Reading: Brain altering stuff

I've been doing a lot of reading lately about how the brain is altered by regular recreational reading. Not checking your iPhone but reading a novel; a continuing story with plot and characters.

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During our wider reading sessions I often get asked whether the students can read the newspaper.  The answer is "no". Newspaper reading is fragmented, disjointed and doesn't offer the cognitive benefits that reading a novel has.

There are distinct advantages to reading an ongoing novel or short story. A research report done on the effect of ongoing reading on the brain (Bergland 2014) showed:

• "becoming engrossed in a novel enhances connectivity in the brain and improves brain function" 
• "enhanced connectivity included the students' left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with language comprehension"

The challenge we have is allowing our students to read. Giving them permission to read and to steal those moments of 10 or 15 minutes to read their novel. Before dinner, while waiting at the bus stop, at the end of a class.

We know that at the start of puberty, there is a tremendous growth in brain development. We also know that during the teenage years you either "lose it or you lose it"

Further Reading:

Bergland, C. (2014). Reading Fiction Improves Brain Connectivity and Function. [online] Psychology Today. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-athletes-way/201401/reading-fiction-improves-brain-connectivity-and-function [Accessed 29 Jul. 2019].

Coghlan, A. (2016). Revealed: the teenage brain upgrades that occur before adulthood. [online] New Scientist. Available at: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2098557-revealed-the-teenage-brain-upgrades-that-occur-before-adulthood/ [Accessed 30 Jul. 2019].

Siegel, D. (2014). Pruning, Myelination, and the Remodeling Adolescent Brain. [online] Psychology Today. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/inspire-rewire/201402/pruning-myelination-and-the-remodeling-adolescent-brain [Accessed 30 Jul. 2019].

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Encouraging a regular reading habit

The data from our reading observations has shown that there is a large chunk of our Year 7 students that are not reading regularly.

Reflecting on the Wider Reading data, we can see that there is a group of girls who are just not reading outside the wider reading sessions every fortnight. Their reading is disjointed and often they pick up a different book each week. The only book that they have finished all semester is their class set text. We know that reading competency, vocabulary range and imagination will develop if students read novels regularly.

They have sports practice, they have homework, they have production rehearsals. The excuses are endless and sometimes quite creative. Students don't understand the benefits of reading regularly and they are not willing to make the changes or sacrifices to steal 10 minutes here or 10 minutes there for their reading.

So what are we doing about it?

We have put together a 'Drop everything and read' campaign. I purposefully called it a campaign because it has a start and an end date. We are doing this in Term 3 because we now know a fair bit about our Year 7 readers, we have 6 months of reading observations about them. Now it is time to change some habits.

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So we have started off with bookmarks to launch the campaign and classroom posters encouraging them to find the 10 minutes a day to read. To steal it from the time before dinner or when waiting for a bus.

Students will use the bookmarks (hopefully) to record how many minutes they read per week and enter the data online so that we can tally up which class has read the most. Yes there is competition between the English classes, however, we are not targeting individual students even though we will have that data so that we can verify and encourage their efforts when we talk to them during the wider reading sessions in the Learning Commons.

The plan is to see how they go and encourage them along with some lolly packs and perhaps button badges if I have the time to make some.

After I presented to two of the classes this afternoon, there was a buzz and lots of questions:

1. Do I have to read?
2. Will there be chocolate?
3. What if I forget to read?
4. Can we each get chocolate?
5. Can I listen to an audio book?
6. Is there chocolate?

When exiting the classroom after presenting the ideas, a student who is a big fan of Tui Sutherland leant into me and said "I am going to knock it out of the park".

I am going to try and blog as much as I can about this project.

Three simple ways to use the Makerspace 3D Printers in your Art Curriculum

Three ways in which you can use your School Library Makerspace 3D Printer to enhance the Art curriculum.

1. Flourishes for Textiles 

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As part of our textiles curriculum, students are shown how to create and print custom buttons on our 3D Printers. If they don't like buttons, they can custom print a tag to be sewn onto their garment or in this case (image) iPad pouch.

This is a quick and easy task that is designed to get them thinking about the application of 3D Printing in the textile realm.

2. Create jewellery

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As part of a Year 10 graphic design unit, students designed their own jewellery and then we scanned in the diagrams, converted them to 3D shapes using Selva3D and printed them off. In reality, it is probably more a laser cutting exercise than 3D Printer, but we didn't have a laser cutter.

3. Create Makers Mark stamps for ceramics

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This is such an incredibly simple concept. Students who do ceramics normally sketch their name on the base of the object that they have made. A Makers Mark stamp is another extension of that and an opportunity to talk about branding.

If you want to take this concept pone step further, creating a metal "makers mark" can be done via shapeways and here is an example of one. You could create it as a keyring and get it printed in metal.