OyMG by Amy Fellner Dominy tells the story of Ellie, who hopes her skills at debate will help her win a scholarship to a prestigious private high school. The trouble is, she finds that her religion may count against her in the selection process. When she decides to hide who she is to increase her [...]
Thomas Friedman is more known for his observations on world affairs than family affairs, but in a recent opinion article for the New York Times, Friedman talks about how children show higher success rates in school when their parents read to them in the early years and are involved with their lives as they grow. [...]
When my daughters were young, reading books together was one of our favorite things to do as a family. Most often, my husband, daughters and I would snuggle up together just before the girls went to sleep, and either my husband or I would read aloud. We stopped often to laugh or talk about something [...]
Today is National Family Literacy day, the start of a whole month devoted to families reading together. To celebrate, I’ll be giving away one copy each week of my guidebook, Book by Book: The Complete Guide to Creating Mother-Daughter Book Clubs. While Book by Book is geared to book clubs made up of moms and [...]
An article in today’s Omaha World-Herald talks about the rise of mother-daughter book clubs and it touches on some of the reasons these groups are so popular. If you’re already in a book club with your daughter, you probably know many of the reasons brought up in the article. For one, mother-daughter book clubs help [...]
I recently read an article in Time magazine about Girl Up (girlup.org), an organization that “aims to mobilize 100,000 American girls to raise money and awareness to fight poverty, sexual violence and child marriage. In the article, writer Nancy Gibbs talks about how educating girls can have such a huge impact on societies all over [...]
Kim Culbertson, author of Instructions for a Broken Heart and Songs for a Teenage Nomad, is also a high school teacher. On her website you’ll find recommended activities that go with her books. I particularly like the Song Journal and the Collage Poem activities. You can download instructions for both of these at Culbertson’s website. [...]
I love puzzles almost as much as I love books. When I see crosswords, Sudoku grids and word search puzzles, my fingers start to itch and I scan the clues even if I don’t have a pencil in my hand and don’t intend to solve it. Solving puzzles is mostly a solitary activity, one I [...]
