“How can I get my child to become a better writer?” is a question I’ve heard repeatedly. One thing that works for me is finding my own pleasure in writing. Reading “First you Write a Sentence” by Joe Moran has increased my enthusiasm and motivation to write well. While on an afternoon walk with a …
My summer is spent poolside, participating in our neighborhood swim team. Our team is developmental, which means even children who don’t know how to swim strokes are allowed to join. Over the season, their strokes refine and improve. To me, breaststroke is especially descriptive of the changes. Once the arm pull and frog kick movements …
It’s that time of year–cramming, scrambling, weeping and wailing–we are preparing for AP tests. Among the stress and frustration, my son made me laugh when he shared this innocent observation: “I’ve always imagined the bubble sheet to be a river.” He continued explaining, “I want to try to block the river with the bubble choices …
Here are a few books we’ve been enjoying from our local library. In addition to having a paper copy, we listened to the award-winning audio for this moving graphic novel. What a fantastic collaboration by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed! Highly Recommend. This is a delightful story about the opportunity to attend school. The illustrations …
Witty and clever, I love this book about being a mother within the Jewish faith. Her main theme is that anyone can “adapt Jewish tricks for raising flexible, quick-thinking, literate, open-minded kids.” I love her confidence! Her writing is sprinkled with Yiddish vocabulary, such as vontz: “the kid may become an egocentric little vontz (Yiddish …
From my “Parenting Book” reading list: Are My Kids on Track? The 12 Emotional, Social, and Spiritual Milestones Your Child Needs to Reach by Sissy Goff , Melissa Trevathan, and David Thomas Here are my thoughts about it. Strong Emotional Vocabulary In the book, the authors recommend, “people of all ages develop an emotional vocabulary …
This quote was one I really agreed with: The pressure-packed college admissions process can take away from the joys of high school if students and their parents or guardians get wrapped up in being accepted at a handful of extremely selective schools. Across the board, counselors remind their students, “You are not your test scores.” …
While introducing Hyperbolic Sine to my son last week, he asked a question that surprised me. He wanted to know more of the proof, more of the details behind the process. Until his question, I hadn’t realized that the Hyperbolic Trigonometric Functions connect imaginary numbers with logarithms. Mind blown! Perhaps one of my math teachers …
While reviewing a list of Spanish reflexive verbs this morning, my teenage son was curious to learn more about one verb: deshacerse. This verb means “undo” and “get rid of.” We flipped open the “501 Spanish Verbs” to review the conjugation and look at some examples. We were both surprised by the final example: el …
We recently took an extended trip to México’s Yucatán Peninsula. Here are some of the things that surprised and delighted us. 1. Abundance of Churches The cities we visited were vestiges of Spanish colonization. Each had a main cathedral with a plaza. But there were lots of Catholic churches in each city. We had an …
