Helping our kids develop critical thinking skills can be one of the most challenging tasks we have as parents. Teaching them to not only pay attention to how their behavior affects those in their day to day life, but how it can cause a ripple effect that impacts society as a whole is important to […]
Since 1973, we have featured stories written by some of the most talented, creative, and smart writers in the world and ensured those stories are accompanied by illustrations created by equally amazing and talented artists. Every story and each illustration on the pages of any of our 11 children’s magazines is there to encourage young readers […]
When I was pregnant and took a tour of my daughter’s future daycare, I wasn’t surprised to see a computer lab called “Tech Town.” I assumed Tech Town was for the older kids, since the school went up to kindergarten, so I was surprised to find out that weekly trips to the computer lab began […]
Holidays are great. Especially holidays that are celebrated with parades, cookouts, and fireworks. But before you fire up the grill, why not take a few minutes to make sure your kids know why we have the holiday in the first place. A great way to do this is by sharing the two stories below. The […]
Last week, we introduced the Discover Summer Reading Program. Each week, for the next 6 weeks, we are making a few stories available to download based on a popular summer theme. Each story comes directly from the pages of our magazines and are short, quick reads. In addition to helping prevent the summer learning slide, readers […]
When my daughter was in third grade, my husband and I showed up for a parent-teacher conference where we were told that our child was spending too much time reading fantasy books. It wasn’t the reading the teacher had issues with; it was the selection of books. Instead of my daughter’s chosen genre, the teacher […]
More than two hundred years ago when William Wordsworth wrote “the world is too much with us,” little did he know how much the world would be with us today. What would he think of our overscheduled, over-stressed, over-worked world that leaves us with little time to relax and unwind, little time to close our […]
If you are a parent of a school aged kid, you’ve probably heard about how students lose around two months of reading, writing, and math skills over their summer break and have lower test scores after the break then before. Because of this summer learning loss, the first two months of a new school year is often […]
I’m feeling very Zen today. It’s certainly not because it is the first day of summer break, since that has already resulted in an entire box of cereal being dropped all over the floor and a resulting tantrum when my daughter was told she had to actually clean it up herself. And it definitely isn’t […]
Today is the summer solstice. That means that those of us in the northern hemisphere will experience the longest day and the shortest night of the year with more than 15 hours of daylight to use for whatever activities makes us happy. My family is looking forward to a bike ride around the local lake […]