiative was that she owned the experience, and through owning that experience she came to realize that if she could do that, she could learn anything. We have never pressured her to learn anything at all, ever, and because of that, her ability to learn has remained intact. She is bright and inquisitive and interested in the world around her."
2. Motivated children can go from apparent non-reading to fluent reading very quickly.
In some cases unschooled children progress from non-reading to reading in what seems to observers to be a flash. For example, Lisa W. wrote: "Our second child, who is a visual thinker, didn’t learn to read until he was 7. For years, he could either figure out what he needed to know from pictorial cues, or if stuck, would get his older brother to read to him. I remember the day he started reading. He had asked his older brother to read something to him on the computer and his brother replied, "I have better things to do than to read to you all day", and walked away. Within days [my Italics] he was reading quite well."
Diane wrote, "My first daughter could not read when she turned 5 in March but by the end of that year she could read fluently, out loud, without pause or hesitation." And Kate wrote that her son, at age 9, "taught himself to read" in a period of just one month. In that time span he deliberately worked at reading, on his own, and progressed from being a hesitant, poor reader to highly fluent reading, well beyond what a standard school would have regarded as his "grade level."
Such step-like progressions in overt reading ability may occur at least partly because earlier, more covert stages of learning are not noticed by observers and may not even be noticed by the learners. Karen attributes the rapid onset of reading that she observed in her son to a sudden gain in confidence. She wrote: "Over this past summer, son A [now age 7] went from hiding his ability [to read at all] to reading chapter books. In a summer! Now, six months later, he feels confident enough in his reading ability that I regularly get up in the morning to find him reading aloud to his sister. He even offers to read to his father and me. This was unheard of a year ago when he hid his ability level from us in his embarrassment and lack of confidence. I’m so glad we didn’t push him!"
3. Attempts to push reading can backfire.
Three of the people who sent me stories wrote that they at some point attempted to teach reading to their non-reading child and that the attempt seemed to have negative consequences. Here is what they said.
Holli wrote that when her son was "about 3 1/2" she began trying to teach him reading. "I think the Bob books are stupidly repetitive and inane, but I found ones that were at least moderately engaging and had him start practicing them. … He really was not ready yet, I think, for actual reading, and whether he was or not, he resented being made to do something that wasn’t his idea, so he resisted. … Pretty quickly I realized that in spite of the progress he was making in reading skill, I was doing more harm than good to my son, because I was making him hate reading. I immediately ceased formal instruction in reading, and just went back to reading to him whenever he wanted me to." Holli went on to note that, roughly two years later, her son "entirely surreptitiously" began to look at books on his own and eventually to read, apparently hiding his interest and practice so as not to feel pressured.
Beatrice wrote, of her daughter who learned to read at age 8: "I too am guilty of trying to ‘make her’ read, when she turned 6, worried that the kids at school would be learning this skill and not wanting her to be left behind. After a couple of weeks of insisting she read and keep a journal with me spelling everything and she copying it all out, she told me flatly to ‘leave me alone,’ that she would have no part in my scheme and would learn to read when she was ‘good and ready.’"
And Kate, a homeschooling mom in the UK, wrote, concerning her attempts to teach reading to her son: "By age 9 he was resistant to any English and reading became a regular battle. He resisted it and found it boring and he was distracted, so finally I got over my own schooly head and tried a new policy of letting go. I said that I would never make him read again or even suggest it…. Over the next month he quietly went to his room … and taught himself to read…. I had spent four years teaching him the basics [when he wasn’t interested], but am now sure that he could have learnt that in a few weeks."
4. Children learn to read when reading becomes, to them, a means to some valued end or ends.
There’s an old joke, which I recall first hearing several decades ago, about a child who reached age 5 without ever speaking a word. Then one day, at lunch, he said, "This soup is cold." His mom, practically falling over, said, "My son, you can talk! Why haven’t you ever said anything before?" "Well," said the boy, "up until now the soup has always been warm."
This story is completely apocryphal as applied to learning to talk, which is why we understand it to be a joke. Children learn to talk whether or not they really have to talk in order to get their needs met; they are genetically programmed for it. But the story, somewhat modified, could apply quite reasonably to learning to read. Children seem to learn to read, on their own, when they see some good reason for it. Many of the stories sent to me illustrate this idea. Here are some examples:
Amanda wrote, concerning her daughter who attends a Sudbury model school: "She had consistently told people that she didn’t know how to read until she made brownies this past November [at age 7]. She asked her father and myself to make her favorite brownies for her, but neither of us was willing to make them. A little while later she ran into the room and asked me if I would turn on the oven for her and find her a 9×11 pan (she said, "9 ex 11" instead of "9 by 11"). I got her a pan and turned on the oven. Later she ran in and asked me to put the brownies in the oven. Then she said, ‘Ma, I think I can read now.’ She brought me a few books that she then read out loud to me until she jumped up and said, ‘those brownies smell done. Will you take them out now?’ … Now she tells people that she knows how to read and that she taught herself how."
Idzie, a 19-year-old unschooled but beautifully educated blogger, sent me a link to an essay, on her blog, about her own memories of learning to read. She wrote, in part: "When I was something like age 8 or 9, my mother was reading the first Harry Potter book aloud to my sister and me. But, well, she had things to do other than read, and if she read too long, her voice would get hoarse. So, being quite frustrated at how slow a process this was, and really wanting to know what happened next, I picked it up and began to read."
Marie, an unschooling mom, wrote about her son, now age 7: "[He] found the incentive to become a better reader through acting at a local theater. He has always been passionate about putting together ‘shows,’ but now he is old enough to have real acting experience. He sees that reading is an integral part of this activity that he loves and it has given him a strong reason to grow and develop as a reader. He recently had a part in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and had to read and memorize Shakespeare. It took no instruction on the part of a ‘teacher’ whatsoever."
Jenny wrote that her daughter, who didn’t begin to read books until age 11, was able to satisfy her love of stories by being read to, watching movies, and checking out CDs and books on tape, from the library. She finally began reading because there was no other way for her to satisfy her interest in video games, such as ToonTown, and manga books, which require reading that nobody would do for her.
5. Reading, like many other skills, is learned socially through shared participation.
Observations at Sudbury Valley School, and at other Sudbury model schools, suggest that many children there learn to read through age-mixed play. Non-readers and readers play games together, including computer games, with written words. To keep the game going, the readers read the words and the non-readers pick them up.
Vincent Lopez, a staff member at the Diablo Valley School, a Sudbury model school, sent me this sweet example of age-mixed learning: "In the art room they are making signs to imitate a TV show that had just started. It is in my opinion, a dumb, low-ethics, media-driven, free for all dating show; I’ve let this be known before. In their own way they are processing the future to come. … but I digress. The jewel of this snippet is that the 5-year-old is attempting to read the sign with the help of his multi-aged peers. …Students learn because they want to get the jokes, be more advanced like the peers around them."
Nearly all of the stories from home unschoolers include examples of shared participation in reading. One of my favorites is that presented by Diane, who noted that her daughter, who learned to read at age 5, became interested in reading because of the family’s regular Bible reading time. Before she could read she insisted on having her turn at Bible reading, "and she would just make up words as her turn!"
Others wrote about shared family games involving words, or about shared television viewing in which the onscreen guide and captions would be read for the benefit of nonreaders. Over time, the nonreaders needed ever less help; they began recognizing and reading more and more words themselves. The most often mentioned examples of shared participation are those of parents, or sometimes siblings, reading stories to nonreaders, often as part of the bedtime ritual. Nonreaders look on, at the words as well as the pictures, and sometimes read some of the words; or they memorize books that have been read to them repeatedly, and then later they pretend to read the books while actually attending to some of the words. Pretend reading gradually becomes real reading.
In previous essays I have referred to the great Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, whose main idea was that children develop new skills first socially, through joint participation with more skilled others, and then later begin to use the new skills privately, for their own purposes. That general principle certainly seems to hold in the case of reading.
6. Some children become interested in writing before reading, and they learn to read as they learn to write.
At least seven of the people who sent me stories said that their child was interested in writing, or typing, either before or simultaneously with their initial interest in reading. Here are four examples:
Marie wrote, of her son, now age 7: "He is an artist and spends hours drawing things, especially stories and inventions. So naturally he wished to make his pictures "talk" with captions, titles, instructions, and quotations. … There was a lot of ‘MOM? How do you spell Superdog wants to go home?’ I would spell out the sentence and five minutes later, ‘MOM? How do you spell Superdog sees his house?’" This boy learned to read, at least partly, by reading the sentences that he, himself, had written.
Beatrice told a similar story about her youngest daughter, who learned to read before age 5. "She learned to read from her desire to express herself through the written word. Starting from the time she could hold a pencil, be it writing a poem, a song, designing an ad, she needed me to tell her the spelling: ‘How do you spell beaver, how do you spell suggest?’"
Lisa R. wrote of her son, who is presently in the midst of learning to read: "His reading skill relates to his writing efforts. … He has written short notes and story titles using his own phonetic spelling. Sometimes he asks how to spell words for a note or a book. Through repetition, he now remembers some of these words."
Lisa W. wrote: "Our oldest child learned to read when he was 4 years old as a by-product of trying to find free online games on the computer. He would open the browser and ask me to spell free, then online, then games. All of a sudden he was reading."
7. There is no predictable "course" through which children learn to read.
Lest you leave this essay with the belief that I and the people who have contributed these stories have taught you something useful about how to "teach" or "help" your child to read, I assure you we have not. Every child is unique. Your child must tell you how you can help, or not help. I have no idea about that, nor does any so-called reading expert. My only advice is, don’t push it; listen to your child; respond appropriately to your child’s questions, but don’t go overboard by telling your child more than he or she wants to know. If you do go overboard, your child will learn to stop asking you questions.
Quite a few of the people who wrote to me expressed surprise at the sequence that their child went through in learning to read. Some learned to read quite exotic words, which never appear in the primers, well before they learned simpler words. Some, as I said, learned to write before they could read. Some seemed to be learning at a rapid rate and then they just stopped for a couple of years before progressing further. We adults can enjoy watching all of this as long as we remember that it isn’t our responsibility to change it. We’re just observers and sometimes tools that our children use for their own chosen ends.
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I am very grateful to the people who took time to write their stories so thoughtfully and send them to me. I hope that many of you who have just read this essay will add to these stories with stories of your own, in the comments section below. It’s high time that we created a real account of the many ways that unschooled children learn to read, an account to contrast with all those rows of books on teaching reading that exist in the education section of every university library.
Finally, I can’t resist ending with a little story about my son’s learning to read. He was a very early reader, and one of the first indications of his reading ability occurred when he was about three and a half and we were looking at a Civil War monument in a town square somewhere in New England. He looked at the words, and then he said to me, "Why would men fight and die to save an onion?"
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Notes
*[1] D. Rose & B. Dalton (2009), Learning to read in the digital age. Mind, Brain, and Education, 3, 74-83.
[2] R. M. Savio (1989), Self-initiative in the learning process; and A. DelGaudio (1989), SVS Reading Study. Unpublished senior honors theses.
[3] A. Halonen et al., (2006). The role of learning to read in the development of problem behaviour: A cross-lagged longitudinal study. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 517-534.
Courtesy: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201002/children-teach-themselves-read?page=2
Filed under: Reading Tips, Children, Psychology, Reading
DECEMBER 10, 2008 • 3:35 PM 1
14 Ways to Cultivate a Lifetime Reading Habit
By
Leo Babauta
“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” — W. Somerset Maugham
Somewhere after “lose weight”, “stop procrastinating”, and “fall in love”, “read more” is one of the top goals that many people set for themselves. And rightly so: A good book can be hugely satisfying, can teach you about things beyond your daily horizons, and can create characters so vivid you feel as if you really know them.
If reading is a habit you’d like to get into, there are a number of ways to cultivate it.
First, realize that reading is highly enjoyable, if you have a good book. If you have a lousy book (or an extremely difficult one) and you are forcing yourself through it, it will seem like a chore. If this happens for several days in a row, consider abandoning the book and finding one that you’ll really love.
Other than that, try these tips to cultivate a lifetime reading habit:
- Set times. You should have a few set times during every day when you’ll read for at least 5-10 minutes. These are times that you will read no matter what — triggers that happen each day. For example, make it a habit to read during breakfast and lunch (and even dinner if you eat alone). And if you also read every time you’re sitting on the can, and when you go to bed, you now have four times a day when you read for 10 minutes each — or 40 minutes a day. That’s a great start, and by itself would be an excellent daily reading habit. But there’s more you can DO
- ALL SOURCES FROM KV PATTOM LIBRARY BLOG
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