I am interested in keeping people inspired and informed with images, videos, poems or research texts about learn to read materials for preschoolers and typography. If you want to submit material, please email me at Ulrike@lovetoread.com
We just taught animation classes to kids and teens for a week. It was intense with a lot of fun and a lot of work. Apart from animating a 3d Alphabet, we made coffee-cup people. To explain the concept we showed a sample animation of our own coffee-cup Lady Gaga (see movie). The goal of the coffee-cup exercises is to promote divergent thinking, leading to more ideas, more creativity and better problem solving. It is a skill that is so important, but not emphasized in normal school life. There is an excellent TED talk presentation by Sir Ken Robinson that shows how our educational system is not supporting divergent thinking. It was interesting to find out that the younger the kids were, the more ideas they had... just like in the Ken Robinson's "paperclip" study. They also liked bumping into the tri-pod and camera a lot, which led to many re-shootings... Altogether we took thousands of photos. What a week! Here is a clip that shows what the kids did with their coffeecups. Do you consider yourself creative? If so, do you engage in creative or lateral thinking activities? Get our Coffee-Cup character creation kit right here to get started!
We love children museums. Here we are with Cosi and Niko at the San Diego Museum for kids. We love the San Francisco children museum, the Exploratorium as well as the Skirball center in LA.
There is something about boxes...simple cardboard boxes, pandora boxes, mystery boxes,... One day I brought my son Nikolas with me to the office. The plan for the day was to create a stopmotion animation for the Spanish Alphabet, but with him being in the office I was not really able to concentrate on anything serious. While there were no toys around, Nikolas was highly entertained with boxes: as you can see:
We see it every day on signs, billboards, packaging, in books and magazines; in fact, you are looking at it now — the Latin or Roman alphabet, the world’s most prolific, most widespread abc. Typography is a relatively recent invention, but to unearth the origins of alphabets, we will need to travel much farther back in time, to an era contemporaneous with the emergence of (agricultural) civilisation itself.
STOP-MOTION ANIMATION WHAT you NEED The first thing you need is, of course, an idea. Try to stick with something simple for your first one–any action that can be split up into smaller parts works well.
Alphabet City Exhibit Debuts at the Elizabeth Gordon Gallery
From Amelie to Zachary, quirky coffee-cup characters will be featured in the Alphabet City exhibit that opens on August 15 at the Elizabeth Gordon Gallery in Santa Barbara. Ulrike Kerber’s Viva Design Inc. has crafted the city skyline with fun characters as part of its Love to Read project. The one-month exhibit will include Love to Read events, animations, and presentations. Love to Read aims to instill an early love of reading and inspire preschoolers (and their parents) to create animations with recyclable materials.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about babies – and how the child’s ability to explore, experiment, and make mistakes is an essential part of the creative process. When we are at the height of our creative productivity or “flow” state, our brainwaves reflect a deeply meditative, or “theta,” pattern.As babies and pre-adolescent children, this theta state – characterized by the ability to shut out the world and deeply concentrate and connect with a task at hand – is the norm, enabling children to lose hours playing in completely imaginary worlds. Yet, for adults theta brainwaves are more difficult to access, usually coming only in half-waking states as we slip into dreams. Rumor has it that Thomas Edison (progenitor of the 99% namesake) would sleep just 4-5 hours a night and then power-nap in order to intentionally access the super-creative powers of the theta state. Edison would grasp a ball bearing in his hand, which he draped over the arm of his chair just above a tin pie plate. As he nodded off in his chair, he’d drop the bearing, and the clanging would wake him up just as he drifted off. Then, he would immediately write down whatever was in his mind. Author Jim Robbins writes of a similar technique used by chemist Friedrich Kekule, in A Symphony of the Brain, describing a reverie in which he “envisioned atoms forming a chain and snakes biting their tails, which led him to discover the shape of the benzene ring.”
The theta state is characterized by the ability to shut out the world and deeply concentrate and connect with a task at hand.
Hebrew letters that melt, extrude spiky appendages, and crawl around on three-dimensional surfaces -- those are the disturbing and inventive forms thatOded Ezer creates when he wants to get away from everyday typography.
Ezer is a versatile graphic designer and type designer working in Israel, where his poster, logo, and publication designs reflect the commercial side of his work. His angular Hebrew typeface family Maya was honored in both the ATypI bukva:raz! type-design competition and the Type Directors Club's TDC2 competition in 2001, and was shown among the winners in the book Language Culture Type. But Ezer also practices experimental typography that he calls "typo art," manipulating Hebrew letters in space and turning type into three-dimensional objects.
For my german friends or whoever likes to have a quirky introduction to German: Nadia Budde wrote and illustrated an unusual Alphabet book for toddlers "Trauriger Tiger toastet Tomaten"...check it out!
When your child tries to put a new toy together, does he read the instructions first? Then he may be a visual learner who learns best by seeing.
Would he rather listen to someone else tell him the directions? He may be an auditory learner who learns best by listening. Or, does he want to start putting the toy together without any instructions? Then he may be a kinesthetic learner who learns best by moving his body—arms, legs, fingers, etc. Children learn in all three ways. But, by understanding learning styles, parents can help make study time more effective.
Is your child interested in learning the names of letters? Does he look through books and magazines on his own? Does he like to “write” with a pencil or pen? Does he listen attentively during story time? If the answer is yes, he may be ready to learn some of the basics of reading. If not, he’s like most preschoolers, and will take another year or two to develop the language skills, visual perception, and memory he needs to begin formal reading.
Language is made up of socially shared rules that include the following:
What words mean (e.g., "star" can refer to a bright object in the night sky or a celebrity)
How to make new words (e.g., friend, friendly, unfriendly)
How to put words together (e.g., "Peg walked to the new store" rather than "Peg walk store new")
What word combinations are best in what situations ("Would you mind moving your foot?" could quickly change to "Get off my foot, please!" if the first request did not produce results)
Speech is the verbal means of communicating. Speech consists of the following:
Articulation How speech sounds are made (e.g., children must learn how to produce the "r" sound in order to say "rabbit" instead of "wabbit").
Voice Use of the vocal folds and breathing to produce sound (e.g., the voice can be abused from overuse or misuse and can lead to hoarseness or loss of voice).
Fluency The rhythm of speech (e.g., hesitations or stuttering can affect fluency).
I love the the ideas of Sir Ken Robinson…and had the privilege of seeing him speak. He challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types.In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled TED 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning -- creating conditions where kids' natural talents can flourish.
I took a week-long parenting class at the Institute in Philadelphia. I took from it the general idea of offering to my children limitless opportunities for growth. While the class was useful, it is not designed for anyone. It is exclusively for professional parents, that can home-school full-time. At the time I took the class, the institute philosophy did not include media, tv, commuters, or anything technical. I think nowadays you cannot leave out these important stimulating learning tools.
This is the class I took: How To Multiply Your Baby's Intelligence Course The course features lectures, live demonstrations by parents and children, and practical instruction. Parents learn how to teach their children to read, how to learn a foreign language, indeed how to learn anything and everything including: Mathematics, and music appreciation. Parents learn about sensory and motor development and the fundamentals of a good nutritional program for the family.
By TAMAR LEWIN Published: October 23, 2009 Parent alert: the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those “Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses. They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect. “We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds,” said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years.
We love children museums. Here we are with Cosi and Niko at the San Diego Museum for kids. We love the San Francisco children museum, the Exploratorium as well as the Skirball center in LA.
