Increase affect and effect your children's literary experience

I am attending nowadays a 10 meeting workshop that teaches how to play meaningful and effective games with children. The workshop is moderated by Mrs. Sigal Huri, and I thank her for the great insights.

One subject that keeps on poping during the workshop is emotional affect and how it effects the way kids play.

"Affect refers to the experience of feeling or emotion.^[1] Affect is a key part of the process of an organism's interaction with stimuli. The word also refers sometimes to affect display, which is "a facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect" (APA 2006). " (WIKIPEDIA - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_%28psychology%29 ).

The principal is very simple, increase your kids' emotional affect during the game, and the game will become more meaningful, effective and fun for them.

I suggest to use the same techniques of affect increasing when reading books with the kids, and turn the reading to a much meaningful, memorable and joyful experience.

So, how can one increase emotional affect?
Usually by stimulating the hearing and touching  senses.

Examples for stimulating the hearing sense:

• Whisper or increase your voice according to the content
• Use different musical scales producing the same sound
• Use your sound going  extremely from high to low tone or the other way round. It is known that sirens are great affect increasers

Examples for stimulating the touch sense:

• Tickle or hug the kids in the middle of reading
• Jump, clap your hands or do other physical actions with the kids that are related to the book content

As always, those are just simple examples, use your imagination and you will probably find much better ideas to stimulate your kids senses when you read books.

Another suggestion I can provide: if you write a book for your kids using http://batalugu.com , you can combine elements that increase affect in the text itself, and use them naturally  when reading the book.

Tell a (meaningful and effective) tale ,
Dorit Rosen
Founder
Batalugu