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“We try to flip the experience and lead with
the ways that people are working to help
and support after a crisis. It doesn’t mean
we ignore the tragedy; kids deserve to learn
about the seriousness of a situation,” Kahn
said. “But if we can change the focus so
that it’s not all about the number of dead or
hurt, we’ll have created an approach that’s
considerably more sensitive to young readers.
And maybe we’ll have calmed some of our
readers’ potential anxieties.”
According to Kahn, the feedback has been
“absolutely tremendous.”
“Teachers are grateful to have a nonfiction
literacy resource that actually engages their
students with reading. For so many students,
the very word ‘nonfiction’ equates to boredom.
Now, teachers have a resource that includes
videos from last night’s rocket launch, images
of a brand-new species discovered or a play-by-play account
of their favorite sport. For parents, it’s a tool that allows them
to generate a global discussion at the dinner table,” Kahn
said. “The feedback is incredibly powerful. When we began to
write stories about the Crimea crisis, we had a young reader
from Ukraine write to us to thank us for giving her a way to
actually understand what was happening in her own country.”
The Ebola outbreak in 2014 was an example of a scary story
that needed to be handled with kid gloves.
“We waited as long as we could before running the
story because it
was
a very scary event,” Kahn recalled.
“Ultimately, we considered it our mission to help calm down
some of the fears felt by our readers—and their parents
and teachers.”
A mother in Texas wrote Kahn complaining that she did not
want her young daughter reading about the Ebola scare. In
her email, the mother wrote: “I wish there was a way for my
daughter to read News-O-Matic on her own while still being
sheltered from stories on Ebola or ISIS or other
scary topics.”
In reply, Kahn wrote: “I understand that our story cannot
magically make scary stories go away. But what we hope to
do is make kids feel safer and more secure by presenting the
information in the most positive light.”
A month later, Kahn said, the mother wrote back to thank
News-O-Matic for providing Ebola facts so she could sit
down with her daughter and explain what was happening.
Still, determining which stories to run each day and how to
present them in the proper light for kids remain daunting
tasks for Kahn and his staff. Combined with myON’s
personalized reading platform, the end result is to provide
kids both digital articles and books that serve them and their
communities well.
“The range of stories must represent both genders and
diverse cultures. Our readers need to understand at a
glance that the world is a big place with many different types
of people,” Kahn said. “It’s our mission to inspire kids to
generate the daily habit of reading. Those are the kids who
then will grow up to be well-informed, conscientious and
empowered citizens.”
News forKids
...
cont’d.
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