Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Books Transform Lives (1)


Between the lines: reading together helps families bond and grow








I regularly venture into parts of Hong Kong I would never see were it not for my work with Bring Me a Book. I visit kindergartens, primary schools and community centres.
When I see the sweet and earnest faces of the children, I can't help but wonder about their future. How many of them will break out of their economic class and stop the poverty that often gets passed from generation to generation?
Many parents in these communities can barely make ends meet, yet they will spend what little they have on after-school tutorial classes for their children. They do so in the misguided belief that more tutorials lead directly to better school grades and, ultimately, success in life.
The after-school classes to which I refer are not the fun-filled and stimulating activities that middle-class children enjoy. Tutorials in these communities often involve paying HK$50 for a child to sit silently for one hour, among rows of students, watching an instructor with a wireless microphone expounding academic theories.
This learning environment is hardly helpful for a child who is already struggling at school. Most parents want their children to read well, yet many are sceptical about their ability to help their children develop a lifelong love of books. Some parents don't believe they are educated enough or have sufficient language skills. Others blindly follow the masses; if the whole neighbourhood has signed up for English flashcard classes, they feel compelled to do the same.
I tell parents in these communities to save their money and take their kids to the public library instead. Through our read-aloud training workshops, they come to understand the tangible and intangible benefits of parent-child read-aloud sessions.
And after they put what they've learned into practice, they become true believers that something so simple as reading stories together can have a big impact on their family life and their children's development.
Middle-class families tend to spend quality time together and live in homes containing at least half a dozen books. This is not the case in lower-class families.
One parent told me that, before she started reading with her son, their interaction usually involved berating him about school homework and household chores. This parent went from a long day of work to an evening of cooking, cleaning and childcare. Her eight-year-old son rarely spoke to her, preferring to spend his time playing video games in his room.
Our training workshops comprise two classes one week apart. At the end of the first class, we give parents two books to take home, and ask them to read aloud to their children every night for one week.
By the time the parent with the eight year-old son returned for the second class, she was a devotee of reading aloud.
She revealed that her son was at first reluctant to sit down and listen to his mother read a picture book. When they finally sat down and read the story together, she suddenly realised that she hadn't cuddled with her son, not in months, but years.
By the end of the week, mother and son were having meaningful conversations, including her son sharing that a friend was being bullied at school.
She began to see her son in a new light, as the labels of irresponsible, ill-mannered and unresponsive melted away, and his sense of humour and endearing perspective on life came to the foreground.
By the end of the second class, she knew that their lives had been transformed.
This parent was aware that this transformation would improve the relationship, but what she had yet to learn was what had happened would lead directly to her son's improved cognitive and non-cognitive ability.
In the next column we will find out how. 

Annie Ho is board chairwoman of Bring Me a Book Hong Kong, a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving children's literacy by reading aloud to them bringmeabook.org.hk

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

"The Good The Bad and The Vocab"


Between the lines: children's books that celebrate the power of language

Tuesday, 08 October, 2013, 10:40am







My daughter loves to play with older children, and I enjoy spending an afternoon with families with older offspring, as it gives me a glimpse of what may be in store.
When my daughter was three years old, I witnessed my friend's five-year-old son doing something he wasn't supposed to. Rather than berate the boy, my friend calmly suggested that he think about the consequences of his action. And he stopped misbehaving.
I was greatly impressed with this feat of superior parenting. My friend advised that children can be conditioned to take, or refrain from, certain actions once they have suffered consequences.
Of course, the key is to carry through with the threatened consequences, or to allow the natural consequence to flow.
For example, if a child is jumping around while eating his ice cream cone, don't warn him that the melting dessert may fall onto the ground and then take it away to hold it for him.
If you warn him about the consequence, you must allow him to experience it (unsafe consequences excepted) for the lesson to be learned.
For weeks after that play date, I started to teach my daughter about actions and consequences. One day, she asked for a cookie without saying "please". I said, "What's the magic word?" to which she hesitantly replied, "Consequences?"
I realised that, while she had learned this new word, she was too young to grasp its meaning.
Since then, I have patiently waited for my daughter to be old enough to understand "consequences", as her daily life continued to be filled with instances of good and bad consequences. Now that she is five years old, we enjoy books about vocabulary, which explore concepts like "consequences".
Jamie Lee Curtis, the Hollywood actress, celebrates the power of language in her eighth children's picture book, Big Words for Little People. This picture book uses rhyming verses and humorous illustrations to introduce words such as consequence, privacy and inconsiderate.
Of the word persevere, Curtis writes: "To persevere is to try and to try, even though you might want to give up and cry. When doing a puzzle that puzzles your mind, you persevere until the right piece you find."
This word is accompanied by an illustration of children trying to put together a giant 60,000-piece puzzle.
Another of our favourite books is Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Cookies: Bite-Size Life Lessons. Children learn about what it means to have respect, be modest, feel compassionate, and a range of other feelings and concepts, all in the context of baking, eating and sharing cookies.
With beautiful drawings by acclaimed illustrator Jane Dyer, this book helps define grown-up concepts in language that children can understand.
For trustworthy, Rosenthal writes: "Trustworthy means, if you ask me to hold your cookie until you come back, when you come back, I will still be holding your cookie."
This book was so well-received that Rosenthal followed up with new words in the same cookie context in a whole series of books about going to school, love and Christmas.
For primary school children, Lee Bennett Hopkins' Wonderful Words: Poems about Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening is a poetry collection sure to inspire young wordsmiths.
Hopkins is a distinguished poet and anthologist, and this book includes poems by Emily Dickinson and Carl Sandburg. With poems titled Metaphor,Words Free as Confetti and How to Learn to Say a Long, Hard Word, language is celebrated as something that greatly influences our lives, externally and internally.


Annie Ho is board chairwoman of Bring Me a Book Hong Kong, a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving children's literacy by reading aloud to them bringmeabook.org.hk