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 […]
Activities
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 […]
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. […]
"Project Bookmark" in Toronto
And to think, I was going to stop following Mayor Miller’s tweets. I’m glad I didn’t, because today he was tweeting about an amazing enterprise called Project Bookmark Canada. The project takes advantage of the incredible array of books set in Canadian locations. As the Project Bookmark website says, “when […]
Great game: Tick Tock Boom
Tick… Tock… Boom is an awesome game my son discovered. You flip over a card that has two or three letters on it: for instance, OU or IRD or REW. Then, each person has to say a word that includes those letters. The catch is, after you say your word, […]
Likes video games, running
There are lots of fun literacy activities for active kids. I was talking to a mom yesterday who said she has two sons – one of whom isn’t a good reader. He likes video games and is quite physically active. Here are some fun suggestions: * Write a simple sentence […]
Time for a little Spring cleaning
It must be Spring.This week I found myself on the floor, in front of my son’s bookshelves, clearing out and arranging. The shelves were getting too squished, and they weren’t really… well, appealing. My theory is that books should be laid out like beautiful fruits, ripe for the picking. His […]
Great website – reading and math
I love Soft Schools. A wonderful kindergarten teacher told me about it years ago, and I’ve used it ever since. At Soft Schools you can create fun puzzles, tailor-made for your child, and then print them out or let your child do them online. For instance, there are:Word ScramblesUse your […]
Dial-a-story
I’m recording some books on CD for our school. It (and another mom in the schoolyard) reminded me that the Metro Toronto Public Library has a wonderful service. It’s Dial-a-Story, and all you have to do is phone a number — and let your child listen. Every day there is […]
