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When Your Aspiring Musician Won’t Practice

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 […]

Talking With Your Children About What They Can Do To Help Protect Creatures Great and Small

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 […]

What Greece Can Teach Your Child About Financial Literacy

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 […]

A Different Kind of Treasure Hunter

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 […]

Toddler + Ball = An Adorable Learning Opportunity

What’s cuter than a toddler with a ball? The answer: Not much. Watching little kids interact with this particular toy is one of my favorite things to do. I love the looks on their little faces when they mistakenly kick the ball again just before they reach it, and the joy in their eyes as […]

How to Talk about Sharks with Your Child

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 […]

A Stripey Look at First Concepts

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 […]

Pondering Pluto

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 […]

Teacher Testimonials Example

Teacher Testimonials “The ideas in the lessons such as figurative language and writing ideas were useful. My students were very engaged!” “I liked that there were so many articles about the same topic because that is exactly the type of thing my students need to know how to do: read multiple sources of […]

The Poetry of Life

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 […]