For Teresa Shartar, a pediatric Occupational Therapist in Atlanta, Caribu has become a go-to when working with children. “It’s phenomenal,” she said. “If you’re working with a child on focus, eye gaze, visual tracking, following directions, and turning pages, Caribu is excellent because you can do many OT activities virtually.”
As communities around the world take note of United Nations International Literacy Day (September 8), Caribu is proud to be an outstanding option for families to read together and share literacy learning from almost anywhere across the globe. International Literacy Day was was established by UNESCO in 1966 as an opportunity to increase awareness of building literacy development worldwide. In 2015, the U.N. created a series of Sustainable Development Goal goals, one of which is to ensure that “all young people achieve literacy and numeracy, and that adults, who lack these skills are given the opportunity to acquire them.”
When it comes to our family’s bookshelves, I’ve decided to ignore advice about decluttering because you can never have too many children’s books around the house. Finding time to read to your kids daily from the time they’re babies is the most important thing; I still read to my 10-year-old every day. But as a literacy specialist, I know that the way you read—your tone, the rise and fall of your pitch, as well as the expression that you incorporate—can matter just as much as the narrative and pictures in a book. Here are three simple strategies that you can use to help your child’s reading interest and level flourish as you cuddle up together.
This fall, there is a new solution for teachers to keep students engaged during reading activities. Caribu is excited to announce the launch of its new web platform that allows you to read children’s books page-by-page with your students while you teach classes online. With Caribu, you can build a culture of reading in your classroom even during this time of social distancing. Caribu’s new web-based platform will allow you to open and read books on your computer as you teach lessons with Zoom, Google Hangouts, and other video calling platforms. This makes it simple to share read alouds, facilitate guided reading, and have book discussions with groups of children large and small.
The Caribu app is an excellent tool to support kids’ reading while they are learning from home. It provides an easy-to-access library of hundreds of books and activities that children can read and enjoy from almost any device, anywhere in the world. They can connect in a video-call with relatives near and far to share in learning together, or read independently with the app at their fingertips. Caribu’s in-app library organizes books by age level and subject so families can easily select books that match children’s interests and skills. Read on to learn more about how to assist your kids’ distance learning, and how you can use Caribu to prevent summer slide and enjoy virtual playdates.
People often say that practice makes perfect. Research certainly supports this, especially in children. In fact, studies have shown that repetition can be critically important for learning in general—especially for memory and language learning. So while adults can easily pick up new information from a single exposure, when kids ask to watch the same movie they’ve already seen a hundred times or read the same book before bed for the 10th night in a row, it might just be their way of learning the storyline. And although it might be boring or even annoying to do the same thing over and over and over (and over and over) again, this extra practice might be just what children need to learn new things.
For a long time, comic books and graphic novels were geared toward children on the basis that, because they have pictures, they’re not “real books.” As a child, I wasn’t allowed to read comics for that very reason. I read my first comic book as an adult when I met my husband, who is the comic buyer for our local shop. Today, I am the mother of two girls who are obsessed with manga (Japanese comics). This year alone, I have read over 400 comic books. It’s safe to say that comics play a very large part of our family’s reading life.
Any parent, grandparent, or teacher who has told stories to their children will recognize that at the end of a good story, you don’t just walk away with a good story – the two of you feel closer. Why? Doctors call this attachment. And to understand how it works we have to shift our perspective for a moment from the story itself to the relationship that arises between speaker and listener during a story.
According to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, fathers who engage with their children through shared book reading see a boost in their own parenting skills while also raising their preschooler’s school readiness and behavior.
As parents settle in to becoming homeschool teachers overnight, the challenges they’re facing can certainly feel daunting, especially at a time when most are worried about their health and financial well-being.