New Children’s Book: Animals You’ll Learn to Love

About the Book “Animals You’ll Learn to Love” by author Benessa Harrison is a recently released children’s book that follows the lives of a recently adopted puppy named Bully and an adventure-seeking housecat named Thumbelina. These stories follow the animals’ relationships with their owners, detailing the special bond they have. Through her stories, Harrison shares

Strong Girls – Female Protagonists

“Strong Girls” is a continuation from a post I wrote last year about Gender Stereotypes: “Like a Girl”. If you haven’t already read it, or if you need a refresher, you can click the link to read it. Coincidentally, just as I have been thinking about this topic and how we should teach our boys

Raising Lifelong Readers

There’s no doubt about it that kids who read are better off in so many ways. Reading: makes them smarter teaches them empathy helps them learn about their world around them exercises their brains improves their concentration enhances their vocabulary and language skills develops their imagination and stimulates their curiosity helps them do well in

Scribd – Read Without Limits

Listening to audio books in the car is something we have done since the boys were little. We started with CDs and moved on to audiobook apps when we discovered how handy and economical it was to have a library of books on my smart phone. Then our Tales2Go membership expired and I went searching for other audiobook apps to

Age-Appropriate Books for Children

There’s a big difference between what a child can read and what is age-appropriate for them. Just because a child is able to decode the words in a book doesn’t mean that they can read that book. There may be ideas presented in the story that are too complicated for them to understand, or it

Recommended Reading List to Encourage Reading

Accelerated Reader by Renaissance Learning is a reading program that offers comprehension and vocabulary quizzes related to a large collection of book titles so we can see how much our children actually understand from what they’re reading. Comprehension has been found to be particularly important because it is the key to reaping the benefits from

Teaching Stories: Learning Science and Math Through Stories

When G1 was little, it was all I could do to get him to read fiction because he was only interested in non-fiction books. Now that I’ve so successfully converted him to fiction, encouraging him to read the occasional non-fiction book is like making rocks bleed. Thankfully, a number of authors have found ways to

Reading List: On STEM, History and the Story of the World

It’s been a while since we added general knowledge books to the collection of books we have at home, so I’ve been looking into a few series to add to G1’s reading list that he might enjoy. The following books came highly recommended. The Story of Science In the three-book The Story of Science series,

Children’s Books: G2’s Reading List

G2 is a very different child from G1. The kind of books he is willing to read are also very different. While G1 will read books that G2 enjoys; G2 rarely picks up the books that G1 likes to read. So when it comes to book recommendations, I have to look for a very specific set

Book Week Workshop by Malaysian Author Shamini Flint

Shamini Flint visited our school for Book Week. She was amazing and also delightfully witty. I regret that I had never heard of her before despite the wide success of her books. If you don’t know who she is either, Shamini Flint is a Malaysian writer. Yes, I’m claiming her for Malaysia even though she