Popular Books
- Judith Kerr - The Tiger Who Came To Tea
- Janet and Allan Ahlberg - The Jolly Postman or Other People's Letters
- John Burningham - Would You Rather?
- Rod Campbell - Dear Zoo
- Eric Hill - Where's Spot?
The majority of these books have been published for years, and are old time favourites. The fact that they are old means they are classics - they are often passed down generations of families and have sentimental value to them. Typical features of these children's books are visually orientated. With conventions such as images, bright colours and interactive flaps revealing parts of the story. The purpose of these conventions is to match the intellectual capability of the target market. Typically, children aged 5 and lower are more interested in images, and not many words. With reference to Bruner's ideology, we can say that children encode visual based information, because it's the limit to what they can understand at this stage.
The most popular authors for children in their infant years tend to be:
The most popular authors for children in their infant years tend to be:
- Michael Bond - A Bear Called Paddington
- Roald Dahl - The BFG
- Francesca Simon and Tony Ross - Horrid Henry
- Charlotte's Web - E B White
- Enid Blyton - The Enchanted Wood
The most successful conventions of these types of books, for infants, are the lighthearted storylines along with the illustrations. Because the audiences are still going to be young, they are interested in words and syntax on a page. However, if it's too complicated they will lose interest in the book. The popular books for this age category are mostly of a fictional style, such as the BFG or Charlotte's Web. The standard narrative with imaginary characters causes the readers to still be creative and imaginative.
The most popular authors for children in their junior years tend to be:
- Michelle Magorian - Goodnight Mr Tom
- C S Lewis - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
- Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl
- J R R Tolkien - The Hobbit
- Louis Sachar - Holes
These books are considerably longer in length than the narratives written for younger audiences (early childhood, infancy). They have no pictures in them, and are specifically for older children because of the development in sophistication. While a lot of them still revolve around a fictional narrative, there is more maturity in these texts. Juniors will be developing their own reading and writing, so using these as templates will help them to do so.
When I was younger, I remember being very fond of interactive and bright books in my early childhood. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle was one of my favourites. The main reasons for this being that there were bog pictures on every page, each with the caterpillar on. This made the book familiar to me so I kept going back to it. Furthermore, there were a few short sentences throughout the book, this meant that my mum or dad could read me the book before falling asleep at night. I had the hardback version, meaning the pages were nice to handle and durable.
Bibliography:
http://www.booktrust.org.uk/books/children/booklists/241/
Reading + Phonetics Schemes
The most popular scheme in primary schools at the moment is synthetic phonetics. Popular schemes include Jolly Phonics and Floppy's Phonics. This is when, with help from the teacher, children are told to break words down into their individual phonemes. For example, 'dog' would be broken down to form the sounds 'd' 'o' 'g' and spoken aloud to form the full word. By using these steps, it is a process which makes the development of phonetics easier.
Typically, teachers will begin with single letter sounds (s,a,t,p,i,n) and once developed, will go on to learning more difficult, two letter sounds such as 'ou', 'oi' and 'ai'.
Eventually, once all of the phonemes are learnt and practised aloud, it will become easier for the children to repeat words without the need for guidance from an adult. However, when new words are introduced, they will follow the same process to learn the word. They will 'decode' the word into their separate phonemes, and build them back up to form the word.
A negative trait of this approach is that these processes will simply not work for all words. Slightly trickier words which are non-standard and don't comply with usual regular rules will mean that children find them harder to decode. Therefore, they will have to be guided with context on how to apply rules to different sounds. Furthermore, as classes will be going at one pace with each other, certain individuals may progress faster than others. If this is the case, they will be bored in class because they already know the words. To resolve this, parents usually get in touch with the teachers and extra books and tasks are sent home to assure the child is meeting their full potential.
Advantages of this scheme include the fact that children can interact with teachers face to face. Often, this way of learning means that children can develop skills actively. So, by having the opportunity to communicate with adults, they can ask questions and be corrected any time they need.
The most popular reading scheme in primary schools across the UK is the Oxford Reading Tree, the home of Biff, Chip and Kipper. These are a set of books intended to help children learn how to read, with the option of home learning just from reading the books. Biff, Chip and Kipper are characters in a set of books which all tell the story of adventures that they have been on. These books are supposed to be an enjoyable and fun way of picking up language. There are also books to help children decode sounds and words, all with the comfort of learning in your own home.
Advantages of these books are that there is an option to pay a set price and know your child will have the full collection of books. This will provide a learning experience that 80% of the UK also use in primary schools. The Oxford Reading Tree provides a fun way of learning how to read, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry books.
However, this learning experience may not provide as much support as other schemes. As the majority of the learning will be done through reading, there will be not so much of an active process involved. Therefore, even though children can ask where appropriate, it's not being given and taught to them in the same way as decoding the words with teachers.
Bibliography:
Miscues
During the development of a child's speech, they will undoubtedly make mistakes along the way (miscues). By taking on the role of teacher or parent, it is a duty to correct and notice these miscues in order for the child to advance in their speech.
Common miscues recorded by adults tend to be:
- Mixing up the word order of a sentence - often happens with high frequency words
- Additions of unnecessary words - often when they are making sense of a text
- Omission - can indicate the child is reading too fast
- Changing tenses mid-sentence - can indicate the child does not understand tenses
- Substitution of a word - can indicate a child does not understand the existing word
- Repetition - can indicate a text is too difficult
Caregivers will often notice these miscues without having to look for them. If they are a regular occurrence, they will correct the child subtly until they say the statement in the right form. They may do this through echoing, modelling or positive/negative reinforcement. Many people record a child reciting a text they've never seen before. This way, when recording the speech, there are miscues made which may not have been noticed if the text had been rehearsed.
Bibliography:
Some good research. I was looking for where you got this from: "children are told to break words down into their individual letters. For example, 'dog' would be broken down to form the sounds 'd' 'o' 'g'" but it's not on either of the bibliographical links for that section. Ensure you are not saying letters when you mean phonemes (check phoneme/grapheme if necessary and try and always use the terminology).
ReplyDeleteTo develop, look more into the pedagogical debates about synthetic phonics and reading schemes vs more integrated approaches and quality children's fiction.
Very informative article indeed. Thanks for sharing new techniques to learn new things.
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