New Moon Girls has just released its list for the Second Annual Girls Choice Book Awards. The books on this list were all chosen by girls as some of their favorites. There are newer titles as well as older ones, in categories of fiction, nonfiction, fantasy and myster. So see the list and learn more [...]

As National Family Literacy Month draws to a close, I wanted to share some final thoughts about reading together as a family. In previous posts, I have talked about tips for starting a family book club, given ideas for books to read in your family book club, and suggested others games and activities you can [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

I’ve recently discovered a new website that offers great parenting advice on a quite a few topics. It’s called Summit Series For Families, and parents can find lots of different advice, tips and other information there. Topics covered include Raising Responsible Kids, Technology, Bullying, Divorced and Blended Families, and one of my favorites, Literacy. In [...]

I remember lots of bleary days following sleepless nights when my children were very young. If only I had been able to Malia Jacobson’s e-book called Ready, Set, Sleep: 50 Ways to Help Your Child Sleep, So You Can Sleep Too.As a sleep journalist, Jacobson has written extensively on this topic, and her tips are [...]

Everybody wants to maximize their time in the summer. Long, warm evenings seems to give us more time than we have the rest of the year, but many of us yearn to fill it with things we want to do, not things we have to do. Yet shifting summer schedules can throw us off too. [...]

This coming Saturday our mother-daughter book club will be meeting to talk about Carlos Eire’s interesting memoir about growing up in Cuba, Waiting for Snow in Havana. As luck would have it, it’s supposed to be one of the warmest days we’ve had so far this year, and it should be sunny. In Portland, we’ve [...]