The mark-my-time stopwatch bookmark

Please give us your ideas about how to use this reading tool.

It’s a bookmark with a stopwatch on it. So - kind of cool.
As soon as my son saw it, he wanted to use it right away – for sure, that’s a good thing.

But then I got thinking. If I was a kid who wasn’t that into reading, would I want to have that inexorable clock, ticking down the minutes? Mightn’t it make reading more of a chore?

So I spoke with some teachers at my son’s school. Here are their ideas:
*It’s good, because the child knows that when time’s up, they’re done for the day.
*You can use it to “count up” the minutes – and give them a reward after a certain amount of time.
*Kids can set it to two minutes. When the two minutes are up, that’s their cue to stop and think about what they’ve read. In this way, it could be a reading comprehension tool.

So I’m thinking that the mark-my-time bookmark could be really great for some kids. Anyway, for about $10 (or $8.95 US), it’s worth a shot if it’ll get your kid reading.

Disclosure: When I read about this product online and decided I wanted to blog about it, I contacted the company and they sent me the product to review. I haven't received any monetary compensation, and can write whatever I want about the product - if it was no good, I'd tell you. (Or probably just not blog about it.)

You probably have other ideas about how to use this product, or some other kind of "reading-timing" device. Please post 'em in the comments!

Yes, I took this picture in my garden. Don't ask me why.

Reading gets easier

As kids learn to read it becomes, quite literally, easier for them.

Younger children exert more effort and have to activate more of their brain. As children get older, and read better, they can use less effort, and less of their brain's real estate, to understand what they're reading.

To decipher letters and words, the beginning reader has to use a large amount of cortical space in the visual areas of both sides of the brain. They use a slower, less efficient pathway (the "dorsal route") to decipher parts of words.

As kids get better at reading, the brain uses a more efficient route (the "ventral" or "lower route") in its left hemisphere.

"Once we know a word well, we no longer need to analyze it in a labour-intensive way," writes author Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid, The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

As kids get better at reading, the decoding process becomes more automatic, and the brain can concentrate on higher reading functions like comprehension.

Why do we need to know this?

So we can assure our kids, "It gets easier."

'Cause it literally does.

So it's kind of like exercise. When you're out of shape and you need exercise the most, it's the hardest - you're pushing all that extra weight, your muscles are flabby. When you're in shape, your metabolism is working better and your muscles are strong and exercising's easier.

All of this scientific-brain-information was taken from Proust and the Squid, by Maryanne Wolf. Once again, I have read and processed the hard stuff so you don't have to. No, no, your coming here is payment enough.

Photo by zetson.

The Twilight series

What you need to know about Twilight.

So you’ve heard about the Twilight series and you’re wondering if you should get the books for your daughter. There are four books in the series: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn.

Here’s what you need to know about Twilight:

1) What is it about?
Bella (a 17-year-old girl) falls passionately in love with Edward (a vampire who looks 17 but is in fact over 100 years old). Together, they face dangers including other vampires who want to kill Bella, and werewolves (the vampires’ natural enemy.) To complicate things, Bella’s best friend, Jacob, is a werewolf.

2) Will my daughter read them?
Yes. If you’re trying to get your teenaged daughter to enjoy reading, these’ll do it. They contain everything girls love. Well-developed characters and an “emotional plot” – girls like books that allow them to follow the thinking of the characters and understand their motivations. This has it in spades.

3) What’s good about them?
They’re a quick and easy read – like a better-than-average romance novel. They’ll keep your daughter interested, from one chapter to the next and one book to the next. The characters will stay with you.

4) What else is good?
My teenaged friend, Megan, appreciates Bella and Edward’s strong family values. They unselfishly try to protect each other and their families throughout the books. Also, Edward is a “good” vampire, part of a coven that has sworn off killing humans, opting for big game instead. (They call themselves “vegetarians.”)

5) What should I watch out for?
I'd recommend that you read the books and discuss them with your daughter. Emotions run very high in the Twilight series. Bella and Edward fall “irrevocably” in love after laying eyes on each other just a couple of times. In very short order, Bella is ready to die for Edward, and vice-versa. It’s all very dramatic, romantic and highly glamourized. Remember, this is essentially an older man in the body of a 17-year-old, and he admits that vampires are “the most efficient predators.” If Edward was, say, 40, how would we feel about the plot? That’s the stuff you need to discuss with your daughter – just to kind of underline the difference between fiction and real life.

The other thing that’s kind of iffy is that Bella, although she is presented as quite mature, tends to hide things from her parents and make big life-and-death decisions without doing a whole lot of research first.

6) The movie and the merchandise.
There is one movie (available on DVD) and another on the way. The author’s website is www.stepheniemeyer.com. There are also about a zillion “fansites” about Twilight. Twilight is huge – think “Harry Potter” huge.

7) Cool facts you can tell your daughter.
*The interesting spelling of Stephenie Meyer’s first name comes from her father, Stephen.
*She has brothers named Seth and Jacob (both names of prominent werewolves in the books).
*She is working on a fifth book, Midnight Sun, which is Twilight written from Edward’s perspective. However, it was leaked on the Internet and that bummed her out. Here’s a link to the author’s statement about the leak. She is still planning to publish the book, likely this year. Update: Nope, she's not doing the Edward book now. Blame the leak. Instead, she'll publish a book from Bree Tanner's perspective (from Eclipse). Read about it here.

Something that bums me out - the books contain some spelling mistakes. (Who’s instead of whose, the odd missing word, and disturbingly, "Bella and I" when it should have been "Bella and me"). But I guess it’s inevitable since the books are, like, 600 pages long. But next time – Stephenie, I can recommend a great proofreader (http://www.writingink.ca/), hint, hint.

Cartooning for Kids

When kids write... they read.

Adventures in Cartooning is a great book that teaches kids how to do their own cartoons.
And they don't have to be great at drawing, either.

The book uses an engaging story line to take the reader through the process of building their own cartoon.

Before they even realize it, they've learned how to create a logical story line, use panels, and add thought bubbles, movement lines and all those other useful cartoon gimmicks.

My son got drawn into the story, which is about an elf who teaches a knight about cartooning, as the knight searches for a dragon to slay. Before long, he ran downstairs to show us his own cartoon.

Learning and he didn't even realize he was learning. Ya gotta love it.

Here's an online preview of the book to get you hooked. Hey, that rhymes. Thanks, Boingboing.net for the heads-up on this one.

How to get your boy reading

Get him this book. I'm not kidding.

This is the "perfect storm" of a book for boys.

It's got what boys love - facts.
Short facts - fact bites, actually.
And those facts are about video games.
And there are cool pictures of people doing crazy things.
And the cover has metallic words.

You get your boy this book, and he will read it.

Unless he's not into video games, of course, in which case - get him this book.

"Project Bookmark" in Toronto

And to think, I was going to stop following Mayor Miller's tweets.

I'm glad I didn't, because today he was tweeting about an amazing enterprise called Project Bookmark Canada.

The project takes advantage of the incredible array of books set in Canadian locations. As the Project Bookmark website says, "when you walk through this country’s villages, towns and cities and explore the buildings and neighbourhoods, you are walking on fabled ground."

The organization is placing permanent markers, bearing fragments of text from Canadian literature, in the exact spots the text refers to.

Today they launched the first marker, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. The text is about a nun who falls from an unfinished bridge into the arms of a man, suspended below. The marker is located on the north-east corner of Toronto's Bloor Viaduct (near Broadview subway station).

OK, that's one for adults. The one they're doing after that (within the year, they're hoping) is Dennis Lee's children's poem, The Cat and the Wizard, at Casa Loma.

This will be an incredible way to view the city - and eventually the country - from a literary perspective, especially with your kids.

Now seriously, mayor. I love ya, but either you do too much in a day (entirely likely) or you're just over-tweeting. So maybe slow down, take a breather... knock it down to say, oh, just five tweets a day? Unless they're about literature, in which case go nuts.

Great game: Tick Tock Boom

Tick… Tock… Boom is an awesome game my son discovered.

You flip over a card that has two or three letters on it: for instance, OU or IRD or REW. Then, each person has to say a word that includes those letters. The catch is, after you say your word, you pass the next person a “ticking time bomb.” Whoever’s holding it when it makes its hissing sound, loses.

It’s a fast-paced game (a whole game takes about 15 minutes) and even more fun than you’d think, because inevitably someone accidentally comes up with some crazy word like “glarg” and then everyone starts laughing as the person madly tries to think of a real word.

I wasn’t too sure about the ticking time bomb. But it’s quite quiet, and it just ends up being more like a round, black timer. There’s also a “junior” version of the game that involves pictures rather than words.

In a pinch, you could make a version of this game yourself, using flip cards and an egg timer. But this game is quite well made and worth the money.

I went to the manufacturer’s website, Piatnik, but I couldn’t find the exact version of this game. But I did find it for sale here, at the Cyberboutique of the Canadian Museum of Civilization. I’ll contact Piatnik and see if I can find out more because I’m wondering if they have more word games. Stay tuned.