An effective and meaningful way of enhancing children's learning, doing research empowers children to participate actively in their own education and to make original contributions to knowledge. This book's unique child-centered perspective provides an easy-to-follow model for teaching research methodology to children aged 10 upwards.

The author shows how certain strategies can improve children's progress in writing. Dealing with the age range 3 to 13, the book addresses issues to do with:

    The gender gap
    Children with English as an additional language
    Left-handedness

Dorothy Latham includes ideas for sound and easy ongoing assessment of writing. The book is written in line with the requirements of the English National Curriculum and The National Literacy Strategy Framework for England, but is not limited to them.

Developmental language disorders (DLD) occur when a child fails to develop his or her native language often for no apparent reason. Delayed development of speech and/or language is one of the most common reasons for parents of preschool children to seek the advice of their family doctor. Although some children rapidly improve, others have more persistent language difficulties. These long-term deficits can adversely affect academic progress, social relationships and mental well-being.

 

Each chapter is written by a leading authority in the field in a format accessible to researchers, clinicians and families alike.

 

This book, with its focus on both theory and practice, will be invaluable to students and researchers of speech-language pathology, psychology, psychiatry, linguistics and education. It will also be of interest to practicing speech-language pathologists, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, educational psychologists, and teachers and parents of children with developmental language disorders.

 

"Stories, Pictures and Reality" follows two children as they work out the reality status of stories and pictures, with a daily parent-observer record from the birth of the first child until the second is eight, a span of eleven years in all. Together, these children pick through the meaning of stories and the motivations of the characters they discover in this unique first-hand description of the discernment that children bring to books from an early age, full of revealing quotes that tell us a great deal about the cognitive development of our young readers.

This book contains some well-formatted entertaining plays that allow children to act out the stories while the teacher feeds them lines. I tried out the warm-up exercises and two other plays, "Friends 1 and 2 have an argument" and "Goldilocks and the Many Bears" on children ages 4-9 and the kids had a great time! I asked the kids what they thought of the plays and they said, "They were fun!" The kids and I look forward to performing more of these charming little plays.