Teach Your Child Spanish Through Play, A Guide and Resource for Parents or Spanish for Kids, Games to Help Children Learn Spanish Language and Culture Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I was lucky enough to receive a pre-released copy of this wonderful resource! If you're a parent that understands the importance of second language acquisition, and really WANT to teach your child Spanish, but, but, but... This is the place to start! The author has written in a manner that flows and is easy to understand (none of that educator jargon) and truly gives practical, fun, and simple ways to experience Spanish with your child.
As you read, you feel like you're sitting at your kitchen table and she's just giving you some great advice!
Starr includes vocabulary lists in different sections, and the five different sections listed in the Table of Contents make it easy to use as a reference as well as a basis for HOW to teach Spanish (even if you don't know Spanish yourself). There is even a resource section that includes how to evaulate material, websites, books, language centers, camps, addresses for embassies, the works! For that section alone, the purchase is worth it!
Whether your child is a wiggly one, or a "sit and do worksheets type," this guide is a must-have. I'm impressed, somehow, she covers it all!
Sra. Gose, creator of Flip Flop Spanish: Ages 3-5: Level 1 & Flip Flop Spanish: Ages 3-5: Level 2

Click Here to see more reviews about: Teach Your Child Spanish Through Play, A Guide and Resource for Parents or Spanish for Kids, Games to Help Children Learn Spanish Language and Culture

Teach Your Child Spanish Through Play is a valuable resource for parents, home educators and teachers which includes tips for parents who don't speak the language, creative games and activities that cater to each learning style, a guide to teaching culture, ideas for building and maintaining bilingual communities through playgroups and language clubs as well as a voluminous resource directory. This book is a must have for anyone who wants to teach a child language and culture.

Click here for more information about Teach Your Child Spanish Through Play, A Guide and Resource for Parents or Spanish for Kids, Games to Help Children Learn Spanish Language and Culture

Read More...

A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)A slim book, but not an easy read. Lots of repetition of ideas and content, as if the book had been written as separate essays and then stitched together without the aid of a good editor. He goes off on tangents within chapters which often had me re-reading pages to see if I had missed a transition.
Pitched as a book about how people have reacted to and adopted new communication technologies, it is really more a light historical overview of the topic. Disappointing. If you like technology and history you've already read most of this book elsewhere. Lots of rehashing of Petroski's book on the pencil and on Thoreau. Chapters on handwriting and Wordstar don't really add much. The last few chapters begin to get at what I thought the book was about -- how people react to and adopt new writing/communication technologies. The illustrations are also not the best, although some are at least interesting. The early Photoshop ad showing Marilyn Monroe holding Abraham Lincoln's arm is something I had not seen before.
If you haven't any background in the history of technology and want a very brief overview, this might be of interest. For me there are better sources and better edited books written in a more engaging style.I expected a lot more than I got.

Click Here to see more reviews about: A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution

Computers, now the writer's tool of choice, are still blamed by skeptics for a variety of ills, from speeding writing up to the point of recklessness, to complicating or trivializing the writing process, to destroying the English language itself. A Better Pencil puts our complex, still-evolving hate-love relationship with computers and the internet into perspective, describing how the digital revolution influences our reading and writing practices, and how the latest technologies differ from what came before. The book explores our use of computers as writing tools in light of the history of communication technology, a history of how we love, fear, and actually use our writing technologies--not just computers, but also typewriters, pencils, and clay tablets. Dennis Baron shows that virtually all writing implements--and even writing itself--were greeted at first with anxiety and outrage: the printing press disrupted the "almost spiritual connection" between the writer and the page; the typewriter was "impersonal and noisy" and would "destroy the art of handwriting."Both pencils and computers were created for tasks that had nothing to do with writing. Pencils, crafted by woodworkers for marking up their boards, were quickly repurposed by writers and artists. The computer crunched numbers, not words, until writers saw it as the next writing machine. Baron also explores the new genres that the computer has launched: email, the instant message, the web page, the blog, social-networking pages like MySpace and Facebook, and communally-generated texts like Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary, not to mention YouTube.Here then is a fascinating history of our tangled dealings with a wide range of writing instruments, from ancient papyrus to the modern laptop. With dozens of illustrations and many colorful anecdotes, the book will enthrall anyone interested in language, literacy, or writing.

Click here for more information about A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution

Read More...