Reading and writing aren’t necessarily indoor activities.Facing a blank page is daunting, even for professional writers. The next time your child has to write a story for school, start by taking them outside. Before you start, remind your child that a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. […]
Month: May 2009
A brilliant TV series
Make your child brilliant. One of the inspirations for this blog was a TVO series called Make your child brilliant, which I saw last year. It’s airing again on TVO starting on Sunday, May 24, at 8 p.m. It’s a documentary featuring a woman in the UK, Bernadette Tynan, who […]
Cool games on the Internet
Here are some funky literacy games even your child will agree are pretty cool. I stumbled across this site, and I love it. It’s easy to navigate, fast loading, has great graphics and the games are fun. And it’s by the BBC, so you know your kids will also learn […]
Explain the exclamation mark!
This activity will boost your child’s reading in five seconds. One of the most exciting things about reading is the exclamation mark. The other day, I was reading a book to a couple of kids in a kindergarten class. When I got to a sentence with an exclamation mark, I […]
Literacy activities that appeal to kids
Go with what your child enjoys. I strongly believe that the best way to get kids reading is to give ’em what they like. But maybe you think that their interests – their real interests, what they would spend most of their time doing if they were allowed free reign […]
Getting your kid to write an essay
The key is to make it relevant to your child. I spoke with a mom recently who said that her son has to write an essay and isn’t motivated because he doesn’t like the topic. She wondered how to make the project more interesting so he’d want to do the […]
The mark-my-time stopwatch bookmark
Please give us your ideas about how to use this reading tool. It’s a bookmark with a stopwatch on it. So – kind of cool.As soon as my son saw it, he wanted to use it right away – for sure, that’s a good thing. But then I got thinking. […]
Reading gets easier
As kids learn to read it becomes, quite literally, easier for them. Younger children exert more effort and have to activate more of their brain. As children get older, and read better, they can use less effort, and less of their brain’s real estate, to understand what they’re reading. To […]
The Twilight series
What you need to know about Twilight. So you’ve heard about the Twilight series and you’re wondering if you should get the books for your daughter. There are four books in the series: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn. Here’s what you need to know about Twilight: 1) What […]
