You are your child’s first teacher. As a parent, you need to embrace this idea and not wait for some stranger with a master’s degree in education do the job for you. Develop your child’s cognitive skills at an early age. Cognitive skills, the ability our brains use to think, read, learn, remember, reason, and…
As the 2018-2019 school year begins, we want our children to perform at their peak performance. Parents can help by providing the environment children need to be top notch students. The best thing parents can do is to provide daily rituals designed for peak school performance. First, establish parameters. Kids work best with daily rituals…
Many parents set up computer schedules for their kids and trust them to use their time responsibly. It is important, however, to spot-check their history use. One parent told me, “I prepared computer schedules and spot-checked the sites my kids visited, but one day my nine-year-old visited a kid site I thought was okay until…
As a reading specialist working for the Glendale Unified School District, I noticed a serious decline in reading skills of many of my students after a long hot summer break. According to researchers at the National Education Association (NEA), “Children can lose up to three months of reading progress over the summer months, and that loss…
Dewey Fairchild is a middle grade child with the unique ability to manipulate parents to change their behaviors. What kid wants a helicopter mom walking her to school every morning? Or a dad who burps and picks his nose in front of her friends? It’s embarrassing to the nth degree! In steps Dewey Fairchild to…
How to Steal a Dog is a heart wrenching novel about homelessness and its affects on two young children. Georgina Hayes is forced to live in a car with her mother and little brother Toby. Her father abandoned them, they were soon evicted from their home, and Mrs. Hayes had to scramble to find two…
Author Lou Ann Walker’s primary language is American Sign Language (ASL). Born to Deaf parents, it was her job to be the ears and voice for her family. Raised in Indiana during the early 1950s-60s, Walker eloquently writes about a loving family faced by an ignorant public to the problems inherent in deafness. Over twenty-three…
Do you think your child is gifted? There are developmental guidelines teachers look for to tell if a child is advanced for his age, but first let’s set the record straight about the gifted child. I have two daughters. At the age of 6 my youngest was tested as gifted by her kindergarten teacher and…
Narciso (Ciso) di Angelo is a sixteen-year-old homeless boy living on the streets of Rome, Italy. During the day he panhandles tourists, and at night he walks in the dreams of strangers. Ciso believes he’s one of a kind, but soon discovers there are others like him who “Walk the bridges between two worlds, between…
When I was a child, I read Superman comics. I liked how my super hero saved lives and fought vicious criminals. I wanted to grow up to be just like him. Well, I’m no super hero, just an ordinary guy. But dads like me do have the power of being super for our kids by…