Over the years many people have asked me, “How do I make my child a strong reader?” The answer is simple, “Read.”

By IBTimes Staff Reporter | June 24, 2011 7:01 AM EDT

Survival International has released the first, clear pictures of this ancient Amazonian tribe, who grow crops, peanuts, bananas, corns and more. Have a look:

From Food Navigator USA

Comment: I’ve been screaming this from the roof tops for years. Real food vs. processed food. Read on, McDuff!

Good morning! It’s going to be a hot week!

Portion size and eating more often largely responsible for obesity: Study

W had a great time at the Science Museum in Nashville. The children were delighted with the ability to be free and just run and play among so many wonderful exhibits. They climbed, they discovered, they experienced a huge building filled with childhood activities and a love of learning.

More delicious portraits by Beve Pietrowsky!

Parents entrust children to a school – especially an early childhood school. Parents form a bond with teachers and the director, and if it goes as it should go, the time a child spends at school will be a productive time, a learning time, a time when independence and a sense of self emerges to help the child do well all his life at whatever he tries.

Every summer I am doubly annoyed by the intrusive and trespassing third party who inches it’s way into the covenant of parent and teacher. Every summer, a parent at a public facility – usually the pool – will do one of three things: scream at one of our teachers for disciplining a child; try to grab a child from the school and carry him or her off to sooth some problem; or simply fight with a teacher about the “proper way” to care for a child.

No child likes to be scolded about poor public behavior, but I can guarantee any parent that a child will be scolded if they do dangerous or self indulgent things. If a child pushes another child under the water, the pusher will be scolded and sat out along the side of the pool for a period of time. If a child invades a family’s space and takes toys not belonging to the Garden School, they will be told to return the toys and leave the family alone. If a child tries to leave the pool area where he belongs, he is done swimming for the day. These are “have to be” rules for the sake of the community of swimmers.

But no matter how much a child is warned, told, instructed, there are those who will test the waters right up to the pool’s edge. And parents know that we are tough, strict, and stick to our guns and because we do, we are able to do remarkable things with remarkable behavior.

But at the same time, those big and public “NOs” often make a stubborn child weep. There won’t be any tears because the child is neither frightened nor hurt; the child is angry and the most you will get is noise in a great big way, so wailing, sniveling and piercing shrieks are often the issue.

This is where the trespassing do gooder begins to annoy me. “Why is that child crying?” demands a middle aged woman as she leaves her own charges to do anything they want like go too deep in the water or disappear.

“None of your business” is the correct answer. Most teachers will tell Mrs. Buttinsky that the child is fine just angry from breaking the rules.

“Well, she’s been crying for a very long time.”

“That’s because she’s not getting her way.”

“Well, I think it’s a disgrace to have a child who is crying.”

“I’m sorry that you are disgraced by discipline.”

At this point Mrs. Buttinsky, huffing like a race-tiger, dashes to the child, swoops her into strange arms and proceeds to take the child away from the group.

What’s wrong with this scenario?

Good Samaritan? Nasty teacher? Bad communication?

What is wrong with this scenario is kidnapping. Mrs. Buttinsky is stepping over the limits of parent teacher covenant and attempting something that will only be viewed as a kidnapping attempt. The child was not hurt; the child was disciplined. The child yelps were not a product of calling for help, but for attention to be paid. When the police are called, and they have been called when Mrs. Buttinsky has jumped the limit, the police are always on the side of the care provider simply because of the covenant created at the free will of both the parent and the teacher.

Strangers are strangers and have no business usurping the agreement parents have with a teacher. Strangers also have no business touching a child who is not in their company. Adults in the public have no business undermining the care between a teacher and a child.

Children are often poorly behaved. It’s the nature of children. They are not yet reasonable, and sometimes they do the wrong thing. But in order to teach, in order to make an impression, a scolding and a period of thinking it through is the only really fair option to give a child who needs that time to remember the rules.

Mrs. Buttinsky can only ruin that child’s learning time and squash a teacher’s resolve to teach the child.

From Education Week

Study Finds Sudden Insights Key to Learning Words

Comment: Interesting stuff…

Parents and teachers often use flashcards and picture books to teach young children new words, but a new study suggests that understanding basic words may come from a flash of initial insight more than repetition.

“What we know is children are getting a lot of input from their world, and they are teasing out what information is useful or not useful,” said Janice H. Im, the interim chief program officer for the Washington-based nonprofit Zero to Three: the National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families. “If language experiences are not rich, then where is your interest to retain them?”

The study’s findings suggest that children—and, in fact, all new language learners—can build up concrete vocabulary from interacting with a complex learning environment, not just repeated exposure to words in isolation.

In a study published in the May issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University conducted a series of four experiments on how adults and preschool children learn the meaning of unfamiliar words. The researchers focused on so-called “seed words,” basic nouns that form the foundation for text comprehension.

Repetition vs. Insight

Many language-development researchers believe children learn a new word gradually, taking a general meaning from encountering it multiple times in various contexts and gradually arriving at a more specific meaning. By contrast, the researchers for the new study argue that people instead make a best guess about a new word’s meaning based on the context in which they initially encounter it, and hold onto the meaning unless it is clearly found to be wrong.

“Where people were learning gradually, they were learning the wrong thing. They got more and more abstract descriptions in order to cover all the examples,” said Lila R. Gleitman, a study co-author and a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “But little children don’t learn that way at all; they learn concrete before the abstract; they learn doll before they learn toy.”

Those learning a new language at any age tend to follow that same early process, she said. In three experiments, including 37 adults and a replication study with a dozen 3- to 5-year-olds, participants watched short video scenes of a mother talking to her toddler in natural environments, like a playroom or a kitchen. The videos were muted to replicate the experience of someone at the very start of language learning, with a single word replaced by either a beep or a nonsense word, to evoke the experience of hearing a new word for the first time. Participants were asked to identify the meaning of the target word from context, which varied from one scene to the next. For a target word meaning “horse,” for example, the “parent” in the film might point to a toy horse and name it directly, or refer to it by saying, “Let’s see the horses today.”

For 90 percent of the scenes, no more than 30 percent of participants accurately identified the word. Of the 7 percent of scenes in which a majority of participants identified the mystery word, all of them were for concrete nouns naming basic groups of objects, such as “ball” and “horse,” which often are among the first gained in a child’s vocabulary. The scenes in which a majority of participants identified the mystery word were considered “highly informative.”

Children mirrored the identification pattern of the adults; they identified the target word in 53 percent of the “highly informative” scenes using common nouns, compared with only 22 percent of the other scenes.

Next, the researchers allowed the participants to try to identify a dozen new mystery words by viewing five scenes for each word; each scene used the word in a different context and across different word orders. If a child learns basic words through association, statistically comparing possible meanings over time, the researchers expected all the participants to improve steadily in their ability to guess the mystery words.

That’s not what happened. Instead, participants seemed to make a best initial guess at what the word meant and changed their minds only if the meaning was clearly wrong in a later scene. If they had a highly informative scene early on, 66 percent were able to identify the target word correctly, but their accuracy decreased, rather than increased, after watching the five scenes. Participants who saw the more-informative scenes later in the lineup were less likely to correct earlier misconceptions of the words.

Penn’s Ms. Gleitman suggested that people may mentally disregard examples that don’t fit a preconceived idea of a word’s meaning. “How can you avoid going abstract? Only by forgetting what you learned before,” she said. “What you remember is your guess, your one guess. It’s the failure of memory that’s rescuing the learning procedure—because you don’t remember the things that are wrong. It’s paradoxical, but that’s what seems to be happening.”

Moreover, she said, that could explain why educators do not see young children make large numbers of mistakes about the definitions of their first words, even during the first five years when they learn 5,000 to 6,000 words.

Ms. Im of Zero to Three said she has seen similar behavior with children she has worked with as well as her own daughter; children understand the meaning of a specific noun like “ball” before the more abstract “object.” “Why we call something ‘furniture’ or‘chair’ is really arbitrary,” Ms. Im said. “When children see that, they are able to grasp not only the meaning of a word but how it is used in a particular context.”

Fast-Mapping

Bob McMurray, an assistant psychology professor and the director of the Mechanisms of Audio-visual Categorization Lab at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, argues that both the “first, best guess” model known as fast-mapping and associative learning are likely at play in early language development. In a 2008 study published in Infancy, the journal of the International Society on Infant Studies, University of Iowa researchers showed 16 2-year-olds two familiar toys shaped like a car and a duck, and one new toy. When the toddlers were told, “Get the blicket!” more than 80 percent were able to retrieve the new toy and remember its name. However, after a five-minute delay, the children were not able to name the new object in a group of unfamiliar toys. “This research has demonstrated that learning does occur during a fast-mapping trial; however, the amount of learning from a single fast-mapping trial is insufficient to support full-blown word learning,” Mr. McMurray wrote in an essay on the project.

Yet Ms. Gleitman’s research may help explain the results of Deb Roy’s Human Speechome Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Roy recorded and mapped more than 230,000 hours of video in his son’s first three years. Mr. Roy, now the chief executive officer of Bluefin Labs in Cambridge, Mass., found his son’s first words were associated with “hot spots” in the home where the words often were used by adults, such as “water” in the kitchen.