Elementary Summer Reading

Here is a great summer reading opportunity. It is for elementary teachers and student. If you are not an elementary teacher, but have an elementary school child or know an elementary teacher the program may be used by individual students or if a teacher or school participates they have an opportunity of earning free books, as well as a one year ebook subscription to over 140 books. Best of all the books have a strong science and math connection.

Children who read all 25 interactive ebooks will receive a free book!
Teachers who organize the effort and submit passports for 10 or more children will receive one-year free access to all 140 Arbordale interactive ebooks and 5 books for their classroom.
If five or more teachers from the same school submit passports, the school earns 25 or more books and unlimited school-wide and home ebook access.

Arbordale has a free program for children to read over the summer to avoid a summer slump. Their “Read around the World” summer reading program has 25 free interactive ebooks to read at home, school, or on the go all summer long. Children can “stamp” their reading "Passport to the World" with books they’ve finished on their BINGO cards. To learn more, go Arbodale's Summer Reading web page.

Click here to download the passport with 25 cover image stamps. Cut out and affix stamps in the appropriate world region as books are read ... like a US National Park passport!

To get the child's well-deserved, free book, when all 25 books are read and the passport is full, a parent signs the passport and either sends it on to the child's teacher, or mails it directly to Arbordale with a parent contact form.

Comments

Ebooks as Textbooks - Part 2 - Highlighting

Highlighting can be a very effective tool in reading and learning no matter the kind of text being read: from novels to textbooks. Most textbooks or other forms of information text will usually used text features along with graphics to help organize information presented in the text. These elements are done to help focus attention on important or key concepts and provide additional information. The text organization itself can include structural elements such as heading, subheading, index, glossary, paragraph spacing, bulleted or numbered lists, sidebars or side boxes, italics, underlines or bold for words or even sections. Graphic content can include the use of symbols, colors, illustrations, pictures, diagrams, charts, and graphs. Poor highlighting design - too much text has been highlighted. The act of highlighting is less time consuming and much easier than note-taking ( to be discussed in an upcoming posting). To be effective in highlighting it should be a kind of meta

Ebooks as Textbooks Part 8: Textbook structure

Textbooks usually have a structure, and it doesn't matter if it is an electronic textbook or a paper printed one, the people who put the textbook together usually make it have a structure to help you better understand what you are reading and learning. Textbooks are usually a type of text known as informational or expository text - this is text written to inform, and can be things like textbook chapters, newspaper and magazine articles, and other reference materials like encyclopedia items. The other kind of text that you usually encounter in school is narrative text, where a story is being told - which could be fictional or non-fiction. And while textbooks are informational text, many will also have narrative text, usually as stories to help you better understand the concept, although in an English or literature class the stories are often more the focus of the learning. Textbook Elements With an electronic textbook it might be hard to see the structure, because you cant riffle

Auto Summarization

In dealing with textbooks and students with disabilities, one of the most common things that we would do is to get the textbook in a digital format, as an ebook. By doing this we were able to use a number of tools based on the need of the student. I've had students who could not lift their physical printed textbook, but would be able to access though a laptop installed in their electronic wheelchair, for students with vision issues we could boost the font size or use a text-to-speech tool to have the book read aloud to them. One tool that I used with a number of my students who had issues was the Auto Summarize tool in Word. The tool works well with textbook, but wouldn't work for other texts, such as novels. I used this to reduce the amount of text that they had to read, the "cognitive load" of the text, but would still enable be able to get the information. Word did a great job, and depending on the student I would reduce the text to about 66% for facts and support

eBook News

Search This Blog