Discover Summer: National Summer Learning Day

Most families welcome summer break and enjoy the lack of routine and revel in the much needed downtime. While it’s nice to have the break, it’s also important to look for outside of the box learning opportunities throughout the summer months.   According to the US Department of Education, “Over the summer months, some students experience […]

Pokemon Go and Theory Behind Game Theory

If your children have been spending a lot of time playing games this summer (Pokemon Go, anyone?), they aren’t alone. Playing a game (video, board, puzzle, or otherwise) is probably the most popular choice of activities for kids with a bit of free time on their hands and the explosion of Pokemon fever is reminding […]

Meet the Magazine: How Cricket Got Started

By Marianne Carus, founder of Cricket Magazine   Who better to start off our new “Meet the Magazine” series than the founder of Cricket Magazine, Marianne Carus. Here is an excerpt of Marianne’s essay about the founding of Cricket that originally appeared in “Celebrate Cricket: 30 Years of Stories and Art”.   I’d like to […]

Discover Summer: Read to Develop Critical Thinking Skills

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 […]

Cricket Writers and Illustrators Receive SCBWI Recognition

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 […]

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 […]