We all love the feel of snuggling up with a book with our child. So how can reading ebooks be helpful for your child’s development?

Ebooks are not meant to be a replacement for reading together with your child. They are designed to be an additional way to engage children in a literacy activity. Kids love computers and rather than screen time simply being for fun they can now use the computer as an educational resource too.

The better ebooks available on the market are more than a video presentation of an existing book. The ones that are simply videos do not engage your child in reading the words. The ebooks that stand out from the crowd are the ones where the words highlight in time to the audio. This encourages your child to read along to/follow the narration. It models fluency, tempo and voice intonation. The child will start to recognise the words and their relevant sounds. Repetition is one of the keys to learning and a child can listen to the audio version of the story again and again whilst following along.

When children are becoming independent readers they will want to have a go at reading for themselves. This is when they need the functionality of being able to click on an unfamiliar word to hear it spoken. They can self pace their learning giving them a sense of control. If they read to themselves and come across an unfamiliar word they can click on it to hear it spoken and carry on their independent reading without having to wait for adult intervention. This can also become a game as the child clicks on a word and tries to say it before the narrator has had a chance. This activity builds up their vocabulary and reading skills as well as being fun.

Animated illustrations engage even the most reluctant readers yet do not distract from the words that are equally important. The illustrations in children’s picture books are as important as the words giving the child an opportunity to understand what the words that are being spoken are describing.

Comprehension or recall quizzes at the end of an ebook ensure that the child has understood and remembered the story. Knowing there is a quiz reinforces that attention needs to be paid to the story and reinforces understanding.

Ebooks can be a great educational and fun activity that you can share with your child or let them have a go themselves and be in control of their own learning.

Ebooks like those that are described above are available at http://www.wizz-e.com.

British neuroscientists have recently found the reason most people can predict words and sentences as they are being scanned by the eye. Rather than reading every word and sentence to the end before coming up with its meaning, new research has shown the brain makes an educated guess and then moves on.
As we become more literate, the brain becomes better at predicting sentences and therefore quicker at reading.
Researchers have shown that the angular gyrus’ role, rather than acting as a dictionary as previously thought, acts in anticipating what our eye will see – like the predictive texting function on a mobile phone.
The research, published in the journal ‘Nature’ was based on a unique study into former guerrilla fighters in Colombia. The team scanned the brains of illiterate adult rebels, who had had no education, before and after they had undertaken a five year reading and writing course. The new readers had a higher density of so-called grey matter, where information processing is carried out, in several areas of the left hemisphere of the brain.
It is hoped that the research could unlock understanding into the causes of dyslexia.
Google news article here.

A report today, commissioned for BookTime, a branch of the independent literacy charity Booktrust, reports some interesting findings regarding children’s leisure time and reading habits.

 

• One in every 20 family homes in Britain today has fewer than ten books.
• Yet 96% of all children surveyed say that they enjoy reading.
• 60% of children like to share a book with their parents/carers as it shows that they like to spend time with them.
• 3% of parents and carers never or rarely read with their children. For those who do, just one in three read with their children on a daily basis.
• 56% of all parents and carers (and almost half of all parents of 4-5 year olds [48%]) say their child spends more time facing a screen, playing computer games and watching DVDs rather than reading.
• Parents and carers of boys are twice as likely not to read with them compared to those who have girls.
• Children were asked ‘what stops you reading’ and they reported watching TV (54%) and playing on the computer or video games (41%).

 

So kids love reading, they love being read to yet half of them are choosing screen based ‘mind numing’ activities rather than reading. As parents we need to make reading a priority. Making time for reading demonstrates the importance we place on it and also increases literacy skills. When one in 5 children leave primary/elementary school without meeting the required standards in literacy we cannot leave this until it is too late. Turn off the TV and pick up a book or use screen time as educational time and introduce them to ebooks!

 

The independent research was conducted on behalf of Booktime and Booked Up. 1,772 UK parents of primary school aged children and 1,318 children aged 5-12 years took part in the research.

 

 

 

 

I was fascinated to discover information on how the importance of phonemic awareness was discovered. After World War II the U.S. Government looked for ways to ease the transition back into life for disabled veterans, including those who returned home blinded in battle. A young psychologist, Alvin Liberman, was tasked with creating a reading machine for the blind. The idea was to create a machine that could vocalize print as a finger ran over Braille letters.

Although the machine worked it proved too slow at articulating the individual sounds to resemble speech. Listeners found it impossible to join the machine’s sounds together to make any sense out of them. However, Liberman’s team of scientists had stumbled upon a new under¬standing of the reading process.

They had unintentionally identified the complicated relationship between the language that we read [letters] and the lan¬guage that we speak [sounds] and discovered one of the primary reasons it can be hard to learn how to read. Just as the blind listeners could not make sense out of the sounds coming from the reading machine, struggling readers have a hard time blending together the different sounds that make up a word.

Many young learners find it incredibly difficult to distinguish the small segments of sounds – “phonemic awareness”. Their difficulty has nothing to do with an ability to recognize the individual letters but what word they form when strung together. Well over a third of all beginning readers have difficulty identifying, discriminating, and isolating sounds.

Phonemes are the sounds that make up spoken words not the individual letters. For example, the word ‘on’ is made up of two phonemes: /o/ and /n/. We hear them as a single word because we blend the individual phonemes into a unit as we pronounce the word. Clusters of letters that represent single sounds (th, sh, oo, ough, or ck) are also important for children to be aware of. The word ‘though’ is not de-codable just by the individual letter sounds, there needs to be an understanding of the phonetic sounds too. Phonemes are not the sounds that letters make but the sounds of speech that can be represented by letters.

Effective reading instruction needs to include teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics. Helping your child to recognise the sounds the letters make and how they combine is as important as understanding the letters themselves.

Our kids have grown up with media all around them. It is not surprising that they are gaining access to this media on an increasing basis. But children having access should mean that we try to protect them. A recent report by Ofcom investigating the media literacy among UK children shows some alarming results.

It is not surprising that households with children aged 5-15 have high levels of take-up of the main media platforms, e.g. digital TV, games consoles and the internet. What is interesting is how the data shows that children are becoming more fluent in media at a much younger age.

85% of children aged 5–7 live in a household with a games console, which is as high as 90% in households with boys.

Almost every child had access to a TV in their house, but what I found surprising was that 47% of 5-7s have access to a TV in their own bedrooms.

There has also been an increase in the number of younger children (aged 5-7) using the internet at home. Two thirds of children [66%] in this age bracket are using the internet. This increase does not appear to be the result of increased internet take-up within the home, suggesting that children in this age group are starting to use the internet at home at a younger age.

Children aged 5-7 mostly use the internet at least weekly for games (30%), schoolwork (26%) and information (15%).

The majority of parents say they trust their child to use the internet safely. However less than half of parents whose child uses the internet at home (45%) say they have internet controls or filtering software installed – fewer have set safe search settings.

The internet and digital media can be an amazing resource for our kids to learn and to play. For me the data shows an alarming trend where children can access/view content without parents being present or proper controls in place. As adults we need to make sure they are protected as well as ensuring they gain balanced access between fun and educational content.

Children’s Book Week is celebrated in the UK on 5 - 11 October 2009. This year’s theme is words and pictures – focusing on books which spark the imagination by combining superb illustrations with magical language. Award winning digital children’s book publisher, Ebooks4Kidz Ltd, joins in the celebrations by offering customers up to 75% off their normal retail prices.

The founder of Ebooks4Kidz Ltd, Jeanette McLeod, said “Our passion is to spark children’s imaginations and love of reading by bringing our books to life. It fits so well with what Children’s Book Week is trying to achieve. So we decided to celebrate Children’s Book Week by offering customers substantial discounts on many of the interactive digital children’s books we have available. That way our products are even more accessible to parents who want their kids to develop their literacy skills and love of reading books. Our passion is to spark children’s imaginations with our animated illustrations and to bring the stories to life with automatic page turning. Kids love the ability to listen to the story being read aloud, following along with the narrator as the words highlight. For emerging independent readers they can have complete control to read the books themselves and click on any unfamiliar words to hear them spoken. Our passion is to get children reading more by combining their love of technology with great stories and fantastic illustrations. For less than the price of a cup of coffee children can be truly inspired by words and pictures as they both come to life.”

Independent children’s ebook publisher Ebooks4Kidz Ltd is offering up to 75% off a selection of their children’s digital books available on their website http://www.wizz-e.com.