Friday, January 13, 2006

My Favorite Pages


While on vacation I managed to read the two magazines I received for Christmas. (The giftgiver wasn't cheap--I asked for them in order to try them out.) My favorite of the two was Pages. I got the November/December issue, in which I read one fascinating article after another.

For instance, the article about The Lit Blog Co-Op, which is a group of lit-bloggers that bands together to help promote four books a year that they feel aren't getting enough attention, was thought provoking. The thought it provoked in me was, "Hey, there are more and more kidlit blogs being created all the time. Maybe some of us could get together and do something like this."

Then I remembered that I don't liked maybe 75 to 80 percent of what I read, so I decided that probably wasn't one of my better ideas.

Attention, Please by Jennifer Nelson involved kids with ADD/ADHD and reading. Kids with ADD/ADHD often have trouble learning to read. They mature like any other kid and are ready to learn about more sophisticated concepts, but they can't learn about them through reading the way other kids can. The author suggested that parents continue reading to these children so that they don't fall behind in learning concepts or vocabulary just because they can't read the words themselves.

I thought that article was so good that I'm planning to make copies for a couple of relatives studying education.

Another article I liked was about The Jungle Law by Victoria Vinton, a novel about Rudyard Kipling's life while he was living in Vermont. I'm not a particular Kipling fan, but I have always been interested in what the heck he was doing in Brattleboro, which I've driven past a few hundred times.

One last article in the magazine, ticked me off the way articles about its subject always tick me off. You'll have to read tomorrow's post to hear about it.

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