education – ACHUKA Children's Books UK

Why the future of edtech is video

December 21, 2016 By achuka Leave a Comment

Jens Peter de Pedro, director of Lingokids, explains why children learn best with live-action video:

According to recent research from Insight Kids, 92% of US children like watching non-fiction content, and 62% say they enjoy doing so online. The researcher, Sarah Chumsky, adds that children are naturally drawn to non-fiction content because it helps them do the work of growing up. From exploring real-life videos, kids gain inspiration, competence and confidence, she argues.

Children prefer to acquire knowledge from people to which they have real relationships. This is because education isn’t just a transfer of information, as developmental psychologist Peter Gray says, but also a transfer of culture, and we only really pick up culture from people who are significant to us. This applies to dancing as it does programming, microbiology, accounting, or learning a new language.

For example, Lingokids launched in February as a comprehensive English-language app-based course for children ages two to six designed with content from Oxford University Press. Aside from an adaptive learning algorithm that adjusts to kids’ varied improvement levels, it features live-action shows like MyTeacher (pictured). And as an educational technologist behind Lingokids, I know I may never have the cultural influence that an older brother or sister can have, but that must be what I shoot for. To create a relationship with customers, we have to credibly convey emotion, and no medium does that like live-action video.

Kidscreen reecntly reported on a global appetite for live-action drama among young consumers of TV and VOD. If children are craving authentic emotional connection for their entertainment, why would they not want this in their learning, too?

via Kidscreen » Archive » Why the future of edtech is video.

Excellent New Online Resource: Power of Pictures | CLPE

July 22, 2016 By achuka Leave a Comment

The Power of Pictures is a new literacy website from CLPE and children’s authors/illustrators which helps primary school teachers to develop their understanding of the craft of picture book creation as a way of raising children’s achievement in literacy. This site houses short films from children’s illustrators alongside a range of specially developed teaching materials and resources.

includes excellent video content such as:

via Power of Pictures | CLPE.

Philip Pullman: Schools Are Letting Children Down

May 16, 2016 By achuka Leave a Comment

In a splendid piece in The Guardian’s Family section on Saturday, which led on Philip Pullman’s love of comments, the author went on to speak at length, in typically trenchant terms, about the current state of education:

Pullman believes that schools are letting children down in terms of how they express themselves imaginatively. They are not taught to draw and, worse he thinks, are not encouraged to write stories in any appealing way. “I’m filled with unhappiness for the children at school, the English stuff they have to do these days. ‘Literacy’, as they call it. It’s terrifying and wicked and monstrous. One of the things children are told to do is to make a plan first. Write your plan and then write your story. Spend 15 minutes on the plan and 45 minutes on the story.”

Pullman knows from experience as a writer that this is the wrong way to go about it. “I tried writing out a plot with the second or third novel I wrote, and it was so boring, so desperately boring.

“It’s not that I don’t write a plan, but I write the story first and then write the plan to see where I’ve gone. And I see that that bit needs to be moved there and I can do without that bit. But you need some timber before you can start doing the carpentry.”

It’s as if, Pullman suggests, pupils are being taught how to write stories or write any piece of composition in such a dull, bureaucratic way that they will be put off using imagination. That, at least, is in line with current government policy, he suggests waspishly. “[Education Secretary] Nicky Morgan said we don’t need the arts in education because you can’t make any money from them. Her point was that you can’t become a hedge fund manager if you learn to draw or write stories. It’s no good to you – that was the implication.”

What does Pullman suggest should be done? “You have to ask children to do something unnatural to them, which is to disregard what they are told by grownups. Teachers are wrong about this.

“They are not wrong because they are bad people; they are wrong because they have to do this or they’ll go to prison. They’ll get the sack and go to prison unless they do what they’re told, but it’s wrong. It’s a wrong way of writing. It’s a wrong way of reading. It doesn’t understand the meaning and purpose of these things, and in the end it’ll fail and it’ll fall and it’ll fade away.”

via Philip Pullman: Why I love comics | Life and style | The Guardian.

This Children’s Book About Sex And Gender Is A Total Game-Changer says BuzzFeed

November 6, 2015 By achuka Leave a Comment

Sex is a Funny Word is nothing short of revolutionary. Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth’s newest book is brilliant in its approach to giving caregivers and educators the tools they need to talk to kids about their bodies. Not only is it “the first trans-inclusive book for kids,” but it also uses inclusionary language and diverse representation across race, ability, gender, and sexuality, to hone in on the most important aspects of discussing sex and bodies with kids aged 8-12. It is the second in a trilogy of books – the first, What Makes a Baby, is a beautiful, balanced, and many-gendered explanation of baby-making for kids aged 5-8.(While Sex is a Funny Word discusses body parts, gender, touch, and other topics related to the word “sex,” it doesn’t delve into reproduction — intercourse is being reserved for the third book, planned for release in fall 2017, which will be geared toward older kids.)

via This Children's Book About Sex And Gender Is A Total Game-Changer.

Pullman joins calls to scrap baseline tests

April 1, 2015 By achuka Leave a Comment

Children’s author Philip Pullman has joined leading educationalists, early years specialists and psychologists in calling for plans to introduce tests for four- and five-year-olds in their first weeks at primary schools to be scrapped.

The tests, known as baseline assessment, are due to be trialled in a number of schools from September and will be used to measure basic skills including children’s ability to count and recognise letters and numbers immediately when they start in reception class. They will be introduced nationally in 2016.

Pullman is one of 80 signatories to a letter to the Guardian which argues that the tests should be stopped because they are “statistically invalid, will formalise a testing culture from the age of four, will be used to judge teachers and schools and, most importantly, will be dangerous for children”.

via Philip Pullman joins calls to scrap baseline tests for four and five-year-olds | Education | The Guardian.

Learning With Nature – ACHUKAreview

February 6, 2015 By achuka Leave a Comment

I attended the public launch of this title a week ago, and since then have been able to have a leisurely look through the book. What an impressive collaboration between writers and the publisher’s design team this is! “A unique must-have resource for families, schools, youth groups and anyone working with children,” the back cover proclaims – and yes, it is! I commend it without reservation.

I hope particularly as many schools as possible will obtain copies for their staff libraries. Although many of the recommended activities included in the book, together with the accompanying photos, suggest the need for a forest or woodland context, there are also numerous suggestions that would work just as well within the boundaries of schools that enjoy at least a little bit of green space. It is also undeniably the case that many of the children who are fortunate enough to be taken to the kinds of workshop organised by the book’s authors are from backgrounds that are already sympathetic towards outdoor learning. The book can have most impact if its ideas are taken up in classrooms up and down the country.

One of the speakers at the launch event remembered attending a local primary school in the 1960s. Every Wednesday afternoon the class would be taken up onto the Downs for nature study. The teacher would sit down with a packet of Weights cigarettes, while the class was given freedom to identify wild flowers and plants using Ladybird field guides. A bygone era indeed. The loss of such experiences from the school curriculum (how many infant classrooms even have a Nature table any more?) would not matter so much if children were still doing more of the same in their own time. But they’re not.

The book carries an impassioned foreword by Chris Packham, who notes, alongside a sharp decline in the numbers of kestrels, skylarks and lapwings, another “tragic extinction”:

… that of the young naturalist. I walk my dogs twice daily through the woods near where I grew up, and in years I have not seen a single child making camps, climbing trees, damming streams, let alone looking for birds’ nests, catching grass snakes or tracking foxes. Not one; they have gone.

Well, not gone exactly. They have been iomprisoned, protected from the dirty and dangerous outdoors by being locked up inside in front of televisions and computers.

Each of the three authors has been actively and successfully involved in running outdoor workshops for children over several years. They don’t pretend to have thought up all the activities themselves. This is a compilation of tried and tested activities guaranteed to engage and enthuse.

The book has four main sections – with easy to navigate coloured page tabs:
GAMES
NATURALIST ACTIVITES
SEASONAL ACTIVITIES
SURVIVAL SKILLS

The book is generously illustrated with photographs that have all been scrupulopusly credited to no fewer than thirty separate photographers.

The book has an excellent index, an Afterword from Jon Cree, Chair of the Forest School Association, and author biographies.

Marina Robb is founder and managing director of the outdoor learning association Circle of Life Rediscovery; Anna Richardson is a forest school facilitator and trainer; and Victoria Mew, also a qualified forest school practitioner, has a particular interest in animal tracking.

I very much hope it comes to the attention of the judges of the SLA Information Book Award.

http://www.achuka.co.uk/reviews/?p=549

Author John Marsden to open arts-focused secondary school

February 2, 2015 By achuka Leave a Comment

Children’s author John Marsden has bought the former Macedon Grammar School site and plans to open a new secondary school focused on the arts…

Last week Mr Marsden bought the site of the former Christian college, where he plans to open a new secondary school focused on the arts.

“There is such a huge passion for the arts among young people,” the author of Tomorrow When the War Began said.

“It can be taken much more seriously nowadays. A generation ago it wasn’t really a viable industry for most people, but now there are heaps of ways you can make a career in the arts. It is no longer something treated as airy-fairy or lightweight.”

Macedon Grammar was closed by the state government in December after it accumulated about $1.8 million in debt and was deemed financially unviable.

It will be the second school founded by Mr Marsden, who also runs the alternative Candlebark School in Romsey in the Macedon Ranges.

Mr Marsden said the school would open its doors to creative students by the start of 2016, or possibly even later this year “if the bureaucracy allows for that”.

…

“So many children are learning or experiencing the world in a completely artificial way through computer games, [that] even relationships are conducted at a distance. We are very much the opposite way. We put kids into the bush, send them up mountains and down rivers and into snow.”

via Author John Marsden to open arts-focused secondary school.

From the maker of Lara Croft: the teenager’s dream of a free school

January 8, 2015 By achuka Leave a Comment

Gaming magnate Ian Livingstone is receiving flak from the likes of Toby Young for his ambitious plan to hone students’ coding skills…

Livingstone is widely hailed as the founding father of the British games industry. He launched Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing game that thrilled adolescents of the late 1970s and 1980s; co-founded Games Workshop, which became one of the biggest games companies in the world; and wrote or co-wrote 15 gamebooks in the Fighting Fantasy series, which has sold over 17m copies in 31 languages. He still has six friends round to his house regularly to play games, keep a record of the scores and compete for their own annual trophy. “I’m the current champion,” he tells me. “I love board games with like-minded friends, having a laugh, doing deals, reneging on them.”

But on the eve of his 65th birthday, he is talking to me about his plans for a network of free schools which, he thinks, can transform our approach to secondary education. He speaks quietly and rather flatly; there’s nothing flamboyant about him, and he sometimes sounds slightly bored, as if he’s reading out an inventory and would rather be playing games. But there’s no mistaking his conviction. “Children today are totally different from 50 years ago. They run their lives through social media and smart phones. They share their ideas and their creativity. They collaborate naturally.” Yet when they go to secondary school, he argues, they meet a regime of standardisation and conformity, requiring them “to memorise a lot of stuff they won’t ever need because they can google it or whatever”.

via From the maker of Lara Croft: the teenager’s dream of a free school | Peter Wilby | Education | The Guardian.

How About: My Name Is Parvana + The Breadwinner

December 18, 2014 By achuka 1 Comment

Topical fiction about life in Afghanistan under the Taliban by award winning Canadian author.
Published in the US in 2012, My Name Is Parvana, is a sequel to The breadwinner trilogy.
When Oxford Children’s Books published it in the UK earlier this year, they also reissued the first book in The Breadwinner sequence (with compatible cover design).

What has YA Author John Marsden Been Up To? Turns out he’s been running a school….

October 18, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

John Marsden, who has been running a school for the past eight years, talks a bout his new book for adults. The link has an accompanying video.

Given his huge following among teen readers, why write a novel for adults? “It wasn’t really a conscious decision,’’ he says, as a flying soccer ball slams into his office wall. “I’ve gotten a little tired of the young adult market, or the genre. It seems to have gotten very crowded with a lot of pretty unattractive books; a lot of books where writers are trying terribly hard to capture the voice of this funky, cool teenager; it just doesn’t ring true. Too many adults have invaded the territory with motives that might have more to do with their own immaturity than anything else.’’

He points out he hasn’t begun a YA novel — a 2008 adaptation of Hamlet was his last work aimed at teenagers — since he opened Candlebark almost nine years ago.

via YA fiction author John Marsden targets adults with South of Darkness | The Australian.