It starts with wild enthusiasm – on the part of you and hopefully your child. How fun it will be to learn to play violin or tuba or piano, goes the thinking. This will be a magical, musical journey! You procure an instrument, you line up a lesson. And then it’s time to practice every […]
There aren’t many stories in the news that have the ability to bring tears to a child’s eyes like those that feature animals who have been hurt or killed either by accident or on purpose through human error or judgment. Children are natural animal lovers and they have an innate sense of fairness that is […]
There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about Greece and its financial troubles. Scary words like recession and unemployment and default are used endlessly by newscasters and commentators, and to a child listening in, I’m sure it is both confusing and ominous. Especially with the U.S.’s financial crisis so recent (and still […]
My eight-year old daughter is an expert butterfly egg hunter. Our backyard is filled with plants that are hosts—food plants—for the caterpillars that ultimately turn into butterflies and every summer, various butterfly species travel to our tiny urban backyard and lay their eggs on these plants, connecting their babies to the tasty treats that the […]
With all the focus on sharks in the media – from Shark Week on Discovery to shark attacks in the Carolinas – your young ones may be asking a lot of questions about the fascinating and sometimes frightening fish. They might even be afraid of them. As a blogging mom once wrote, sharing childhood memories […]
My daughter and I heard a news story on NPR the other day about NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft’s nine-year, three-billion-mile journey to Pluto. The story caught our attention because it focused on whether Pluto was actually a full-fledged planet or just a dwarf planet as it had previously been labeled in 2006. The scientist interviewed […]
We are all poets. Each one of us sees the world in our own special way. Whenever we look up at the passing clouds and see long tail dragons and sailing ships we are poets. When we share our visions and dreams we are poets. We are poets whenever we tell the world who we […]
When I was young, my two favorite walks in the neighborhood were to the mailbox and to the bookmobile. I relished racing up our steep cement driveway to pry open the mailbox half-hidden by Trumpet vines and search for the latest copy of Cricket Magazine. Once a week, I’d walk half a mile down the […]
My nephew is terrified of bugs. Small ones marching across the sidewalk make him stop in his tracks and a friendly buzzing bee once chased him off an amusement park ride we had waited an hour on line to get to ride. So when we started planning a multi-family camping trip (3 days in the […]
One of the best parts of my job as CEO of Cricket Media is getting a first look at the fascinating content that streams out of our editorial department, from high-quality new fiction for kids of all ages to science facts I never knew. One of my favorite all-time articles in ASK contained stories on strange but […]