I Learned How to Pronounce Words in Jamaica, Mon!

I found this kids website from the BBC the other day. It has educational games for English and Maths (which is British for math) for early elementary students. I tried several of the games and found them quite fun. The most fun part for me was called Space Spins. When you pull a virtual lever, a sentence appears on the screen and is read aloud to you, in a very strong West Indies accent! Wha? The idea is to learn to read, I believe, but the story reader is the only voice on the program that speaks anything other than Received Pronunciation. So why is the vocabulary program speaking like Miss Cleo? Who knows, but it's hilarious!

What Guys Read in the UK

There's a story on the BBC News site today calling for more reading support, particularly for working class boys.

"Boys like books which depict them in powerful roles, often as sporting, spying or fighting heroes - not just Jane Austen, but a necessary dose of Anthony Horowitz as well," [Education Secretary Alan Johnson] said.

"To help get boys reading we need a boys' bookshelf in every secondary school library in the country, containing positive, modern, relevant role models for working class boys."

I'm the first to agree it's very hard to find novels that boys, particularly in the 10+ age-group, will read. But if you put all the exciting books on the "boys only" bookshelf, what happens to the girls who like adventure stories or the Hardy Boys?

Perhaps a better approach than sorting library books by gender, is to make English/reading lessons more accessible for the underwhelmed by changing the way the subject is taught. Enter English teacher Gary Spina, author of The Mountain Man's Field Guide to Grammar. From the New York Times:

"What few of his teachers realized was that Gary was an avid reader before his teens, making his way through the shelf of Jack London in the local library, digging into copies of Robert Louis Stevenson at home. In seventh grade, he picked up Hemingway and began to realize there might be something manly in writing well.

Then, in high school, he applied for a job writing copy at an advertising agency in Hackensack and was rejected because he spelled the word “advertize.” Learning something about correct language and grammar, he realized, might prove useful in his goal of being self-sufficient.

Decades later, Mr. Spina used these insights to write a most unlikely reference book, “The Mountain Man’s Field Guide to Grammar,” which was released last year. In the crowded field of grammar books, his is probably the only one to include “grifter” and “pemmican” in its glossary and to teach the simple sentence with examples such as “Dirty Doris spit tobacco juice.”

Cool, huh? I've been looking for a grammar resource that won't put the boys to sleep. I'm going to check this one out right away!

Cool Little Resource for Visual Teens

I just picked up a copy of The High School Learning System. It's an interesting package--multimedia presentations on English (with ebook texts), history (US and World), math (pre-algebra through calculus) and science (mostly biology) with Q&A and quizzes assess learning (if you want to do that). The presentation on the French Revolution lasted about 20 minutes of narration with period background music and pictures. They included a good amount of detail, covered the various governments between 1789 and 1799 and offered a 101 question online "quiz" (sounds like a test to me!) at the end.

I was less impressed with the math section. I noticed on their website that they have a stand-alone math learning system product, so that may be why this section is less comprehensive.

I have the 2006 version, which I bought on ebay for $13 (2 DVDs and 1 Spanish-English online dictionary). The 2007 version costs $40 and includes:

"• All core subjects covered
• 86 integrated educational titles
• 54 hours of multimedia presentations & video
• 37 hours of audio books
• 101 Barron’s Book Notes
• Printable tests to monitor progress
• PLUS new educational material for your iPodTM"

I think this would be a great resource for younger gifted kids working at a high school level, for homeschooling teens and/or as a review for regular high school classes.

The Secret Key to the ACT

Or at least to the English subsection--diagramming sentences! Yes, it's true! Klaus raised his score on the English subsection by 10 whole points (from 59th to 96th percentile) by taking a half hour to learn to diagram sentences. I couldn't believe he'd gotten all the way through the first half of 10th grade Enriched English without learning to identify the subject and predicate of a sentence. No wonder he had so much trouble last year. How would he correctly identify subject-verb agreement problems if he couldn't identify the correct subject and verb?

As you might expect, this method of teaching grammar/parts of speech works particularly well with visual-spatial learners. Plus, it's loads of fun, kind of like cracking a code. With Klaus, I used exercises from the following sites:

From the Student Learning Assistance Center of the Alamo Community College District--very clear, step-by-step instructions for basic diagramming. This is primarily what Klaus used.

AP Language and Composition Resource Page from Southwest High School's Language Arts Department, gets into a little more detail on the complexities.

So when would someone need to know how to do this? Maybe never, unless he or she wanted to rock the house on the college entrance exams or in a college composition class. I used my ability to deconstruct a sentence when I was doing freelance paper-editing in college. It's not being able to draw the diagram in the right way that's important, but rather being able to analyze the structure of a sentence, brick by brick, and see the relationships between the words, phrases and clauses. That's when writing begins to become the tool, rather than the taskmaster.

Have a Horrible New Year!

It's Horrible Books time again. Ray at Del Sol Books is readying another bulk order from the UK of Horrible Histories/Science/The Knowledge and the other Terry Deary books. For those who don't know, these books are short chapterish books that cover lots of "educational" topics in all their gory (and don't stint on the human sacrifice) details. These books aren't available in the US and they can run $20 a piece on ebay, but Ray gets them for ~$7.50 a piece with a flat rate for shipping ($7).

These books are appropriate for gifted elementary aged kids and particularly appeal to 9-12 year old boys, who are terribly difficult to find books for. Last day to order for this round in January 28, for delivery in mid-February. For all the horrible details, see horriblebooks.com.

When Hamlet Met Claudius

Shakespeare in the Bush is an old but toally awesome essay by anthropologist Laura Bohannon that could spark a great discussion about the supposed universality of Shakespeare. While visiting the Tiv people in West Africa, she tried to tell them the story of Hamlet--and got it all wrong according to her hosts. Frankly, I think the Tiv interpretation makes more sense than Shakespeare's. (Will's play was an adaptation of an existing story about the Prince of Denmark, which scholars refer to as the Ur-Hamlet.)

This essay would be a great companion piece for kids studying Hamlet or to spark a discussion about how western culture is viewed by non-westerners. Click here for an interesting article by CNN.com on both Hamlet and the Ur-Hamlet in an interview with Hamlet scholar Harold Bloom.

World eBook Fair

Now through August 4, you can download thousands of copywritten books from Project Gutenberg though the World eBook Fair. Books are text-searchable and free to the public for this limited time only. From their website:

"Welcome to the home of the World eBook Fair, the largest showcase for eBooks, eBook publishers, editors, and others working in the new world of eBooks.

July 4th to August 4, 2006 marks a month long celebration of the 35th anniversary of the first step taken towards today's eBooks, when the United States Declaration of Independence was the first file placed online for downloading in what was destined to be an electronic library of the Internet. Today's eBook library has a total of over 100 languages represented.

The World eBook Fair welcomes you to absolutely free access to a variety of eBook unparalleled by any other source. 1/3 million eBooks await you for personal use, all free of charge for the month from July 4 - August 4, 2006, and then 1/2 million eBooks in 2007, 3/4 million in 2008, and ONE million in 2009.

Ten times as many eBooks are available from private eBook sources, without the media circus that comes with 100 billion dollar media mavens such as Google. The World eBook Fair has created a library of wide ranging samples of these eBooks, totaling 1/3 million. Here are eBooks from nearly every classic author on the varieties of subjects previously only available through the largest library collections in the world. Now these books are yours for personal use, free of charge, to keep for the rest of your lives.
This event is brought to you by the oldest and largest free eBook source on the Internet, Project Gutenberg, with the assistance of the World eBook Library, the providers of the largest collection, and a number of other eBook efforts around the world. The World eBook Library normally charges $8.95 per year for online access, and allows unlimited personal downloading. During The World eBook Fair all these books are available free of charge through a gateway at http://www.gutenberg.org and http://WorldeBookFair.com."