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Discover Summer: Benefits of Reading Short Stories

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 […]

Is Reading Fantasy a Bad Hobbit?

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 […]

Mantra: Got a Minute?

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 […]

Discover Summer: Reading to Combat Learning Loss

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 […]

Yoga: Find Your Zen Today and Every Day

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 […]

Celebrating the Summer Solstice

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 […]

Fathers: You Rock!

I have a friend on Facebook who frequently comments on how fathers are often not included in the conversation when it comes to parenting. Someone will post an appeal for a few moms to chaperone a class trip or post an article about how moms spend X amount of time helping with homework each night, […]

Notes from the Backseat

Before I jump onto my mommy soapbox about DVD players in the car, I need to be completely honest: the eight-year-old inside me is jealous. That girl would have loved a TV set in her car. You see, my mom was a huge fan of random road trips — and by random I don’t mean […]

Stopping the Summer Learning Slide

by Cheryl Clark, Vice President, Programs, Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) Summer is a time to kick back, relax and enjoy warm lazy days away from school. For many children, summer is also an idle time when they forget many of the skills they learned the previous school year. This learning loss is called the summer […]

Celebrating Alex and her Lemonade Stand

Did you drink any lemonade this past weekend? If so, it may have been sold as a fundraiser during Alex’s Lemonade Days, an annual weekend of lemonade stands where all the profits from your local lemonade stand are donated to charities trying to cure childhood cancers. Through the proceeds of these lemonade stands held throughout […]