Best-selling author Jerry Pallotta takes a peek at eyes from across the animal kingdom in this hilarious and fact-packed alphabet book. The eyes have it! Laugh as you learn by staring right into the eyes of familiar animals (A is for alligator eye) and not-so-familiar ones (Z is for zebu eye!). Readers of all ages will be entertained with every page turn. Language learning bonus: each page defines an idiom that includes the word "eye"!
Victorian Alphabet Books and the Education of the Eye shows how the familiar genre went beyond mere reading instruction to offer nineteenth-century British writers, illustrators, and publishers a site for representing and re-thinking literacy itself. This interdisciplinary study traces how individuals throughout the Victorian era deployed alphabet books to promote visual literacy or oral culture as a vital complement to textual literacy. Their strategies ranged from puns and political allusions to elaborate designs that addressed adult audiences alongside or even instead of children. As the format became more familiar in the first part of Victoria's reign, George Cruikshank, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Cole, and Edward Lear were quick to recognize its critical potential. This history pivots around the mid-1860s and 1870s, when the production of illustrated alphabet books exploded thanks to evolving printing technology and national education reform. Case studies of individual works and makers show how a revolution in picture books reflected and responded to laws assuring children's access to schooling. On the one hand, Socialist artist Walter Crane was able to develop alphabetical illustration from a utilitarian mid-century product into an aesthetically rich, yet accessibly priced "education of the eye." On the other hand, Kate Greenaway, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), and their publishers tended to leverage commercialized nostalgia against pedagogy. This survey concludes by showing how market-oriented trends and the development of photographic reproduction toward the end of the century fed into interpretations of the alphabet, including works by Rudyard Kipling and Hilaire Belloc, that reflected growing ambivalence about industrialized print culture.
In their first edition of Mentor Texts, authors Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli helped teachers across the country make the most of high-quality children's literature in their writing instruction. Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children's Literature, K-6, 2nd Edition the authors continue to show teachers how to help students become confident, accomplished writers by using literature as their foundation. The second edition includes brand-new Your Turn Lessons, built around the gradual release of responsibility model, offering suggestions for demonstrations and shared or guided writing. Reflection is emphasized as a necessary component to understanding why mentor authors chose certain strategies, literary devices, sentence structures, and words. Dorfman and Cappelli offer new children's book titles in each chapter and in a carefully curated and annotated Treasure Chest. At the end of each chapter a Think About It'sTalk About It'sWrite About It section invites reflection and conversation with colleagues.The book is organized around the characteristics of good writing'sfocus, content, organization, style, and conventions. The authors write in a friendly and conversational style, employing numerous anecdotes to help teachers visualize the process, and offer strategies that can be immediately implemented in the classroom. This practical resource demonstrates the power of learning to read like writers.
In the quarter century following the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act, art museums, along with other public institutions, were tasked with making their facilities and collections more accessible to people with disabilities. Although blind and other disabled people have become marginally more visible in recent years, the vast majority of blind Americans remain undereducated and unemployed. In More Than Meets the Eye, Georgina Kleege shows how the scrutiny of one cultural issue-access to arts institutions-in relation to one subset of the disabled population- blind people-can lead us to larger and more general implications. Kleege begins by examining representations of blindness, arguing that traditional theories of blindness often fail to take into account the presence of other senses, or the ability of blind people to draw analogies from non-visual experience to develop concepts about visual phenomena. Following this, the book shifts its focus from the tactile to the verbal, describing Denis Diderot's remarkable range of techniques to describe art works for readers who were not able to view them. Diderot's writing not only provided a model for describing art, Kleege says, but proof that the experience of art is inextricably tied to language and thus not entirely dependent on sight. By intertwining her personal experience with scientific study and historical literary analysis, Kleege challenges traditional conceptions of blindness and overturns the assumption that the ideal art viewer must have perfect vision. More Than Meets the Eye seeks to establish a dialogue between blind people and the philosophers, scientists, and educators that study blindness, in order to create new aesthetic possibilities and a more genuinely inclusive society.
Remarkable progress in eye-tracking technologies opened the way to design novel attention-based intelligent user interfaces, and highlighted the importance of better understanding of eye-gaze in human-computer interaction and human-human communication. For instance, a user’s focus of attention is useful in interpreting the user’s intentions, their understanding of the conversation, and their attitude towards the conversation. In human face-to-face communication, eye gaze plays an important role in floor management, grounding, and engagement in conversation. Eye Gaze in Intelligent User Interfaces draws on ideas from a number of contributors working on how attentional information can be applied to novel intelligent interfaces. Part I focuses on analyzing human eye gaze behaviors to reveal characteristics of human communication and cognition; Part II addresses estimation and prediction of the cognitive state of the users using gaze information; and Part III presents proposals of novel gaze-aware interfaces which integrate eye-trackers as a system component. The contributions highlight a direction for the future of human-computer interaction, and discuss issues in human attentional behaviors and face-to-face communication which are essential in designing gaze aware interactive interfaces.
Fluency is the quintessence of effective reading. To obtain socio-economic success, fluent reading is of primordial importance and reading is considered a crucial marker of an individual’s life course. Approximately 5% of children are affected by developmental dyslexia, exhibiting inaccurate word recognition, spelling, phonological decoding, and most importantly, severely dysfluent reading, which remains as their most characterizing and persistent deficit. Unable to attain society’s literacy demands, individuals with dyslexia are at severe risk for adverse academic, economic, and psychosocial consequences. Recently, it has been posed that the development of automatic letter-speech sound (LSS) integration is critical in the acquisition of fluent reading skills, and in particular that a failure to develop automatic LSS integration results in an impairment of reading fluency. In support, neurocognitive research has suggested that the development of automatized processing of LSS associations is an essential step in the formation of a functional neural network for reading. Furthermore, both neurocognitive and behavioural studies have suggested a less efficient LSS integration in children with dyslexia than in typical readers. Finally, results from intervention studies have suggested that training LSS might be a promising approach to ameliorate dysfluent reading in children with dyslexia. Nonetheless, there is still a considerable gap of knowledge in our understanding of the mechanisms by which learning LSS associations relate to (dys)fluent reading.
This edited book focuses on affordances and limitations of e-books for early language and literacy, features and design of e-books for early language and literacy, print versus e-books in early language and literacy development, and uses of and guidelines for how to use e-books in school and home literacy practices. Uniquely, this book includes critical reviews of diverse aspects of e-books (e.g., features) and e-book uses (e.g., independent reading) for early literacy as well as multiple examinations of e-books in home and school contexts using a variety of research methods and/or theoretical frames. The studies of children’s engagement with diverse types of e-books in different social contexts provide readers with a contemporary and comprehensive understanding of this topic. Research has demonstrated that ever-increasing numbers of children use digital devices as part of their daily routine. Yet, despite children’s frequent use of e-books from an early age, there is a limited understanding regarding how those e-books are actually being used at home and school. As more e-books become available, it is important to examine the educational benefits and limitations of different types of e-books for children. So far, studies on the topic have presented inconsistent findings regarding potential benefits and limitations of e-books for early literacy activities (e.g., independent reading, shared reading). The studies in this book aim to fill such gaps in the literature.
"Barcelona, the cultural epicenter of Catalunya, is presently experiencing the most dynamic and polemical period in its modern theater history. It is the commanding hub of an energetic theater scene that in recent years has witnessed an exuberant outpouring of new dramatists, a steady crescendo in theater attendance, and a continual increase in the international presence of Catalan directors, playwrights, and companies. Barcelona's post-Olympian cultural landscape, moreover, comprises several architecturally striking theater projects. The diversity of opportunities to stage plays in Catalan at an assortment of city spaces is unprecedented, ranging in variety from commercial locales to publicly funded stages to experimental "alternative" venues. Since its origins in the nineteenth century, modem Catalan drama has frequently exhibited a cosmopolitan and even transnational impulse, engaging in an artistic dialogue with international theater traditions of both past and present and forging its identity vis-a-vis its intercultural associations. The path along which the contemporary Catalan theater scene has struggled to recover and reconstitute the professional legitimacy and visibility that it lost during the Franco dictatorship has been a complex process, never lacking in melodramatic excess, witnessed both on and off the stage. The Barcelona stage, throughout its contemporary evolution, has been immersed in a stormy climate, whose relentlessly frenetic atmospheric activity at times may impede one from acquiring the distance necessary to see beyond the hurricane." --Book Jacket.
