Canadian children’s author makes reading fun with new ‘Glyffix’ language

To appeal to pint-sized code-breakers and aspiring spies, Canadian children's author Dale Vandenborre created a new language, "Glyffix," to be an exciting challenge for the young readers of his new book, Penelope's Imagination Runs Wild.

In a "Glyffix" story, words are made up of pictures, spelling cues and symbols for children to figure out.

And while getting through a Glyffix book will likely take considerably longer than reading a conventional English one, the pay-off for new readers will also be greater.

"Glyffix is an enhancement on the typical approach to reading," Vandenborre says in a release. "In a fun and thought-provoking way, the book encourages family interaction and imagination."

Penelope's Imagination Runs Wild is published by AuthorHouseBooks under Vandenborre's pen name: A.J. Funn.

"With my own kids, I used to give them secret messages and see if they were smart enough to figure them out," says the Fredericton-based author and former middle-school teacher of the inspiration behind the book.

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Each word and phrase in the book is comprised of a series of "new age hieroglyphics": colourful image puzzles and spelling clues, many of them requiring a young reader's budding spelling and phonetic skills.

"Each word that you come upon is a little puzzle in itself," Vandenborre tells CBC News. "And each sentence is a puzzle and each page is a puzzle, a bigger puzzle."

"To work through that puzzle requires logic and at the same time it teaches spelling," he says. "It counts on spelling to decipher a message. It counts on phonetics. It plays with synonyms and antonyms."

"There's a lot in the deciphering category that is about literacy and about reading."

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Teacher Jennifer LeBlanc is already using the book in her Grade 4 classroom.

"I found that is was a fun way for them to use their word work and things like that," says LeBlanc. "Their daily literacy has improved with their spelling and they just really enjoyed doing it. So that made it a lot easier to teach them that way."

Want to try your hand at reading the new language? The Glyffix twitter account posts daily phrases to decode. Challenge yourself here.

How do you make reading fun for your kids?