How to use these books? Which books do we recommend?

We’ve prepared a reading guide for you, featuring 5 recommended stories on each level, completed with a few tips tailored specifically for this period perfect as

Browse, use our library and feel free to share your own tips with us through email (hello@bookrclass.com) or any of our social media channels:

Parents who boasted about their kids not having a Facebook account were forced to create one, as well as grant permissions to countless other apps. Screens that were once forbidden have become essential everyday tools, but concerns haven’t weakened. Should parents worry about the effects of screen time on their developing children? What does a child’s online engagement look like? We seek to answer these questions with the help of BOOKR Kids psychologist, Dominika Gyányi.

In today’s digital world it’s nearly impossible to avoid screen time, which makes it no surprise that for children growing up in the age of the internet, electronic devices are a part of life – not to mention the current period of online learning. Recent studies have shown, however, that the main question when it comes to screen time is not how much time is spent in front of a screen, it’s what is being consumed. Consumption of different types of content has a different effect on the nervous system.

We can group digital content that children interact with into four categories:

Entertainment and social media can have unwanted effects on not only the children but adults as well: entertainment media seems to dampen intellectual processing and verbal skills, while social media has proven to be associated with depression. Educational screen time on the other hand has been linked to doing better in school and has no negative health effects. 

It’s hard to say how long high schoolers will be stuck in their rooms, and when we can all go back to classroom learning. What will the return be like? Will certain schools and teachers carry on using methods adopted during the pandemic, or will everything go back to the way it was?

Answers should be based on what’s best for the students. Online learning has put an unprecedented amount of pressure on parents, teachers and students alike. Students are required to focus even harder at a time when a lack of routine and social interactions can lead to difficulty concentrating and a lack of motivation.

I sincerely hope online learning doesn’t stay with us for years, because the digital world can’t replace real-life physical interactions, which are such an important part of social classroom learning. At the same time, the digitalization of learning has given parents and teachers the opportunity to discover useful modern educational technology.

We were mesmerized. At the end of the tale, one of us could blow the candle out. Thanks to her, reading has become an instant comfort zone to me, easing my mind whenever I needed to distance myself from the everyday troubles and difficulties.

With 8 September being International Literacy Day (ILD for short), we would like to encourage you to reflect on your reading habits,  your favourite stories and to introduce new habits into your everyday life.

In 2021, ILD focuses on literacy teaching and learning in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, on the role of educators, and on changing pedagogies. As parents and teachers, we gained valuable experience during this overwhelming period, faced new challenges and experimented with new ways of improving our kids’ literacy.

These new ways of reading might be worth implementing, too.

So here are three tips for you to increase reading a habit:

The same goes for grammatical systems. According to researchers, a single network for both languages develops in the brains of bilingual children, and this network is used later to learn additional languages.

While if a monolingual child learns a new language later, he or she will form another brain network for each new language.

These research findings do not say that bilingual children are smarter than their monolingual peers, but rather that they can achieve the same linguistic development as monolingual children in a field made more difficult by bilingualism. As a result of adaptation, they can more easily accept new information and become more open and flexible in some respects.

In my experience, they don’t feel lost in a foreign language environment, not understanding something first is an everyday experience for them.

When learning to read, bilingual children may benefit from their higher metalanguage knowledge and richer phonemic awareness.

Some studies show that if the dominant language is phonemically more comprehensible, then the knowledge of the dominant language will affect the other language, making learning to read easier, for example.

However, it’s not just about the sounds. Proctor et al.’s (2012) research suggests that in addition to the richness of vocabulary its depth can contribute to learning to read – even the depth of the knowledge of one language can improve reading skills in the other language.

On the other hand, there is a general tendency for a child to be able to read on the same level as monolingual children by third grade, regardless of in which language they started to learn to read.

In our case, the dominant language of the more active parent and the language of the environment coincide: Hungarian. How will our children be competent in their father tongue in school? There are several avenues, often in parallel, to accomplish this, all of which are resource-intensive in different ways.

One such avenue is a foreign language kindergarten or school, another option is to find Saturday schools and events organized by a minority community, and a third option is to look for families, relatives, peers who speak the same language. A fourth way is through stories and reading.

Even 15 minutes of reading stories a day can substantially expand and deepen children’s vocabulary and enrich their connection to a culture. As we love reading, books, and storytelling, for us this fourth option is a no-brainer. Where to find good quality storybooks in a given language is another matter altogether. I don’t necessarily know which author, translator, or publisher to rely on, and there are no libraries to help.

The other side of the challenge is when their dad reads a story, even if they don’t understand everything, our three kids have a global image of the story in their head and they start to understand more and more expressions as the story progresses.

However, when I read a story in their father tongue, I have to simultaneously translate and tell the story in both languages, or we stop after every sentence to decode their meaning. I sometimes check the dictionary, just to be on the safe side. In a foreign language situation when the narrator is not a native speaker, the need for explanation and translation is constant as the context is different.

Therefore, I think it is important that early childhood foreign language learning takes place in an environment with native language competence.

The Bookr Class app is designed to help with teaching and learning English as a foreign language.