#Encyclopedias?
4 messages in this thread
I am looking at buying the Grolier's for the Macintosh. My understanding,
after calling Grolier's, is that it includes the fall print text, many less
illustrations and maps, and sound obviously not in the printed version. I
am curious as to why you will buy your daughter the printed one.
Personally, I learned an awful lot by stoppping on the way to finding
information which I was looking up in the printed ones, when I was a kid!
But the idea of purchasing a complete new update every year sounds better
then those hard to integrate printed supplements. Thanks,
Kenneth Epstein
There is 1 Reply.
My family never bought the printed supplements of the World Book after the
first year or two. The object of getting the kids an enecclopedia is to
teach them to read. It is indisputibly easier to encourage kids to read
from the printed page, rather than the computer screen. When I was a kid,
I'd trace pictures out of the World Book for school. The books also make
great building blocks…houses for dolls, and forts for toy soldiers (The
proceeding is *NOT* a joke! I really will buy the World Book because of
that feature!) When an argument develops among playmates, they can take the
house/fort apart and settle it. (I remember doing that at least once).
The books are much more portable than the computer. Finally, take a look
at the message further down the thread about bores and encyclopedias. I
don't want the kids to be bores.
Nope, they're gonna be in Jr. High before they find a CD-ROM under the
tree.
..<Bob>
There is 1 Reply.
>> be in Junior High before they find a CD-ROM under the tree <<
Bob, I really don't buy that. My 11 year old is in the local equivalent of
junior high, a bit young for his class; my nine year old is in her fifth year
of grade school. Both of them have become quite regular users of my CD-ROM,
mainly to look up information in the STW encyclopedia. What has been very
noticeable is, they will spend a lot of time "exploring" threads related to
what they began looking for. I have never seen them do the same in printed
books. A few weekends back my son spent over three hours at one sitting when
a project he had started researching on early Roman history led him off into
Carthage, ancient Greece, early wars … all with no effort on my part to
encourage. He's a normal kid, who generally prefers his Nintendo, TV
cartoons or the swimming pool to anything which remotely suggests "work".
I think the big difference is, books by their nature tend to be linear –
start here, read to the end, stop. CD-ROMS, especially if the interface is
even halfway decent, encourage and facilitate a much more random access and
the making of connections between pieces of information which might be
scattered through a number of separate volumes in printed form. I recall as a
kid how intimidating those large, multiple volumes were as they sat on the
family bookshelf, and the effort which was required to find information when
you were not always sure how it would be indexed.
While a lot of improvement is possible (and needed) in CD-ROMs and their
access software, I really believe they are a great learning tool and not at
all obstacles to kids learning to read (my young daughter "consumes" on
average a novel a week and cried recently when the TV news announced Roald
Dahl's death, but she is quite adept at using the CD-ROM and is beginning to
learn rudimentary text formatting in Word for Windows).
I don't push the kids into these things — show it to them, explain it, then
leave it to them to decide if they want to use it — they often do!
There is 1 Reply.
Well…I may be a middleaged fogy, but I *still* think elementary school
kids need a printed encyclopedia. Their old man, however, may get himself
the Grolier's. I'm a volunteer at the Smithsonian Institution here in
Washington…a docent at the National Museum of American History…and
visitors *love* to play "Stump the Docent", while we docents play "Flummox
the Visitor". Grolier's AAE would give me an edge in that game…..
Wottthe heck. I'm determined that my little girl become a touch typist
before she gets out of elementary school. If she wants to use an online
encyclopedia too, that's fine. First, however, she has to learn what you
can do with an encyclopedia. I think I'd have an easier time teaching her
that with the printed book.
..<Bob>