Wednesday 16 July 2008

Your thoughts on reading schemes

Did Peter and Jane do it for you?


Ladybird Books are looking for help from parents and carers.
Please read the following message from Shaleeza on behalf of Ladybird:

*Free Ladybird book !*

Dear Parents/Carers,

My name is Shaleeza and I work for Ladybird publishing.

My apologies for bombarding you with yet another discussion topic, but we really value your opinions and are asking for your assistance.

Here at Ladybird, we are all but too familiar with the difficulties faced when encouraging young children to read. For this reason, we want to bring you the most up to date methods and easy to use resources to help you along. However, to achieve this, we want to know what you want.

I am trying to gather information on our three primary Reading Schemes: Read it Yourself, Key Words & Phonics.

I would be incredibly grateful for your opinions on these schemes, if you have encountered them?

I would also be very interested in how your experience of assisting your child in learning to read was?

In order to collect your responses, please click on the following link and complete a short survey: ...The survey

Mums (or Dads or Grandparents), any feedback you give is greatly appreciated and, just to say thanks, we are offering a free Ladybird book to the first 25 people who respond!

To claim your free book, please e-mail me upon completion of the survey, at shaleeza.hasham@ukpenguingroup.com with your name, postal address and child's age/sex.

Thank you all in advance!

Shaleeza (on behalf of Ladybird books)





Friday 11 July 2008

Describing old books

"Tootles the Taxi, in mint condition (no spine, missing page 3)"

Ok, I made that one up. But bookselling is now no longer the province only of the professional. Now that books are bought and freely sold on the internet, you're increasingly likely to come across books that have been mis-described - especially in terms of condition.

Of course, there's always something subjective about this. One person might feel that a dog-eared page or name on the endpaper are faults bearly worth mentioning. To another collector the same characteristics might be seen as serious flaws. And then there are the overall summaries of book condition: Fine, VG, Good, Poor etc - is there a definitive criteria guide?

I would say that this page gets pretty close to my use of these terms:

Describing book condition

Today I also found these video clips which explain some more jargon used for describing flaws in books - not all relevant to Ladybird Books, but even so.

Video clip: Describing book flaws

and part two: Describing book flaws