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 is really good at identifying the similarities in the stories she reads. I remember once when she was 3 or 4, she informed my husband and myself that “Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame are really the same story because they are both about people who are ugly on […]
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 […]
My daughter has never cracked the pediatrician’s growth chart. In first grade, she was sometimes called a baby by the other kids, and in truth her height was not all that much more than an average-sized 3 year old. Then she got into trouble for having her classmates lug her books, homework, and lunchbox around […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about self-reliance and what that means when it comes to raising children. I don’t mean that I’m wondering if we as parents are competent. I think we know we are, despite the deep doubts we all sometimes have and the perceived frowns from our neighbors, friends, and family members about […]
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 […]
Expanding a child’s view of what is possible is like opening up a window or turning on a light that has the power to spark their imaginations and help them dream even bigger dreams. I was reminded of this recently when I overhead the girls in the Girl Scout Troop I lead discussing what they […]