Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2020 i Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

Fan-Tastic Fan Art I hope you like my art! I drew it on a computer program. —KEREN T. I love it! And we can finally put an entry on these critters into our dimensional guide! —AARTI Urgent Message! I am the leader of the Funky, Abominable, and Rambunctious Tribe of Savages (FARTS—I really need to come up with a better acronym, but I’ve got more important things to worry about). Our job is to stop threats so weird that everyone else overlooks them. Right now, we have a serious problem. My spies have found out that an army of aliens that look like a cross between a purple squirrel and a vicious marshmallow that call themselves the Barbaric and Unacceptably Rowdy Platoon of Scoundrels (BURPS—at least their name isn’t any…

What about your emotions? How do they help you to understand what you are reading? In Jane Yolan’s Owl Moon, a girl explores with her father on a snowy night. She longs for this special night. And she’s amazed when she sees an owl. Have you felt longing before? Amazement? Well, if you have, it helps you connect with the story. When we can put ourselves inside a story, we can understand it better. Our brain tells us, “Oh, this girl’s experience is a bit like mine.” And, boom! We can empathize with her. But this skill is not born in us. So young kids have to learn it. Pictures and images help young readers to understand and recognize feelings. Readers feel joy when seeing the smiling faces of friends.…

Remarkable discoveries are turning brain science on its head. You are reading right now. (Lucky guess!) As your eyes observe the words on this page, an area deep inside your brain, called the visual word form area, is helping you turn the different shapes you’re seeing into letters. But wait—what if you couldn’t see the letters at all? Braille is a tactile reading and writing system. People who are blind or visually impaired can use it to read by touch. In the Braille alphabet, raised dots spell out words, numbers, and punctuation. Each six-dot Braille “cell” offers 64 possible combinations. Advanced Braille even uses shorthand symbols for common words—sort of like when someone texts “ttyl” instead of “talk to you later.” Incredibly, scientists have discovered that some people who read…

If your friends say you are a “font of knowledge” you’re probably well-read and have all the answers. But there is another type of font—a typeface or set of characters with a similar design—that might affect your ability to read. Reading Frustration Many smart and creative students find reading exhausting. Christian Boer, a Dutch graphic designer with dyslexia, can certainly relate. His graduation project at the University of the Arts Utrecht required so much reading, he thought he’d never finish. Then his teacher asked him to describe what reading with dyslexia was like. Boer perceived letters three-dimensionally—like balloons that crowd together, floating and turning. A light switched on! Why not start a new project and redesign the alphabet? Alphabet Make-Over Unlike most design projects, the goal wasn’t to make something…

YOU FIGURED OUT HOW TO SPEAK AND UNDERSTAND SPEECH DURING YOUR FIRST FEW YEARS OF LIFE. No one taught you how to do it. Learning to read and write took a lot more effort. Reading doesn’t come naturally to people, but most of us have learned how. Eighty-six percent of the world’s population is literate, and this rate has been increasing for centuries. Literacy makes it possible to navigate a world filled with books, websites, text messages, road signs, and more. But the world of information is changing. Why send a long letter or text when you can share photos or videos instead? Why learn from a book when you can watch an instructional video or practice a skill in virtual reality? Why read magazines when you can listen to…

Nicole Patton-Terry loves helping kids learn to read. She is associate director of the Florida Center for Reading Research at the Florida State University. Patton-Terry works on teams with researchers, students, teachers, designers, parents, and community members. Together they study reading and develop tools that help children read. WHAT IS THE MAIN GOAL OF YOUR RESEARCH? Our research helps us figure out how kids learn to read and how they keep getting better at reading as they get older. That way, teachers and families can help all kids learn how to read, no matter who they are or where they come from or even if they have a disability. WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO BECOME A RESEARCHER? When I was a junior in college, I participated in a summer research…

5,500 years ago, ancient Sumerians etched on clay tablets with “pens” made of giant reeds found along marshes in Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq). They were writing in cuneiform, the earliest known writing system. A couple hundred years later, Egyptians created a system of pictures for words and sounds, called hieroglyphs. They dipped reed brushes into ink to write on papyrus. Writing (and reading) later originated separately in China and Mesoamerica. But human brains developed long before we could read or write. So how does our species achieve this intricate task? A “Map” of the Brain Our brains are complex and interconnected. This is just a small snapshot of what the four different lobes of the brain do for reading. The occipital lobe, at the back, specializes in visual input, including…

THE ACCORDION BOOK is created simply by folding a sheet of paper back and forth to create the pages. This design is great for displays. You can fill the pages with your sketches, cartoons, poems, or photos. Then you can stand the book up and view all of the pages at once! You’ll need Tools Ruler that includes millimeters Pencil Bone folder—a flat, polished piece of bone or plastic used to score a fold or flatten folds in paper X-Acto knife or scissors Paintbrush Materials Cutting mat or cardboard 3 strips of paper, each one 140 mm x 420 mm PVA glue, such as Elmer’s 3 pieces of book board or heavyweight card paper for cover and spine 3 pieces of decorative paper for cover and spine. (You can choose…

When did you become a reader? How did you do it? First, let’s clear something up. When I talk about reading, I am not talking about reading printed words. That is called decoding. Decoding is when you see a word like shipment and you take its parts, like /sh/ and /i/ and /p/ and /ment/, and blend them together. And this makes a word: shipment. You might not know what that word means, but you can say it. It’s like how a detective decodes clues. Reading, on the other hand, is something much bigger. By viewing a book, or listening to a story, you are participating in reading. Many kids read picture books with adults. A 4-year-old may see the Big Bad Wolf at the pig’s straw house and say,…

Sandi Martin had two great loves—dogs and reading. As a nurse and intensive care unit manager at a Salt Lake City hospital, she saw the healing power of therapy dogs that visited her hospital. Then, in the middle of the night, she had an inspiration. Could dogs have the same kind of impact with kids struggling to read as they had helping sick patients recover? Sandi told her friend Kathy Klotz about her idea. Klotz is the executive director of Intermountain Therapy Animals (ITA). ITA is a nonprofit group that provides animal-assisted therapy. Martin and Klotz asked the public library if ITA could bring therapy dogs into the library for a four-week trial program. They would test the idea of having kids read to dogs. That was in the fall…

JANE SAW THE PIRATE ON THE SHIP WITH THE TELESCOPE. Wait, who had the telescope? Jane, or the pirate? Or was the telescope simply on the ship? THE HORSE RACED PAST THE BARN FELL. That doesn’t make any sense. But try reading “raced” as “ridden at a fast pace.” What a difference! Are you laughing? Or just plain confused? For cognitive neuroscientists (experts who study how the brain works), brain teasers like these aren’t just funny phrases. They’re windows into how our brains operate and how reading happens. By studying patients’ brain activity using high-tech devices, these experts can glimpse what happens inside our brains as we try to puzzle out these challenging sentences. Are you ready to do some “mind reading” yourself? Try deciphering these three surprising sentences. Mind…