In Charlotte, NC, four out of 10 students aren’t reading at grade level. This setback has contributed to a poor high school exit rate: One third of students won’t graduate on time, or at all.
In an effort to improve literacy rates, the local YMCAs have established the Y Readers Program to help the city’s youngest readers overcome their learning obstacles and improve their self-confidence. The program works because of its team of dedicated volunteer tutors, including one in particular: Jeff Balek, a man who also has a major obstacle. He can’t see.
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As Good News Networkreports, even though Balek has been blind since birth, that doesn’t stop him from teaching his second and third graders how to read.
“When the kids find out I’m blind, they ask me all kinds of questions,” he says in the inspiring video below. “I think they get a good kick out of it.”
How does he do it?
As his students read the words printed on the page, Balek follows along in Braille. When his students stumble on a word, he is able to help them figure out the pronunciation.
“I love seeing the kids progress,” Balek says.
And without a hint of irony, he adds, “I get inspired because I see them overcoming their obstacles.”
[ph]
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Tag: Literacy
How 3D Printing Can Teach Blind Kids to Read
It goes without saying that reading to kids is vitally important. So much so, in fact, that a couple of weeks ago, the American Society of Pediatrics issued a policy statement urging parents to read to their children every single day — starting in infancy and continuing through kindergarten at least. The organization also advised pediatricians to stress the importance of this during appointments and to hand out books to their patients, especially those from low-income households.
But what about visually-impaired children who face special challenges when it comes to reading? Not only do they have a hard time seeing the words, but they also miss out on all the colorful drawings in picture books, which go a long way towards helping young kids connect with a story.
For those youngsters, researchers at the University of Colorado have come up with a solution: They’re using 3-D printers to create tactile picture books.
Tom Yeh, an assistant professor of computer science, has been leading the team on this project for two years. They’ve created three-dimensional versions of classic picture books, such as “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” “Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?” and “Goodnight Moon.”
One happy user, Michelle Bateson, who reads the books with her three-year-old visually impaired daughter Elodie, told Sarah Kuta of the Boulder Daily Camera, “Elodie loves exploring the tiniest details. Her tiny fingers are so sensitive, she finds marks and lines I can’t see.”
According to Kuta, individual artists and the American Printing House for the Blind have been producing tactile picture books for years, but the process is labor-intensive and expensive. The University of Colorado team’s efforts to produce them with 3-D printers could give all blind kids access to these books. As the price of 3-D printers decrease, the researchers hope that families can use the online library they are creating to print books for themselves.
If you’re curious about what tactile books look like and you’re in Colorado, you can see several examples of “Harold and the Purple Crayon” created by students in Yeh’s upper-level computer sciences classes. The pages are on display at the University of Colorado’s Gemmill Library of Engineering, Mathematics and Physics.
“There’s not too many projects where you can see a very clear combination of engineering, societal impact and art,” Yeh told Kuta. “It gives all students an option to communicate through design and 3-D models.”
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Meet the Celebrity Chefs Cooking Up a Unique Way to Improve Literacy
As the old maxim goes, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.
Now, a new literacy program in Philadelphia hopes this proves true not just for men, but for women and kids, too. And instead of romantic love, they’re looking to foster a love of reading.
In the City of Brotherly Love, more than half a million adults are illiterate or low-literate — that’s more than half of the adult population of the city. So the Free Library of Philadelphia is partnering with local Iron Chef alums Jose Garces and Marc Vetri to launch a non-traditional, cooking-based literacy program. The Culinary Literacy Center opened June 2, offering cooking and literacy classes to adults, kids, teenagers, and ESL students of all ages.
“The beauty of culinary literacy is that it’s basic literacy skills — math and science — and you get to make something. That tactile part of when you’re learning something is so important,” Siobhan Reardon, the president of the Free Library of Philadelphia told Francis Hilario of the Philadelphia Business Journal. “For us, the role of the library is about the grand experiment of bringing people to literacy, and that’s what we’re doing here.”
Garces, an Ecuadorian-American chef, restaurant owner, and of course, Iron Chef winner, has been helping immigrants for years through his Garces Foundation. He sees this venture as aligning with his foundation’s mission of helping kids and teaching people to read by following and writing recipes.
The Parkway Central Library in Philadelphia is in the middle of a major renovation that included adding the Culinary Literacy Center, with its three ovens, walk-in refrigerator and 16 burners. Currently, the library is working with Garces and Ventri to get a school curriculum developed for the fall.
With any luck, after their cooking classes, the new students will be inspired to take home a few books from the library.
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The Bicycle Is Not Just for Exercising Anymore
The summer slide isn’t a piece of playground equipment or even a toy at the local town pool.
While it sounds like something fun, it’s anything but that. Rather, the summer slide is something that parents need to fight against during these warm months.
The summer slide is the well-documented decrease in reading ability that occurs when kids don’t engage in learning over the summer. When children take a break from reading, their abilities recede and as that loss compounds over the years, some kids are left years behind their actual grade level.
To combat the summer slide, one community is looking to a bright yellow bicycle for answers. The city of Longmont, Colorado is launching a book-bicycle-centered outreach effort to try to reach kids whose parents don’t bring them to the library. Friends of the Longmont Library funded the $6,000 BookCycle that features a bubble machine and handle-mounted pinwheels, as well as a cargo hold for dozens of books and a Wi-Fi station that anyone can use.
Library employees will pedal the BookCycle to public events this summer, where they will host story times; they’ll also have the ability to make library cards on the spot. “We’re hoping the mobility will allow us to reach underserved areas and bring the books straight to them,” Elektra Greer, head of Longmont Library’s children and teens department, told Whitney Bryen of the Longmont Times-Call.
People in this Rocky Mountain community can expect to find the BookCycle at the farmer’s market, free public concerts, the First Friday Art Walk on Main Street, and many other events.
Now the librarians just need to learn to steer it — which can be difficult when the BookCycle is loaded up with books. So in preparation for pedaling season, the staff is taking lessons from Longmont Bicycles.
With any luck, they will return to the library from each of their outings with an empty BookCycle, leaving behind many kids with their noses buried in books.
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These Reading Programs Are Going to the Dogs
Early readers need encouragement, not judgement. And what’s more reassuring than a wagging tail, sweet puppy dog eyes, and a rapt audience that will never utter a discouraging word?
Nothing that we can think of. And that’s exactly why innovative programs across the country are bringing man’s best friend into schools and libraries for reading lessons. The well-trained, albeit furry, audience members give kids an outlet for their newfound phonics, and the pooches — with their toddler-like need for attention — lap it up.
In Augusta, Wisconsin, the Tail Waggin’ Tutors visited Augusta Elementary School, giving children 15-minute stints to read to a pooch. “We look for every possible way to motivate kids to love to read,” reading specialist Nancy Forseth told the local Leader-Telegram. “Who doesn’t love dogs?” Clearly, most children, as some 90 kids signed up for the program, she said.
In Anchorage, Alaska, through the Pawsitive Reading Program, pets visit a local library once a month, the Anchorage Daily News reports. The kids don’t even realize they’re working and learning sometimes. “She thinks she’s helping the dogs to read,” one mom says, of her precocious tyke.
The added bonus? (Beyond the reading thing, that is.) Shy kids, and those fearful of dogs, slowly start to come out of their shell.
For both dogs and their owners, these programs are staffed solely with volunteers. But for those involved, the petting, hugs, and smiling kids are certainly payment enough.
Plus, who can resist the photo from the Kasson, Minnesota, Post-Bulletin of a kid reading the modern classic adventures of Pete the Cat to an attentive, dog-show-worthy border collie?
Certainly not us.
Can Comic Books Help Spread Public Safety Messages?
It’s a paradox of public safely: often those most in need of learning about health and safety risks and solutions are the most difficult to reach. They may not even be able to read.
The answer may be pictures — they’re worth 1,000 words, after all. Specifically, comic books, with easily understood drawings and messages that appeal across generations.
Enter Miguel Lopez and his wife, Helen Anaya, of Chandler, Ariz. Lopez used to work for a bank, and he remembered counterparts in Mexico using comic books to teach customers about saving and investing. The comics reached those who couldn’t read well.
Lopez and Anaya thought, why not bring this idea to the U.S.?
And so a genre that typically entertains kids and collectors may now reach a whole new audience — with some of the most important lessons of their lives.
The couple launched Storynamics in 2006, and they’ve hooked up with governments, schools, and other organizations to produce comic books about serious topics: hand washing, the West Nile Virus, water safety, diabetes, even how to deal with bat bites. The comics are printed in Spanish and English, with pictures to help reach those who struggle to read.
“One of the… significant challenges we are trying to address with the stories is literacy about health issues,” Lopez told Aaron Rop of AZCentral. “When you are not comfortable reading, you miss out on many things and many of those things are important to your health.”
Storynamics has produced and distributed over 240,000 comic books in 16 states. The comic book approach appeals to many local governments, because they can provide them to families via their children. Their appeal to kids is universal.
Among the project’s smart moves: the kids get the books in school, then bring them home and beg their parents to read. Few parents can resist their kid coming home excited about a gift from school, begging for Mom or Dad to tell a story.
“They go to their parents and they say, ‘Dad can you read this for me? Look at what they gave me at school’,” Lopez told Rop.
With the help of Storynamics comic books, soon it could be the kids helping their parents to eat right, exercise and get to bed early.
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How One Organization Encourages the Love of Reading
Clifford. Harry Potter. The Boxcar Children. These storybook characters have entertained and inspired countless American children. And now, they can do the same for a whole group of immigrant kids.
Some new book worms at the Integrated Arts Academy, a school that serves many English-language-learning students whose parents emigrated from countries such as Somalia, Nepal, and South Sudan, in Burlington, Vermont, took home free reading material this week, thanks to the Children’s Literacy Foundation (CLF). This nonprofit aims to inspire a love of reading in low-income and rural children in New Hampshire and Vermont. According to CLF’s website, it has served 150,000 children since 1998 — donating more than $3 million worth of books. Donations from the community make it possible for the kids to start their own home libraries.
This year, Duncan McDougall of CLF gave the families a literacy seminar before the kids each picked out two free books at the book fair. McDougall spoke to the parents about how they can support their children’s reading habits, offering them techniques to engage the kids in the story, even if the parents themselves can’t read English well. Five translators were on hand to help the families select good books for their kids.
McDougall told Lynn Monty of the Burlington Free Press, “These children are all very eager to learn and to read more often, but many of them have few, if any, books of their own at home. Their parents often work multiple jobs which makes it hard to take children to the library, and many of the parents themselves have limited literacy skills.”
“We are newcomers who want to help our kids at home,” Mon Gurung, who moved to the U.S. from Nepal, told Monty.
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Meet the Generous Boy Who Collects Books for Homeless Kids
Six-year-old Blake Ansari has learned a lot about the problems facing poor families and kids from his dad, Nuri Ansari, who works with the homeless. So when he heard that there are about 22,000 homeless kids in New York City (according to the New York Times), he told his mom, Starita Ansari, “That means they don’t have a library,” Sarah Goodyear writes for Atlantic Cities.
Blake began collecting books and gathered 600 volumes, which he donated to a PATH (Prevention, Assistance, and Temporary Housing) shelter in the Bronx. Counselors at PATH plan to give the books to homeless children who come to stay there, and the kids will be able to keep the books.
Starita told Goodyear she hopes Blake’s book quest raises awareness of the problem of homeless children throughout the United States, who numbered 1,168,354 in the U.S. Department of Education’s 2013 study. “When you listen to the community, learn from the community, and help the community, you connect to your best self,” Starita said.
As for Blake, he’s got even bigger plans: He now wants to build a library for homeless kids. If he’s accomplishing all this in first grade, we can’t wait to see what he does next year in second grade.
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Can Writing Poetry Help Set Incarcerated Youth on the Right Track?
“You don’t understand what it’s like.”
“You never listen to me.”
Most teenagers make these over-the-top complaints to adults at some point during those angst-filled years. But for some troubled teens, these emotional statements aren’t hyperbolic. And those are just the kids that Richard Gold wanted to help.
When Gold left Microsoft 18 years ago, he started the Pongo Teen Writing Project, a Seattle non-profit that connects with troubled teenagers who are in jail, homeless, in the foster care system, or being treated for mental illness, and teaches them to write poetry to express themselves. Since 1992, Pongo has served 7,000 teenagers, providing them with volunteer writing mentors and publishing their work in anthologies.
Gold told Jeffrey Brown of PBS NewsHour, “What so many of us struggle with is the unarticulated emotion in our lives, and when poetry serves that, it’s doing something essential for the person and for society.”
Through one of Pongo’s programs, writing mentors visit juvenile inmates individually for an hour, asking questions about their lives and emotions to guide them toward writing poetry about their experiences. The mentors transcribe what the inmates express, collaborate on revisions, then give the teenagers a chance to read their work aloud to the group.
Pongo volunteers do similar work at the New Horizons homeless youth center Seattle, helping homeless teens write poems, and hosting poetry reading events.
The workers in the juvenile justice system attest to the difference Pongo makes in the lives of the teens it works with. Warden Lynn Valdez at the King County Juvenile Detention Center, once an incarcerated gang member himself, said that after the teens write their poems, “the reward is, I think that they have actually released something that they have repressed inside.” King County Juvenile Court Judge Barbara Mack said that the young people she sees in her court “have never really learned how to express themselves. And Pongo gives them the opportunity to do that in a way that’s not threatening.”
It’s clear that poetry can be a powerful tool to make teenagers feel valued as they try to move past their rocky adolescences and become productive adults.
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Can a Book Make You a Better Person?
Several recent studies have suggested that reading fiction can improve a person’s capacity for empathy, which gave Roman Krznaric, the author of “Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution,” an idea. Why not start an online library filled with books and movies that teach empathy to their readers and viewers?
Krznaric writes on the blog StartEmpathy.Org, “I wanted to create a place where anybody, anywhere in the world, could find the best resources for helping us escape from the narrow confines of our own experiences and enter the realities of different cultures, generations, and lives.”
So he launched the Empathy Library, where users can recommend and rate the books and movies that have moved them and caused them to empathize with other people. It isn’t actually a library where patrons can check out or download books and movies, but rather a resource for people to use if they want to find stories that can help develop empathy. Kznaric quotes British novelist Ian McEwan, who wrote, “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.”
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