Thing I Wish I'd Started Doing Sooner

"Read it again, mommy, so I can see the words!" --Kiddo, tonight during reading time

For a long time, I resisted running my fingers under the words I was reading aloud. I read somewhere that you should start that habit no later than 18 months old, but I just didn't want to. I'm really lazy and it was like, so hard man, to lift my finger all the way up and across the page.

But then we got stuck in a reading rut, and I read this Salon.com article about baby reading, which referenced a book called Native Reading and the author made the really good point that point with your finger is the most straightforward way to show your kids that spoken language is the chained to written language. Mommy isn't just holding a book open and turning pages and talking, she is lifting the little black scribbles out of the book and turning them into recognizable words and sounds.

"To read natively you must gain a lower-level, almost instinctive association of the written word with the spoken word, and for this you need to point consistently and in a way that is not imposing...it can be pretty annoying for a parent at first...but by sticking with it, not only will text pointing become second nature for you, but it will deeply enrich your child's speaking environment with an obvious correlation of reading and speaking."

Anyway, the point-while-reading thing isn't a magic bullet for anything, but I do feel like it's powerful and I regret not starting it sooner.

Smart Books for Ensmartening the Three-to-Six Age Group

Just posted this on a message board and thought I would share here too. 

This is a list of books I currently favor for suggestions on how to enrich the environments of kiddos ages three to six:

• How to Raise a Brighter Child, by Joan Beck
• Help Your Preschooler Build a Better Brain: Early Learning Activities for 2-6 Year Old Children, by John Bowman
• Teaching Montessori in the Home: The Preschool Years, by Elizabeth Hainstock
• How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way, by Tim Seldin
• MaryAnn Kohl's various art books, and/or Young at Art, by Susan Stryker
• The Preschooler's Busy Book and the Children's Busy Book, by Trish Kuffner
• Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach Your Child to Read and Write--from Baby to Age 7, by Richard Gentry
• Testing for Kindergarten, by Karen Quinn --> don't let the title or the marketing orientation scare you off; this turns out to be a great rundown of games and activities for youngers

I don't have zero-to-three in my pocket now, but off the top of my head:

• Bright from the Start, by Jill Stamm
• Baby Play and Toddler Play, by Wendy Masi for Gymboree

And my favorite books about children's books:

• The Read-Aloud Handbook, by Jim Trelease
• Babies Need Books and Five to Eight: Vital Years for Reading, by Dorothy Butler
• Books to Build On, by E.D. Hirsch

FWIW, if you're looking for more reading material, I have a Pinterest board of Preschool and Kindergarten Reading Lists that you can check out for ideas.

Underappreciated Living Books Resource: Garden City/Rathbone's Wonderful World Series (1950s-1960s)

As I've written before in this space, one of my favorite online book resources is Valerie's Living Books. Another great resource is the Living Books Library. However, both sites favor a religious approach to science ("Group science books by the days of creation, light, chemistry, physics for the first day, astronomy the fourth, etc.") which isn't my bag and which I believe makes them less-than-ideal resources for the various STEM subjects.

As such, I try to be alert for those rare resources that I would consider to be both "living books" and scientifically rigorous. I recently stumbled upon a great mid-20th century series of titles, called The Wonderful World books, which I believe gives a very strong treatment to biology, physics, engineering, medicine, et al. I'd peg the books at being best for kids eight years old and up. 

My favorite of the ones I've seen so far is The Wonderful World of Life: The Story of Evolution, by Julian Huxley, which was originally published in 1958. Julian Huxley was the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog"), as well as being the brother of writer Aldous Huxley (Brave New World). In addition to being merely a scion of the hugely important Huxley-Darwin-Wedgwood-Galton family of scientific significance, he was a noted evolutionary biologist in his own right. 

Anyway, I scanned a few of the pages, in case they are of interest to my fellow evolutionists:

Cover of the 1958 edition of The Wonderful World of Life by Julian Huxley. I think the horse skeleton series is a bit of an inside joke, since according to Wikipedia, Julian's grandpapa THH did some important work on horse species evolution that helped him accept Darwin's idea of "gradualism."

These are the endpapers of The Wonderful World of Life, featuring a portrait of Julian's grandpa as a young man. Bonus link: Here's a cute picture of a young Julian sitting on his grandpa's lap in later years.

I wonder if Julian knew what he was doing when subtitled the introduction "The Fact of Evolution" rather than "The Theory of Evolution."

Gorgeous illustration of the orchid Cypripedium, showing special adaptations for pollenization; the illustration on the facing page of this spread is of chameleon, and it's equally exquisite but I was too lazy to scan both. Forgive me.

Graphic depicting fossils of the Silurian age.

As per the caption, "The evolution of reptiles from fish may be simply illustrated if we imagine the development of Seymouria (bottom) from a lobe-fin lung-fish (top) through an in-between stage of a typical Carboniferous amphibian."

From what I can tell, most of the Wonderful World books had a single author but multiple illustrators. In the Wonderful World of Life volume, the first artist credited on the list of eight illustrators is Raymond Briggs. Briggs later became renowned for his fairy tale illustrations, particularly his collaborations with Ruth Manning-Sanders and Virginia Hamilton. None of the illustrations are credited to individual illustrators, but based on what I know of his other work, the image of a hyaenodon above is by Briggs. 

Illustration of primate evolution; I love how the gibbon skeleton hangs from a branch!

Back cover, just because who doesn't love a good Tyrannosaurus Rex?

Complete list of Wonderful World titles
Britten, Benjamin & Imogen Holst, The Wonderful World of Music
Calder, Ritchie, The Wonderful World of Medicine
Fisher, James, The Wonderful World: The Adventure of the Earth We Live On
Fisher, James, The Wonderful World of the Air
Fisher, James, The Wonderful World of the Sea
Haskell, Arnold L., The Wonderful World of Dance
Hogben, Lancelot, The Wonderful World of Communication
Hogben, Lancelot, The Wonderful World of Energy
Hogben, Lancelot, The Wonderful World of Mathematics
Huxley, Julian, The Wonderful World of Life
Jackson, David, The Wonderful World of Engineering
Jessup, Ronald, The Wonderful World of Archaeology
Lee, Laurie & David Lambert, The Wonderful World of Transportation
Orr, John Boyd, The Wonderful World of Food
Priestley, J.B., The Wonderful World of the Theatre
Swinton, William Elgin, The Wonderful World of Prehistoric Animals

These books were published by Rathbone in the UK and Garden City in the United States (Garden City is/was an imprint of Doubleday). The series seems to come in two versions. The first, from the late 1950s and early 1960s, has illustrations like the Life pictures above. The late 1960s editions replace the illustrations with photographs and have white covers. (Guess which style I like better?)

The authors for the Wonderful World series were a veritable Murderers' Row of mid-century British intelligensia: Benjamin Britten was a major conductor and composed The Young Persons' Guide to the Orchestra, Imogen Holst was his long-time collaborator on musical education projects and the daughter of composer Gustav Holst. Lancelot Hogben was a notable scientist and writer who invented the modern pregnancy test while researching frog endocrine systems. (He also has one of the best British writer names short of Plantagenet Somerset Fry.) John Boyd Orr won the Nobel Peace Prize; J.B. Priestley was a notable novelist and playwright; William Elgin Swinton was the leading British paleontologist of his day, etc, etc.

Enjoy!

Great Tools for Encouraging Child Labor

Just a random product endorsement in light of the oncoming holiday season. I was reminded of these this morning as I cleaned up the brown sugar that was scattered throughout the house. Sigh.

This morning notwithstanding, Jackson has actually become somewhat proficient and enthusiastic about cleaning up his own messes. He barrels into the kitchen screaming, "I WANT MY DUSTPAN!!" He also has a little child-size push broom and a set of child-size garden tools we got him to go with his farmer costume for Halloween. He's very attached to all of them, and I've been very impressed with the quality of the Toysmith brand, which includes details like a beautiful paint job, good hardware and having a little leather loop at the end for easy hanging.

Anyway, if you (a) just like your house clean and expect your kid to help like a responsible citizen, or (b) are a Montessori partisan, here are some recommended "practical life" pieces:

Born Learning PSAs

Pregnancy has crushed my productivity so sorry for the general lack of blogging! I'm posting right now because (a) I can't sleep, and (b) to "bookmark" these videos, since I'm so fond of them. (The Internet is vast and deep and it's easy to lose things!)

Teach Your Baby by Genevieve Painter (Simon & Schuster, 1971)

I found this old early-learning treasure in the free pile at the library (!), and I thought you guys would be interested in some excerpts.

Teach Your Baby by Genevieve Painter (Simon & Schuster, 1971)

p. 14

"In average homes, most parents act similarly during the first year. According to Burton L. White, Harvard's Preschool Project Director, it is during the baby's second year that the behavior of parents begins to differ widely from one family to another. He claims that a toddler's curiosity, his zest for learning and grasp of language, all lead the effective mother to speak to the baby and try to satisfy his now more sophisticated needs. However, to other mothers the grown of the baby only means that he may endanger himself and thus will require more attention and care from her. In large families of small dependent children, the mother is likely to concentrate on keeping the baby out of the way.

"From the studies of the Harvard research team, it is obvious that the child of the mother who is able to provide a variety of experiences and who is able to play with and teach her child in a calm manner is most likely to do well emotionally and intellectually in infancy and in nursery school, not to mention later in school."

Background of the Program in This Book

pp. 15-16

"In 1963 I became interested in the field of special education at the university level, particularly in the problems of non-learning children in school. I had already worked in the Community Child Guidance Centers in Chicago, and for three previous years in therapeutic recreation. Both of these experiences pointed toward the correction of specific educational problems in nursery school and kindergarten through remedial play activities prior to school. Along with other researchers, I was alarmed at the number of children who arrived at nursery school at age three or four, at kindergarten, and at first grade unable or unwilling to learn what teachers tried to teach.

"At about this time I was invited to develop and supervise an educational research program undertaken by the University of Illinois and funded by the United States of Education. Our research was divided into two phases. In the first, professional teachers entered the child’s home for an hour a day for a year. The object of both phases of the research was to determine whether babies who were tutored for a year would show significant IQ increase over those who had no tutoring.

“In the first phase, two professional teachers and I began simply by playing with babies in their homes, much as a mother might do. However, we applied psychological principles of infant development, aiming for the most effective method of teaching the things we considered necessary to the baby’s success in future schooling: use of their senses, of their bodies, particularly their hands; use of language; ability to solve problems; picture comprehensions, etc.

“The thirty babies selected for the program were eight- to twenty-four-months-olds, healthy, and normal in IQ. They were tested and randomly assigned to two groups--those to be tutored, called the experimental group, and those not to be tutored, called the control or comparison group. At the end of a year of tutoring by professional teachers, the experimental group were found to average ten points higher in IQ than the control babies, whose IQs remained at the level of the previous year.

“In the next year, mothers were trained in the educational activities and child-rearing methods used by the professional teachers in the previous year. These mothers then began to teach their own babies, ages five months to twenty-four months. Mrs. Erladeen Badger, who had trained the mothers, made home visits and was impressed to see the babies working happily with their mothers for as long as an hour. At the end of the year, the babies who had been tutored by their own mothers averaged sixteen points higher in IQ than the control babies who had received no special tutoring.

“There were differences more obvious than IQ scores between both groups of experimental children and the control children. The children of the experimental groups were more alert and were able to do many more things. A teacher or a parent taught each experimental child who to use his hands and body, and stimulated his imagination, his ability to reason, to abstract and to make associations, etc. The children were encouraged to feel that they are capable of learning and of doing many more things; therefore, they were willing to learn and to work, and they were also willing to perform for the text examiner--they were 'motivated' to work.

“The child’s capacity to learn or his potential is not a fixed quantity. If his environment is active and stimulating, his capacity or potential is greatly increased.”

SEE ALSO:

• Engelmann's Give Your Child a Superior Mind
• What Your Toddler/Preschooler Should or Could Know, According to Engelmann's Give Your Child a Superior Mind

Fly-Swatter Painting