Talking about Films and Books to Learn More about the World

When adults talk with kids, kids can learn information that helps them understand more about the world and more about how to express that knowledge—in speech and writing. Sometimes it’s hard to get a conversation started, but almost everyone likes to talk about films they’ve watched. Making comparisons between books and their film adaptations can really get parents and their children talking.

The film of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is a successful adaptation partly because the short novel has enough material that the creators of the film didn’t have to make up too much new material (unlike the crew that made a forgettable film out of the memorable children’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are). Fantastic Mr. Fox is a favourite of kids who’ve learned to read words efficiently and now enjoy vicarious adventures through reading chapter books, some kids as early as grade two and most by grade four. Young readers strongly identify with the enterprising Mr. Fox as he battles the local mean-spirited farmers. A little preparation before heading off to the cinema or loading the DVD player will help kids learn a lot as well as enjoy a rousing story.

Before viewing the film, read the book together. If your youngster can read aloud 99 percent of the text with correct word recognition, listen to her read the book. You can slip in any words missed or paused on as long as long as she can read at least 95% of the words correctly. If the book is harder than that, you read it to your son or daughter.

Watch the film together and talk about it afterwards. If you refer to notes you took about significant similarities and differences, you’re sharing a powerful technique for understanding and remembering information and writing about it. But even if you don’t, you’re demonstrating how we discuss works of art. That knowledge will come in useful every time your scholar-in-training studies literature at school.

Since books often lead to movie adaptations, families will have lots to compare and contrast, lots of opportunities to argue for whether book or film is better. Preschoolers can discuss the very different way that Curious George leaves Africa in the book and film. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs will work best with middle schoolers. By junior high, some students will enjoy comparing adult novels like Kathy Reich’s Deja Dead to the Bones TV series based on it. Parents, if you play your cards right, you can continue your exclusive book club into high school and compare the HBO Dexter series to Jeff Lindsay's first novel, Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Make it a family tradition at gatherings to swap book-DVD combinations like I Love You, Beth Cooper, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and Thank You for Smoking. That reading and conversation build vocabulary and information making it easier to understand and read about the world.

Baby First TV—Is Watching Television Good for Babies and Toddlers?

I’m a little older than the desired demographic, but as an early childhood educator, I am fascinated by the new cable station, Baby First TV (230 on Rogers Cable). Is it a good idea to encourage babies and toddlers to watch television?

Some programming delights: I watched babies and parents playing with stuffed-toy dogs as they listened to “Oh, Where, Oh Where, Has My Little Dog Gone?” Karaoke-style lyrics show on the TV screen as first a woman and then a man sing the lyrics. Parents will surely scrounge up a toy dog to join in this hide-and-seek game.

Some programming mimics real-life activities: A voice tells how to place the animal pieces into a 3-D wooden puzzle. Toddlers who watch will doubtless learn more quickly how to complete puzzles like this. And the quiet, steady voice encourages a powerful reflective learning style. In “Peek-a-Boo, I See You!” an appealing creature hides and reappears from behind a bureau. Parent viewers are reminded how much babies like this game. Babies can even watch a kaleidoscope on the TV; the colours and motion are sure to capture their attention. So will a simple segment showing a mobile going round—from the perspective of an infant lying in a crib—and another just displaying a babbling brook.

Some of the programming is simply puzzling: An animated boy without a violin body visits a house where a maestro with a face like a music stand displaying an open score gives him a violin front that becomes the trunk of his body. Talking animals made of fruits and vegetables tunnel through the Earth and walk upside-down when they reach the other side. I’m not sure why adults so often seem to think children will find this anti-science more fascinating than real life, say the birth of a colt or the growth of a rainstorm.

Is it good or bad for babies and toddlers to watch such TV? I worry that infants might hurt their vision development if they watch for a long time: Is it good for them to gaze for a long time at just one focal length? And the incessant music—so much of it sounding like a music box—may cause infants to just ignore it. It’s almost like the creators are afraid of natural sounds. Surely kids would enjoy hearing the water coursing about the stones of the video of the brook! Kids do learn from observation: A child who’s looked at Thomas the Tank Engine may be startled by the size of a real train, but she already knows something about them. I wish the channel showed more segments of gardeners, bricklayers, bakers, bus drivers, grocery store clerks—with natural sounds. To encourage an appreciation of music, why not show more video of real musicians making music? Lucky infants will live with parents who occasionally watch Baby First TV with them and just chat about the curious things they see. Really, how different is that from looking at a picture book together? The station should also close-caption all the shows: Deaf and hard-of-hearing parents are watching, too! And spend the money to properly capitalize and punctuate the captions. Displaying captions will even help some viewers learn to read.

Terry Learns to Read

Here's a story of a little girl I watched learn to read in the other half of the semi-detached house we purchased when we were just starting a family.

The summer before kindergarten, Terry learned to read from her Aunt Becky, who had just completed grade one and showed her regard for school by stealing every reader she had used. Becky's method was simple. Beginning with the easiest book, Becky read aloud each sentence, touching under each word as she read it aloud. Then she told Terry to point to each word as she read the sentence. If Terry made a miscue, Becky lightly slapped Terry's hand. "No," Becky would say and read the sentence again. I often eavesdropped on the daily lessons as Becky led Terry though the books from easiest to harder and harder.

Terriy read so well by September of her kindergarten year, the school recommended that Teryy skip to grade one. (If the school had really supported this acceleration, they would have recommended Terry attend kindergarten even though she could read. The school should have realized that the grade-eleven school-drop-out parents--Terry was on the way--hated school and would probably do the opposite of any request.)

I videotaped Terry early in K at a faculty of education facility and her word recognition skills were at the sixth grade level. She could pronounce a lot of words correctly in passages harder than that, but they didn't make any sense to her. On three IQ tests, Terry scored dead on average.

Her family was very sexist, favouring a younger brother. During the time I knew the family, Dad was in and out of jail for theft.

How did Terry do later in her school career? She ended up specializing in hairdressing at the vocational school and left the year she turned 16.

Rapidly recognizing in print words you can speak or understand is essential to progress toward proficient reading, but not enough. A student must also continue growing a vocabulary and learning more about the world, particularly the information essential for school success. Learning this background information means that a child is likelier to know the information the writer of, for example, a textbook, assumes she needn't state explicity because all the readers will know this. Terry just didn't live with a family that talked about the world at supper, watched National Geographic specials, supported extra-curricular activities or museum visits.

If you have a story of someone learning to read, I would like to hear it.

More Authentic Communication, Less Make-Work

Teachers are doing so many things right in primary classrooms I’ve been in lately. Perhaps oddly for a literacy educator, what I like best is that almost all teachers in classrooms today interact with the children in a warm and respectful way and the kids are almost invariably well behaved. They listen, they do their work, they enjoy one another’s company, they like to chat in discussion and at recess or during nutrition break.

Teachers are reading wonderful stories and interesting factual books on topics that children need to know about. Teachers and students are reading and writing together, discussing ways to understand and create text. More often than in the past, teachers are guiding students’ reading and writing of text of appropriate level. And more children are comfortable inventing spellings and taking a stab at writing independently and finding just-right books that they can read independently. Teachers have clearly been working to implement the Early Reading Strategy of the Ontario Ministry of Education.

I wish more educators were replacing small-one-size-fits-all assignments—however clever—and running language arts periods more like production meetings or workshops. It’s not that language arts lessons don’t have a place. Teachers are powerfully assisting students when they teach brief lessons that help children learn skills or information they need to communicate. But the students learn best when they are engaged in talking and reading and writing for extended projects.

Writing short book reports is a common activity in third grade. Often times students create an illustration and write a short commentary. But consider how teachers could extend this to elicit more reading and writing. After the students have drafted reviews—and why not access a database and read professional reviews and download from Amazon a small graphic of the book cover as a part of the prewriting—they could type them into an Excel spreadsheet worksheet and submit them to an editor. The editor could post them to a master worksheet that students could read but not alter.

One advantage to a writing assignment bigger than work that can be started and concluded in a day is that little time need be spent explaining the work compared to how long the work persists. Consider the ongoing work required when older students help younger to produce a class newsletter with work edited to a polished level. Similarly, students who enjoy creating blogs to explore their thinking may read and write a lot. Students need little encouragement to write and read one another’s Another long term project can be guiding students to help create learning materials for their own classmates or students in another grade. There’s no reason students can divvy up projects and find relevant text and graphics and organize them into a presentation that can be saved as a starting point for the next students.

When students want to create high-quality materials that are personally interesting and will be read by other people, they are also more receptive to practical help to do their job better.

Baby Steps to Reading

I have a life-long fascination with how human beings of any age learn to read. I love books, and it's great to be able to share that with other people.

When babies and toddlers see the adults in their lives reading, laughing, and talking about books, they want to explore that world also. We can help them do that in the normal course of playing and talking with them.

I'm currently writing a book to share what I've learned about teaching young children to read, and I'm setting up this blog as a place to explore my thoughts as I develop the book and to invite comments and stories from parents and pre-school educators.