What's Going on in Your Child's Brain When You Read Them a Story?
npr.org
npr.org
Hearing Robert Munsch read his own stories can be a revelation. He puts so much energy into the reading, in a way that kids seem to really enjoy. He also often deviates from the published text. Listening to him made me willing to take a lot more risks as a reader.
I read "Paper Bag Princess" to my daughter's kindergarten class, and then played them Munsch's rendition [0]. Whenever I go back, the kids ask if they can hear an author reading their own book.
I'm so glad to hear that! Especially with books I've read them many times, I'm going to get bored if I don't start taking liberties with the text.
I don’t think I could keep a straight face for more than a couple of minutes at most if I tried to insert my own ideas into a story XD
I discovered this because we got my kid the books first, which I read to her a bunch of times, and then one day we sat down to watch the show together, which I'd actually never seen, and realized that the first two episodes I'd already read to her as books.
What was really cool though was that she had a much deeper understanding of those first couple episodes than the subsequent episodes, and actually preferred the books to the show.
Anyway, my whole point is that my single point of data seems to support this research -- that she processed better when read to.
For example, if I'm a PoC I'm likely to see some of the characters as PoC as well even if they're not explicitly described so. So many other things like "what do these dragons look like" and "how tall is this character relative to others" etc. Because we were actively involved in creating the world, we'd be more attached to it too.
On a related note, I have been reading Judea Pearl's new book, "The book of Why" (truly wonderful book incidentally). I think that stories must, in some way, help us learn counterfactual reasoning. That is, help us create alternate versions of reality to conduct "what if" experiments in our mind.
I like to think my kids enjoy devices and digital stimuli in moderations, and do try to read to them often, but I wish there was a decent way of checking their development.
They’ve been a thing for 8-10 years, and the window for kids to be influenced this way is only a couple of years, so we’ve had several cohorts of kids grow from 1-4 in the smartphone era.
Before: 3rd party tracking happens; you don't know about it; you don't get the chance to decline to read the article before 3rd party tracking happens.
Now: 3rd party happens if you allow it to happen; you know when it's going to happen; you get the choice to allow it or not.
How is this worse?
Signs my kid has learned and used, without a lot of prompting from us: "All done" "Please" (also means 'yes' -- "Do you want jelly?" "please") "help" "water" "milk" "food"
We read a lot, and always do sign and speech together. Eldest is in Secondary School (UK) now; if it retarded his speech/language skills as some claim it might then it didn't matter because he and middle child are highly literate (several years advanced in reading age).
Mum, Dad (none of my kids bothered with that sign much), food, drink, milk (both kinds), sleep, tired, hungry, more, finished .. all useful starter words.
From 2+ we start faltering with signed vocab so sign (a modified and simplified BSL somewhat of our own) tends to naturally give way to speech -- I mean what's the sign for gazelle, or pneumatic drill, or to say "it tastes bad" rather than just that they "don't like" whatever new food we're trying to get them to try ...
How do you start potty at 6 months?
And how do you go about teaching signs?
>Infant potty training: 0-12 months
>It sounds bizarre to many Westerners. But for parents in places like India, China, and East Africa (deVries and deVries 1977; Boucke 2002), the traditional potty training age is early infancy. In these societies, parents learn to recognize their babies’ body signals and to use these signals to anticipate when their babies eliminate.
>When the infant is ready to go, the parent holds him over a sink, bowl, toilet, or the open ground. As the infant voids, the parent makes a characteristic sound or gesture. The baby learns to associate this parental sign with voiding, and, eventually, the parental sign becomes an invitation to void. When the baby feels the urge to go, he learns to hold back for a brief time until his parent gives him the “all clear."
First child was in terry-nappies, and compostables at night. Latest toddler is in compostables all the time -- terry definitely seem (on my low-number study) to help associate weeing and the feeling of it starting. Nappy free time in the garden or at the beach will help them associate the feeling with the actions too.
Sign, we knew some BSL so started with simplified versions of signs (removed all hand shapes, so Mum is a flat hand on side of head rather than an M-hand; exaggerate movements, make sure signs are differentiated). Just speak and do signs for anything they'd usefully learn - food, more, mum-milk, sleep, potty perhaps as an opening gambit. From 7-9 months they should be able to pick up at least a dozen signs and by 10 months be signing back; obviously that's assuming normal development and consistent use by caregivers.
Most sign books use ASL, which can be confusing if you go to a class and all the signs are different.
The potty and sign go together, giving then a way to communicate their need and a way to greater comfort - I imagine they play off each other.
We have other friends with similar aged kids who's kids get incredibly frustrated when they cannot communicate something like that and just scream until the parents five then what they want.
Our kids did use it both differently, and different amounts, but it was a minor helpful extra for us.
I find it rather strange to impose a defined vocabulary on them. If such a toddler language would actually be of any use to solve an actual problem, I think evolution would have already found a (then well known) solution.
Which makes more sense to you? Reading a wall of text, or looking at a properly formatted table and graph where your brain can study and make sense of trends?
Would you rather have a wall of text or audio description of the human arm, or would you rather have one illustration to distill the relevant features?
Children's brains, I assume, work like adult brains, and this article agrees.
As every parent can attest to, there are just times when putting a kid in front of a TV is helpful (airplane rides, when caring for other children, when you need a break etc) so it would be nice to retain some brain activity, or as you say, meet in the middle.
As VR/AR UI/UX design becomes a thing, there's a body of expertise around multimedia learning that will need to be integrated.
It's second time I've seen something like that today. The first one was even minimally, yet aesthetically styled. It's awesome! I wouldn't expect GDPR to increase UX of the Web so much :)
The url is identical. I've noticed this happening quite a bit. Here's another example, in this case an article I posted then someone posting the identical article a few hours later:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17138682
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17143429
@dang, what gives?
> Are reposts ok?
> If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.
> Please don't delete and repost the same story; accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges. Deletion is intended for things that shouldn't have been submitted in the first place.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17154175
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17157649
Both posts are ~6 hours apart, each one has a decent number of points and comments, and each one points to the exact same url.