Warming Up to the Kindle

My passion in the past to own a kindle has not been on high demand. I had heard stories about college students owning kindles to replace their heavy textbooks. I agree that is nice, but I don’t really mind carry my books around. Then I heard about schools using kindles in the classroom and how nice it was to have all the books in one device. I am ok with it but really I enjoy going to the library and picking up a book and reading it. I have been scared that the kindle will replace all books in the library. That is an assumption of mine but still it could happen.

Recently I have changed my way of thinking about the kindle ever since reading this blog site http://www.edukindle.com/2010/06/more-research-says-bigger-fonts-help-kids-read/. The post title is what caught my eye at first, “More Research Says Bigger Fonts Help Kids Read”. Because I struggled in school as a kid (especially in reading), one of my goals as a teacher is to help the students who struggle to the best of my ability. I understand acatully how frusterating it can be at time and how not just one method of teaching works for all. So after reading this post title I just had to read more!

In the blog post they discussed that with the kindle deceive you can enlarge the print. So you may be thinking no biggy huh? Well with a recent study done about enlarging print for the students received better test scores on the SRA test after one year of using enlarged print. The increase of scores ranged from 41% to 70%! That is amazing to me! The research says that it improves a child from making fewer decoding mistakes and lowers their anxiety levels because there are fewer words on a page. To me this makes perfect sense…in fact why didn’t we think of this sooner! 

Image used with permission from Flickr byjimmiehomeschoolmom.