How to teach … World Book Day

As World Book Day approaches, here are some great ideas, lesson plans and teaching resources to get your students excited about reading

Celebrate World Book Day 2014 with a selection of teaching resources to inspire children to read. Photograph: VisitBritain/Pawel Libera/Getty Images.

  World Book Day is a fabulous opportunity to get young people excited about reading.

This year's event takes place on Thursday 6 March, and the aim – as always – is to celebrate the power of storytelling and inspire a lifelong love of books.

If you are wondering how to get involved, look no further than the Guardian Teacher Network where you will find a range of resources to get your classroom buzzing.

Jump right in with a set of activity packs for nursery, primary and secondary schools. Created by the organisers of World Book Day, they are full of reading-themed ideas. For pre-school children, try acting out a favourite story or making a picture book of children's drawings. Primary students might enjoy organising a book swap or holding a pyjama party to discuss their favourite bedtime books. Secondary pupils could have a book election to find their year group's three favourite books of all time, or they could organise a sponsored "read-a-thon".

How to teach… reading for pleasure

The link between reading for fun and educational success is well established, but how can teachers get reluctant readers into books? These teaching resources will help

  
Studies have found that reading for pleasure is more important to a child's educational achievement than their family's wealth or social class. But how to inspire children to ditch the tech (e-readers excepted) and get into reading for fun?

Having a couple of nice books in the book corner won't necessarily cut it anymore, especially if your students' parents/carers don't have a reading habit. So, here are some great teaching resources and ideas which will help you to encourage all your students to become lifelong readers and turn your school into a reading school.

We start with some inspiring resources from the Scottish Book Trust. For fabulous ideas on creating a reading culture check out The big book bash. It's full of ideas from holding a whole school celebration to setting up blind dates with a book.

If you want to give parents some quick guidance on how to encourage their children to read these top tips sheets are really handy; this sheet is for three-to-seven year-olds and this one for eight-to-11-year-olds. Don't give up on the teens, here are some tips for helping young people aged 12-16. The books don't have to be too wordy, here are some great ideas for picture books for older readers – and their breadth and depth might take you by surprise.

Failure can be productive for teaching children maths

Try, try and try again. GlobalPartnership for Education

Learning from mistakes, errors, and failure seems intuitive and compelling. Everyone can relate to it. But if failure is a powerful learning mechanism, why do we wait for it to happen? Why can’t we design for it, understand how and when it works? What if designing for failure while learning a new concept or skill could result in more robust learning?

Let me frame the question more concretely in the context of learning maths. When learning a new concept, should learners be first taught the concept and then solve problems, or solve problems first and then be taught the concept?

The first option is relatively straightforward and one that most of us can relate to: teach students the concept first, show them how it is applied to solve problems, and then get them to solve problems on their own. This method is commonly known as direct instruction, and is highly prevalent in schools all over the world.

Finland puts flexible holidays ahead of longer school days

The length of the school year and school days, as well as the timing of holidays, is always a controversial topic. While the debate rages in the UK about whether children should spend more time at school…

 

The length of the school year and school days, as well as the timing of holidays, is always a controversial topic. While the debate rages in the UK about whether children should spend more time at school, in Finland – which has both one of the shortest school years in the OECD and some of the best results in international education rankings – there is a push to improve learning by developing novel ways of learning, rather than increasing school days and lesson time.

Winter holidays in Finland are staggered depending on where you live. At the moment pupils in southern Finland are enjoying their last days of the winter holidays. They will be followed by the middle part of the country, and finally northern Finland.

Study of jazz players shows common brain circuitry processes music and language

Researchers scanned brains while musicians 'traded fours'

 

  

The brains of jazz musicians engrossed in spontaneous, improvisational musical conversation showed robust activation of brain areas traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax, which are used to interpret the structure of phrases and sentences. But this musical conversation shut down brain areas linked to semantics — those that process the meaning of spoken language, according to results of a study by Johns Hopkins researchers.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the brain activity of jazz musicians in the act of "trading fours," a process in which musicians participate in spontaneous back and forth instrumental exchanges, usually four bars in duration. The musicians introduce new melodies in response to each other's musical ideas, elaborating and modifying them over the course of a performance.

Children’s attention spans at risk from too much screen time

From iPads to Xboxes, the modern child has a vast array of electronic media to help alleviate boredom, pass the time and play online games. Parents may often wonder about the impact such activities can have on their children’s brain development, behaviour and learning.

Now Labour’s shadow education minister Tristram Hunt has suggested that children need lessons in how to concentrate, because of their increased use of social media.

As always these issues are complex, have been discussed emotively in the press and can be easily misunderstood. Television viewing is an excellent example of this. Most studies find a small but negative link between total numbers of hours of television viewing and academic achievement.

But when research studies control for characteristics of the child such as IQ and socioeconomic status those differences usually disappear.

French Revolution Digital Archive – web site launched -

Stanford University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) have just released a vast trove of documents and images from the French Revolution on their new French Revolution Digital Archive website (FRDA).

The site contains both resources for the dedicated scholar and fascinating material for the everyday history buff, from prints depicting the events of 1789 to records of parliamentary deliberations and private letters.

Why is Singapore’s school system so successful, and is it a model for the West?

Stick to the textbook. Ray Chua/AP/Press Association Images

For more than a decade, Singapore, along with South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Finland, has been at or near the top of international leagues tables that measure children’s ability in reading, maths and science. This has led to a considerable sense of achievement in Finland and East Asia and endless hand-wringing and head-scratching in the West.

What then do Singaporean teachers do in classrooms that is so special, bearing in mind that there are substantial differences in classroom practices between – as well as within – the top-performing countries? What are the particular strengths of Singapore’s instructional regime that helps it perform so well? What are its limits and constraints?

Is it the right model for countries seeking to prepare students properly for the complex demands of 21st century knowledge economies and institutional environments more generally? Is Singapore’s teaching system transferable to other countries? Or is its success so dependent on very specific institutional and cultural factors unique to Singapore that it is folly to imagine that it might be reproduced elsewhere?

The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates

Semir Zeki^1*, John Paul Romaya¹, Dionigi M. T. Benincasa² and Michael F. Atiyah³

• ¹Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology, University College London, London, UK
• ²Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London, UK
• ³School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Many have written of the experience of mathematical beauty as being comparable to that derived from the greatest art. 

This makes it interesting to learn whether the experience of beauty derived from such a highly intellectual and abstract source as mathematics correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain as that derived from more sensory, perceptually based, sources.

Why climate change is very bad for your health

Alastair Mackie’s Mosquito Coast. Noodlefish

It is beyond doubt that our emissions contribute to climate change. And climate change is making us sick.

Sea–level rises, changes to the severity of monsoon seasons and rainfall, flooding, droughts and heatwaves are all predicted to have an increasing impact on our health.

The World Health Organisation estimates that between 1970 and 2004, the environmental effects of climate change caused more than 140,000 deaths each year. And the direct financial cost of the damage it will have on our health is estimated to come in at around US$2-4 billion in just over 15 years time.

Extreme weather events

We tend to think of large-scale weather events as “natural” disasters, but the case is increasingly being made for a man-made cause and effect for some of these. While it is difficult to attribute single events such as Hurricane Katrina to climate change, climatologists have suggested a possible role in contributing to the intensity of these kinds of events. And flooding, droughts, heatwaves, and the spread of disease have all been linked to climate change.