Screens and Books

Earlier this week, I took Max and our 5 year old neighbor to the library for baby story time. There were about 50 people crammed into the little room, though, and Max said no thank you to that. At 16 months, he's sort of at the upper end of the age range for that particular program anyway. I will start taking him to the toddler program soon. We tiptoed out of the room and went back to the children's section, where both children did nothing but swipe screens and mash keyboards despite my best efforts to get them interested in books.

I despise the computers that are set up in the children's rooms. The toddlers are drawn to them like moths to a light, but are unable to interact in any meaningful way. At best, they navigate to some sort of tv program with overly shrill character voices screaming about the color yellow. THE SUN IS YELLOW! CLICK THE YELLOW SUN!

After all that, the book about colors is very boring to Max, I suppose. My neighbor was basically doing the same thing, on an iPad that was mounted to a little security post. App to app to app....she never found one she liked or could navigate herself and she didn't want me to help her. Swipe, swipe, swipe. That was the actual activity she wished to engage in.

I abandoned the idea of reading together in the library and just picked some books out to take home.

I was observing some 4th grade students in a classroom many years ago, coincidentally in a school that is right down the street from where I currently live. When I asked one of the boys what he was doing on the computer set up in the back of the room, he said "I click this button and it teaches me things." I asked him what he was learning. He shrugged, and went back to clicking "NEXT PAGE" without so much as glancing at the text. He had also learned to hit the Escape button to get out of the program when he failed to answer the correct questions and the "NEXT PAGE" button wasn't there.

M works for an educational software company, and I know there is much more that goes into designing and developing a good app for kids, including a lot more attention to accessibility to language and disabilities. (Also, many things have changed since 2003.) I'm definitely not opposed to kids using technology....I'm just frequently disturbed with how it plays out in real life.

Once we got into the car, the kids were both excited to read their books, and as the other children came home they were eager to page through the collection of books we had checked out.

My strategy for picking out books is to browse a section and just pull out a few books that appeal to me at first glance. If I like them, I look up the authors and see what else they have published and might go and find that.

This week I found "Lifetime: The Amazing Numbers in Animal Lives" by Lola M. Schaefer, illustrated by Christopher Silas Neal. This book is pretty simple, but informative. In addition to giving some good facts about how many babies certain animals have, or how many sets of antlers they grow, it offers a good explanation of how to calculate averages, and how an average does not necessarily represent a consistent and regular pattern over a lifetime. For instance, reproduction often peaks during a particular phase of an animal's life, or growth accelerates during youth but slows as they age.

Next time I will look for "Pick, Pull, Snap!: Where a Flower Once Bloomed," also by Lola M. Schaefer, and the Over and Under series by Kate Messner.