The Read to Succeed Summer Program has completed its inaugural effort with 70 percent of participating students earning $1,000 college savings accounts. Those students received certificates at ceremonies today at their respective schools.
Conducted by Read to Succeed, Inc. and funded by the Papitto Foundation, the Program encourages students from three inner-city Providence schools to read during their summer vacation. Students must read six books selected by their teachers as appropriate for their ability. They must also pass a computer-administered test on the books, provided to them at no cost, during their summer vacation. Those who pass six tests receive $1,000 accounts in the Rhode Island CollegeBoundfund(R), the state's tax-advantaged 529 plan.
In the summer of 2008, the Program included fourth graders in the current school term at Highlander Charter School, Bishop McVinney School, and Community Preparatory School. All are located in South Providence, and all serve primarily minority, inner-city, low-income students. Thirty-nine of the 55 students enrolled in the program earned their $1,000 accounts.
"We are proud and extremely happy that, in just its first summer, the Program enabled 39 students to reinforce their studies from the previous year, prepare themselves for the 2008-2009 school year, and begin earning and saving for their college education," said Barbara Papitto, President, Read to Succeed, Inc., Cranston, Rhode Island.
"When students read during the summer, they reinforce the learning of the previous school year," said Robert J. Shapiro, Superintendent Emeritus, Warwick, Rhode Island, Public Schools. "That, along with the college savings account, of course, is the immediate benefit. In the long run, if they become lifelong readers, they give themselves a tremendous advantage over students who read only what it required, and only during the school year." Shapiro is a consultant to the Read to Succeed Summer Program.
Website: http://www.readtosucceedinc.com/
Elementary school students earn $1,000 toward college through summer reading program
Blue Zoo: A New Blog for Young Writers
Attention: teachers, librarians, parents, grandparents . . . do you know a young writer you want encourage?
Here's a great new resource: Blue Zoo Young Writers blog. It offers practical help and inspiration for middle school and young teen writers.
Blue Zoo (http://bluezoowriters.wordpress.com/) offers lots of fun ideas and activities to help young writers with all sort of writing projects: poetry, stories, articles for a school paper, book reviews, and lots more.
The ideas range from story starters to samples to quick exercises for a writing journal, all designed to teach writing techniques used by successful writers.
Want to get young writers' work published? Blue Zoo gives details on places to submit work for publication (recommended print magazines or online sites), plus news about good writing contests.
Blue Zoo is focused on fun and good writing. It has application for homeschooling assignments or in classroom literary arts programs. But the focus is on motivating young writers to write well for their own satisfaction.
Blue Zoo offers a path to writing success and enjoyment.
Please help us! Pass on the Blue Zoo link to local teachers, librarians, and parents . . . and online to friends and bloggers interested in writing and encouraging young writers.
Reading Habits of Teen Boys
One of the senior literature program consultants from Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, the leading provider of print and digital educational materials for middle and secondary students, recently studied adolescent boys and their reading, attitudes, aspirations, and the opportunities available to them to increase literacy.
The goal of Jeffrey Wilhelm, Ph.D., in launching the study was to find ways to support students who are often considered to be reluctant or resistant to reading. He discovered that as students go through school they are expected to read more challenging text, but receive less support for reading that text.
Dr. Wilhelm is an award-winning author, researcher, and university professor. He served as a school language arts teacher for 13 years, and published such books as Reading Don't Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men and You Gotta BE the Book: Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents.
During the interviews, almost every boy described himself as "not a reader." Dr. Wilhelm discovered just the opposite, he saw male adolescents reading comic books, magazines, and Web sites. The students thought they were non-readers because they accepted the school definition of a reader as a reader of traditional types of literature.
"In addition to introducing students to classic literature, there should also be an introduction to the types of literature that appeal to adolescents," Dr. Wilhelm said. "I noticed that many of the boys in our study didn't want to only read books off a list. They wanted to read material that mattered to them, material with a functional value that is in the here and now."
Dr. Wilhelm also found that many adolescent students view the literature taught in class as not relevant to their lives and because of that many teen students became cynical about reading. While Dr. Wilhelm supports teaching classic literature in class, he challenges teachers to make the literature relevant and come alive in the classroom.
"If a teacher can relate a piece a literature to what is happening in a student's life, the student will be engaged," he said.
Dr. Wilhelm's experience working with teen boys as well his knowledge of best practices in reaching all students are put to use in his co-authorship of Glencoe Literature: California Treasures, an all-new program for Grades 6-12 for California aligned with both California's language arts content and English language development standards.
For more information about Glencoe Literature: California Treasures, visit http://www.califtreasures.com/.
Storybooks On Paper Better For Children Than Reading Fiction On Computer Screen
Clicking and scrolling interrupt our attentional focus. Turning and touching the pages instead of clicking on the screen influence our ability for experience and attention. The physical manipulations we have to do with a computer, not related to the reading itself, disturb our mental appreciation, says associate professor Anne Mangen at the Center for Reading Research at the University of Stavanger in Norway. She has investigated the pros and cons of new reading devices.
Mangen maintains that reading on a screen generates a new form of mental orientation. The reader loses both the completeness and constituent parts of the physical appearance of the reading material. The physical substance of a book offers tranquility. The text does not move on the page like it does on a screen.
"Several experiments in cognitive psychology have shown how a change of physical surroundings has a potentially negative affect on memory. We should include this in our evaluation of digital teaching aids. The technology provides for a number of dynamic, mobile and ephemeral forms of learning, but we know little about how such mobility and transience influence the effect of teaching. Learning requires time and mental exertion and the new media do not provide for that," Mangen believes.
"We experience to day a one-sided admiration for the potentials in the technology. ICT is now introduced in kindergarten without much empirical research on how it influences children’s learning and development. The whole field is characterized by an easy acceptance and a less subtle view of the technology," the researcher says.
Would you warn against the use of digital teaching material?
"Critical perspectives on new technologies are often brushed aside as a result of moral panic and doomsday prophecies. I will not warn against it, but I think there is generally little reflection around digital teaching material. What we need, is a more nuanced view on the potentials and limitations of all technologies – even of the book. Very often important discussions about technology and learning have a tendency to reduce a complex field to a question about being for or against," Mangen explains.
The development of digital media leads to a need for more sophisticated concepts of reading and writing and a new understanding of these activities.
"Many people say that children read less and not so well as earlier. With which technology do they read less? What types of text do they read less well? What conceptions of reading are we talking about," Anne Mangen asks.
Even if children and young people do not read as many novels in book form any more, one may still argue that they actually read more than before. Most of what they do on a computer or on their cell phones, is exactly reading and writing.
"Swedish researchers believe we understand more and better when reading on paper than when we read the same text on a screen. We avoid navigating and the small things we don't think about, but which subconsciously takes attention away from the reading. Also texts on a screen are often not adapted to the screen format. The most important difference is when the text becomes digital. Then it loses its physical dimension, which is special to the book, and the reader loses his feeling of totality."
Mangen has mainly been looking at hypertext stories. These stories exploit the multimedia possibilities of a computer and use both hypertext, video, sound, pictures and text. They are constructed in such a way that clicking one's way around them comes close to a literary computer game.
As a researcher, Mangen is interested in the physical aspect of reading and applies theories from psychology and phenomenology linked to the relationships between motor functions and attention in order to highlight the difference between reading a novel and a hypertext story.
"The digital hypertext technology and its use of multimedia are not open to the experience of a fictional universe where the experience consists of creating your own mental images. The reader gets distracted by the opportunities for doing something else," Mangen says.
Source: The University of Stavanger, http://www.uis.no/
Houston Students 'Read for the Record' to Help Close the Literacy Gap
More than 30,000 children from the largest school district in Texas took part in a major effort to set the record for the number of people reading the same book on the same day across Houston.
The day-long event was designed to bring attention to the importance of reading early in a child's life in conjunction with Jumpstart's Read for the Record Campaign. The Houston Independent School District (HISD) was slated to participate in Read for the Record, the world's largest shared reading experience, on Oct.2 but had to postpone its participation as a result of Hurricane Ike.
HISD and Pearson officials planned the record-breaking event to bring awareness to the literacy gap and to demonstrate the importance of reading to young children.
"Our goal was to help children and their families get excited about reading. Every child's academic success begins with reading," said Dr. Abelardo Saavedra, HISD Superintendent. "Pearson's generous book donation is helping us to drive home the message about the importance of reading, and we appreciate their support of this effort."
Superintendent Saavedra and Paul McFall, senior vice president of curriculum for Pearson, kicked off the day by reading the popular children's book Corduroy, the Read for the Record Campaign's official book, to pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten students. The students were enthralled by the children's classic and had many questions and comments for the guest readers.
At other HISD schools across Houston, parents, public officials, business executives from companies such as Pearson, and even Santa Claus read Corduroy to children in their classrooms.
The Pearson Foundation provided 1,800 copies of Corduroy in English and Spanish and related online instructional resources such as lesson plans and classroom activities to help HISD reinforce early literacy skills.
The publication of Corduroy was underwritten by the Pearson Foundation, ensuring that 100% of the proceeds directly benefit Jumpstart's work with at-risk children. Additionally, each book purchased online was matched with a donation from the Pearson Foundation to support Jumpstart's early education programs for children in low-income communities across the nation.
"Research shows that poor reading skills early in a child's life contribute significantly to the widening of the achievement gap. Children are more likely to struggle in school if they rarely or ever are read to at home," said Pearson Foundation President Mark Nieker. "Pearson was privileged to work with HISD on this important effort to raise awareness of the literacy gap--a national problem that can be overcome."
Website: Jumpstart's Read for the Record, visit www.pearsonfoundation.org.
Schools Shake-up Fails to Learn Lessons from the Past
The government is preparing a generation to fail by ignoring the need for compulsory financial literacy in its proposed education reforms, according to one industry expert.
Sara-Ann Burgess, the managing director of independent specialist protection insurer Burgesses, is alarmed that there is no mention of pupils having to learn about day-to-day financial matters such as interest rates and mortgages.
"I find it incredible that at a time when the economy is rapidly going down the drain that the interim report makes no mention of any formal requirement that pupils be grounded in the essential financial knowledge they will require when they eventually move into work and onto the property ladder.
"Part of the reason why the country is in such an economic mess at the moment is that many people did not understand the consequence of their actions when they maxed out their credit and store cards, oblivious to the fact that high interest rates would put them in extreme financial difficulties if they could not make full repayments each month.
"Financial ignorance made some people easy prey for loan sharks and that in turn lead in many cases to familial breakup and all the social welfare issues that go hand-in-hand with this that create a drain on the public purse, and ultimately undermine fiscal policy.
"And it is not just an 'underclass' that has suffered from financial ignorance. Many so-called educated people have fallen victim to boiler room or Ponzie schemes because they did not possess the financial know how to see through the sales patter and lost a lot of money."
Under the proposals presented to the Schools Secretary Ed Balls, some subjects will be lost to be replaced in the curriculum by lessons deemed more inclusive and true to life.
But Burgess argues that without a strong grounding in basic finance tomorrows consumers will simply be fodder for unscrupulous product providers and dodgy brokers and bankers.
"Those who fail to learn the financial lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them in the future. If we really want to create a new inclusive financial world order we must start by arming people with the knowledge that equips them to make the best choices about their financial well-being," Burgess added.
"We do not want to see a return to a time when lenders took advantage of customers by flogging them single premium payment protection insurance when much cheaper cover was available but consumers lacked the knowledge to calculate that they would save hundreds of pounds by simply going to an independent provider like British Insurance."
Website: http://www.burgesses.com/
Mattel Children's Foundation Awards $10,000 Grant
Spread the Word Nevada: Kids to Kids, is the recipient of a $10,000 grant awarded by Mattel Children's Foundation. The grant will allow Spread the Word Nevada, children's literacy project, to continue the mission of adopting elementary schools in the Clark County School District deemed at-risk, in order to serve the disadvantaged children and their families in southern Nevada. After the adoption, new and gently used books donated by individuals, community organizations, local businesses, and corporations are distributed to the at-risk youth. At this time, sixteen elementary schools benefit from monthly book distributions.
Mattel Children's Foundation received over 1,100 applications for the grant from organizations through out the United States. The Domestic Grant program supports "healthy lives and active play, literacy, girls' empowerment and joy for children in need" - visit www.mattel.com. Spread the Word Nevada was one of twenty organizations awarded with the grant. Mattel recognized Spread the Word Nevada, as an effective and innovative program serving the community.
Kids to Kids, a flagship program of Spread the Word Nevada, Inc., a nonprofit, 501(c) (3) corporation, serves at-risk children and helps them create home library collections of books to read and share with family members. While developing a love of reading, these libraries promote future academic achievement and higher self-esteem, which impacts lifelong success. Since 2001, the program has distributed over one million books and has served more than 109,000 children in the Las Vegas Valley and Clark County School District. Website: www.spreadthewordnevada.org
