Kids love pictures. Kids reading get weaned on picture books. They learn to use their imaginations to interact with pictures. Their minds get wired to fall into a picture and explore and hypothesize. Looking at pictures in books is a form of playing.
Kids play what if – what if this and what if that. They experience their emotions through pictures. In a desert of words, when you turn a page and find a picture that engages you – this is bliss. Not just for a kid, but for most adults too. How else to explain USA Today? How else to explain that visual media are far more popular than written media?
We use pictures in the DaVinchy Action-Adventure Chapter Book Series to engage kids in reading. We fill up their minds. We fill up their senses. We make the story come alive inside of them so that reading becomes as easy as breathing – but as fun as playing a video game.
Take a deep look at the picture above. Now imagine you are eight years old. Imagine that you are the little mouse in the picture – our hero DaVinchy. Now imagine that you have just made a friend of the cat, Scruff…and he has said that he will do anything to protect you from now on.
You are inside the story now. You are ready for more information. You can feel the way the cat’s paw feels scratchy beneath your feet. You can see the drool hanging from the cat’s lips. You can smell the cat’s breath.
Are there a thousand words or more in this picture?
You can feel your own place in the world if you are identifying with the hero of the tale. You can see how the world may be a dangerous place, where you are small and everything around you is much larger. But you can also see that by trusting your heart you are able to make friendships and come to a place where you are safe, even possibly in the midst of danger.
We use pictures to fill your child with 1000′s of words that augment the words on the page. The pictures provide a rich emotional context that literally suck your child into the story.
Tomorrow, I will tell you how there are thousands and thousands of words in every picture…and reading-critical brain function that pictures in books aid. Without pictures in the brain, there is no reading it turns out.
This is a quick post. This one chart says it all. The computer is the place to capture your child’s attention. Reading full-color, action/adventure chapter books (ebooks) on the computer will give your kid a fighting chance to become more literate – a better reader! Click here to buy a chapter book that will turn your child from a couch potato into a voracious reader. – Chris Shaver, Author and Publisher, DaVinchy Action Adventure Chapter Book Series
Until kids are carrying around Kindle’s and iPads in great numbers you might think chapter ebooks wouldn’t have an audience. But if you consider how much time kids spend on the computer…and the number of ebook readers that work on PCs and MACs, you get a different view of the potential for chapter ebooks.
The entire DaVinchy Action-Adventure Series is published in ebook formats. Our first format is the DNL format, which requires the freeDNL reader click here.
The DNL provides a “flip book” ebook reading experience and lets kids read a book that looks just like one they’d hold in their hands. It is much like Apple’s iBook format for the iPad.
The reason we chose to publish in the DNL format instead of the iBook format was that DNL lets us have a really fun layout with pictures that run across the middle of the book – it’s splashy and fun and eye-candy for young readers. The iBook by contrast more or less forces you to have small pictures that live on one page….boring. And the Kindle only shows one page at a time in black and white…very boring. Although the Kindle reader for PC lets you view books in two page spreads – but with the same limitations as iBook.
Fun is fun…and kids love fun. And the DaVinchy Action-Adventure Series in the DNL format lets the books BE fun, and not slaves to technology. These are chapter ebooks that kids love to read. You can see all the chapter ebooks you can buy now here.
My son Zach just emailed me this youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rZzwIb6aPE. He said it reminded him of growing up.
Be patient with the beginning – it’s not racy, but starts out like it might go that way. It’s just this lovely poem, a paean to the reading out loud that inspired this chap and made him who he was today.
We raised good kids – they are all grown and gone from the house now…wonderful people in their own right. And I attribute much of who my kids are to the books they listened to…to the books we read them growing up.
We must have read 10,000 books aloud to our kids. Before we hit the chapter book years I would read 5 books aloud before bed of the short, picture book variety. We homeschooled, and reading aloud was a huge part of our curriculum. So the kids were hearing the written word read aloud pretty much all day long. Even text books were read aloud – although I have to say that most text book don’t inspire.
But the cadence of great authors filled our children’s ears. They filled their minds and hearts and spirits. The plots and characters and incidents and accidents of the stories filled our conversations. Our lives were all about books. Our inside jokes about books. Our lives enriched by books.
There are so many wonderful books to read aloud to your children. My hope and prayer is that the DaVinchy chapter books find their place in this world – both as books that kids love to read to themselves, and as books that parents read aloud to their kids.
Reading aloud is so important for the development of thought, and for the development of ear – both of which make for people who grow up to be great writers, great communicators and sensitive, emotionally intelligent, high-functioning adults.
Read aloud to your kids.
Peace,
Chris
Online chapter books are a dream thats time has come.
Parents have always yearned for a way to instantly plug their kids into a good chapter book the moment their kids close the one they are reading. I mean, a kid without a good chapter book is a kid cruising for trouble. Computer games beckon – hours of mindless entertainment…while reading skills slip and reading itself turns into a low priority for entertainment.
This is where the ebook revolution is going to rush in to save the day.
If you have a computer in your house you can find, buy and open a chapter book in ebook form in less time than it takes to find the car keys to head to the local bookstore. And you don’t have to wait a few days for Amazon to deliver any more.
Just yesterday I saw a bunch of chapter books in ebook form on ebook.com. The author was Matt Christopher who writes great chapter books with sports themes.
We’ve just published our first two chapter books in ebook form. We’ll be posting them here at http://davinchy.com/buy-books/ in the next week. But in the meantime you can get our first book free at http://davinchy.com/book-1/. We should also be for sale at ebook.com soon as well.
Matt Christopher books are words only books. Kids with good reading fluency love em and use them as stepping stones to longer form books. The DaVinchy Series is full of color illustration and is an action adventure chapter book series unlike anything in the world today. The vivid color pictures and the words go closely together and help give kids clues to word meaning. This really helps struggling readers or reluctant readers – and early chapter book readers to soar in reading fluency. I think your child will really like them.
Try our free online chapter book at the link above and see.
Back to the online chapter book revolution!
This is more than a technological revolution by the way. And it’s more than a means to scratch an itch at light speed. For kids of this generation their computers and soon their pads will be as familiar to them as our great-great-great grandparents horses were to them. They are their right hands. They are their portals to the world. So offering kids ebooks to read on these devices is allowing them to learn to read in they way they want to learn. Read that last sentence again. If you ever had someone force you to learn in a manner that made you uncomfortable, you will know that learning is impossible unless it’s fun and comfortable.
Yes – the online chapter book is here to stay. It is an ebook that will be able to be read on any digital device.
Celebrate and buy your child one today.
When I was 6 I wrote my first chapter book series. It was entitled Robin Hood Conquers the Monsters. I still have it. In fact I just pulled it out of an old envelope my mother saved for me. The memory of gathering paper and crayons around me and giving word, shape and form to my vision is still there for me. But even more, I have this image of Robin Hood in my head. This image, this picture that I got from a chapter book with pictures that I read…well I saw Robin Hood clearly. I was inspired by the pictures of him fighting with Little John on the log, crossing the creek. I was inspired by his band of merry men in the wood dining on stag flesh. Every last picture burned bright in my imagination.
After Robin Hood Conquers the Monsters, was to come a sequel: Robing Hood Conquers the Martians. Beyond that there were no doubt many other daunting creatures and enemies that I envisioned Robin Hood conquering.
But the images that inspired me are leading me on this path of discovery about the creative abilities of kids, and how pictures excite their imaginations.
I created the DaVinchy Series while Fran Panza and I were working on our first book, Doctor Walter and His Plan to Populate the Moon. We needed a little mouse who lived with Dr. Walter to bear witnesss to Dr. Walter’s creative genius. Fran gave me drawing after drawing – and in each one there was a little something amiss….eyes too big, nose too big, not enough mouth for expression, and so forth.
But when I saw DaVinchy – really saw him for the first time, a 50 book chapter book series – chapter books for kids – exploded into my head almost as whole cloth.
There is power in pictures to excite the imagination in untold ways. I designed and built my own house – and it was the image of it that came first that I held in my mind while I then had to proceed to detail graphically as a blueprint and as a physical rendering to begin the building.
So we offer our little chapter book series to the world with the express intent of inspiring kids to create, to tap into their imaginations, to inspire their love of reading. And we give the first free book away to you – as our love offering, and to prime the pump of visual imagination that is waiting inside your child!
Perhaps from these adventures your child’s own fertile mind with tap into inspirations that will fuel a generation’s desire for great stories, great inventions, or great intentions soon to be fulfilled.
I was rooting in the attic the other day and pulled out a Chip Hilton book I’d put away for safe keeping. Actually, somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought my kids would want to read this chapter book series that gave me so much pleasure. When they were “of age” I pulled a book or two out, and my kids laughed at the characters and the stories – in the way that kids like to laugh at things gone by that don’t express their current reality.
So it’s pretty clear to me that kids chapter books are typically “of their time” and that they fade away when their time passes.
This isn’t a profound observation – just one that I mention in passing, because even a series like the Goosebump chapter book series which my daughter read less than 15 years ago – which seems kind of timeless to me, seems to have passed it’s prime. I see it languishing on the shelves at book sales and yard sales now. Kids are “hungry” for the next big thing and the next big thing. I remember that feeling when I was a kid.
It’s funny, in that regard, our children’s voracious appetites for the new and the unique experience makes them the true engines of the American economy.
This is a lesson well worth learning as a parent. If you want to entice your child to read, you should be looking for the next thing that they are interested – the cool, unique, new and different thing that will let them keep pace with their peers. It will do you no good to protest that this series or that chapter book series would be of great interest to them if only they would give it a try. For kids, at times the patina of age is the kiss of death.
The DaVinchy Chapter Book Series is an ebook chapter book series. This is new and different. Kids love their computers and their colorful fun experience with them – especially with computer games. We give away a free ebook, a chapter ebook. It is Book 1 in the series, entitled Cat’s Claw. It’s a full and complete book – in every sense of the word. Click on Free Book above and give your kids a fun reading experience that is cutting edge.
I spent the weekend on the Clarion river, tubing, carried by the current…thinking about kids and reading…and thinking lots about small things. In Bill Bryson’s book, A Walk in the Woods (which makes a great read aloud chapter book for kids 8 and up)…he says that when you’ve been walking long distances in the woods, the smallest things can produce a low-level of ecstasy.
I like the sound of that - low level ecstasy – and how it pertains to the quiet joys of reading chapter books. I certainly felt low level ecstasy reading Gertrude Chandler Warner to my children, and in turn listening to them read her sentences aloud to me. And there were many time in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe Narnia Series, when I felt the same.
Mostly these were smaller moments in the books. Not the big crescendo’s or the epic battles or the rescue scenes. No, it was in the well drawn character, or the simple gesture perfectly drawn that I could feel myself begin, inside, to vibrate at the low levels of ecstasy.
Tubing, floating down the river, you come slowly upon the bank, witnessing one small miracle after another. The river plays a game of hide and seek with you, if you let it. The currents turn your tube, first one way, then another. But around ever turn, and sometimes just on the other side of the next rock – or maybe it is the next rock itself where you witness a piece of nature’s beauty. It could even be the way a shaft of light, newly revealed by a passing cloud illuminates a bank full of grasses shifting in the breeze. Or the startling red of a cardinal flower so vibrant in the summer sun that it makes you want to cry. Or the soaring spiral of a bald eagle casting it’s shadow on the glassy surface of the river.
Each moment is so small and so large at the same time. Each moment is joy beyond boundless joy – expressing to you the pure happiness of being alive.
This is the same joy of turning the page with your child as you read together before bed. “I’ll read a page and you’ll read a page.” And you look down and see your child’s small hand grip the edges of the book, and hear her sure voice float smoothly across the bobbing waters of vowels and consonant that have never before passed her lips in the same way.
Low levels of ecstasy pass in front of us in every momen when there are children in our lives.
Enjoy these chapter book reading days. They are precious beyond all that is precious on this earth. Just let the river carry you.
I once worked with a guy who was a very accomplished professional and the vice president of a mid-sized company who had deep difficulties reading. In fact, when he was stressed out or under any pressure, he literally read one word at a time. And by one word at a time, I mean one…..word……at……a……time. He would consider each word, it’s possible meanings, think about this word separately – try and fit it into the context of what he had just read – and get frustrated that this word was too variable in nature (they were almost all too variable in nature) to carry the exact precise meaning that it needed to in context.
I worked with him for over 8 years before I heard the story of his reading issues. It turned out that he was quick to learn how to “decode” letters and the sounds of letters and to read when he was in first grade. But as soon as he graduated to chapter books his troubles began.
So long as he was reading a word at a time he had no problem. If there were pictures with the words to give him clues to the story he was reasonably good at reading. But if you took away the pictures and asked him to read for meaning – he read one-word-at-a-time.
You can imagine what a titanic struggle this was. And he said that up until the 11th grade, he got through schooling by faking it or by having his parents read to him. This is not an uncommon story in that regard. But when he got to the 11th grade, his father, who was a musician, listened to him reading one night and realized that his son was literally reading ever word separately – and could not get the sense of the whole.
My friend was a drummer, his father was a piano player, so they shared the vocabulary of music. So when his father told him, “Paul, you are reading every word like it’s a single note of music. You have to read them a phrase at a time – like a musical phrase where you don’t stop but just play it all in a burst”…well at that point Paul finally had a way to read that opened up the world of books to him.
Why do I bring this up? Well in my last post I asked you to list what you thought the top 10 reading problems were. And at the same time I shared the individual challenges we faced with each of our kids.
Now, by sharing Paul’s unique story – I want to gently lead you to a conclusion.
When you are watching your child read, the top 10 problems are irrelevent in some regard. Because if you are watching for the problems, you may easily miss the solution to the specific and unique challenges that your little chapter book kids may be facing.
Even if they have a “common” problem like dyslexia, or a challenge remembering words that contains spellings or letter combinations that are exceptions to rules – you will miss the solution if you are focusing on their problem.
The DaVinchy Chapter Books for Kids are filled with fun, exciting pictures that make it easy for kids to read. It doesn’t matter if they are dyslexic, or ADHD or ADD or what have you – the reading experience will be more pleasureable and easy and fun.
And if there is a secret solution out there, it is this: make reading fun for your little chapter book reading kids!
Try our free chapter book to get your child started on a lifetime love of reading today!
I’m going to put this question out there for you to answer. Given all the chapter books for kids – and all the reading issues that exist for the kids reading these chapter books…what are the top 10 problems chapter book readers face?
On Monday, I’ll give you my top ten list. But I want to frame this up by talking about what we experienced with homeschooling our kids. With our oldest child, our daughter, you wouldn’t say that there were any problems. Except she’d could read so well that she sometimes books that exceeded her emotional grasp – or that frightened her or overstimulated her imagination. This is a tough call for parents – because kids are always pushing boundaries outward, no matter where you set them. At the time, she was reading Goosebumps books – which are harmless enough in their own way, or for the right kid at the right time. But if situations converge – sleepless nights can abound!
Our middle child – our oldest son – was not what you would call a fast-paced reader. He’s got a mild form of dyslexia and he processes slowly. Slowly but surely I might add. I’m not sure he ever really read any chapter books. But at some point or another he started reading the instruction manual for Sim City, the computer game. This manual was as thick as a non-abridged dictionary. It was at that point in time that I knew to leave well enough alone and not worry about chapter books for him at all.
Our youngest son loved the Redwall Series and the Lord of the Rings, and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe Series. In fact he loved anything we would read aloud to him – or that he could get as a book on tape. Still does in fact. I just finished rereading Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, and the first thing he asked me was whether there was a book on tape in the library for it. When he did start to read, he would read the same book over and over again. In fact, when we read A Boy’s Life by Robert Mccammon I thought I might have to pry the book out of his fingers he reread it so many times. But he loved The Boxcar Kids, and Arnold Lobel’s chapter books – and The Wind and the Willows – and just about anything that we’d read to him. Harry Potter books were eventually his cup of tea, too. A bit later in the game than you would say was right if you had a schedule in your head for that sort of thing…but he devoured them just the same, even though we’d read them out loud.
I wonder if you see where I’m going here? Can you tell me the problems that your chapter book readers face? Your top 10?
