Previously I have written about MakeBeliefsComix and its downloadable pages for children. The site has recently expanded its offerings, and I’m passing along a note from Bill Zimmerman, who created MakeBeliefsComix, about what you can find there.

“Dear reader,

In its goal to provide more literacy resources for educators, MakeBeliefsComix.com has significantly expanded its offering of writing prompt printables, organizing them by subject categories to help students write and express themselves.

The free online comic strip generator now features more than 250 printables in 50 subject categories, ranging from Bullying and Peer Pressure, to Elections and Political, to Environment and Ecology, to Writing Prompts. These are found at: http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/Printables_Categories/

The 250 graphic writing prompts encourage writing and thinking in a quick and imaginative way and foster classroom discussion .  A student’s efforts to complete a printable can then become the first step in writing longer essays, poems or stories on the same subject.  The printables also can be used with students enrolled in literacy and English-As-Second Language programs, and provide an educational resource for teaching language arts.  They are taken from the many interactive books of the site’s creator,  Bill Zimmerman, who for many years edited the nationally syndicated Newsday Student Briefing Page, which was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

More than 200,000 educators and students from more than 180 countries visit MakeBeliefsComix.com each month to build their own comic strips and practice language, writing and reading skills.  The site was selected by Google as UNESCO as among the world’s most innovative sites to encourage literacy and writing.  And the American Library Association chose it as a Great Web Site for Kids.

We hope that you will share MakeBeliefsComix.com with your colleagues, students, friends or readers of your publications and favorite listserv groups. 
As always, we welcome your suggestions and ideas to improve our site.

Sincerely,

Bill Zimmerman”

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 about New Moon Girls, click here.

Daughters, which is affiliated with New Moon Girls, also offers some excellent articles this month on parent-daughter relationships, including one I wrote about how mother-daughter book clubs promote bonding between moms and daughters. It’s called Book Club Bonding: Fun for All Ages!

There’s also an article by SuEllen Hamkins and Renée Schultz about the Mother-Daughter Project.

Dan Chapman talks about how dads can support each other and be involved in their daughters’ lives, in Doing a Good Job Better.

Also Donna Renner and Amy Lynch give ideas for what you can do if your daughter doesn’t communicate with you the way she used to in an article titled, If She is Silent.

Both New Moon Girls and Daughters provide excellent resources to parents of girls of all ages as well as for girls themselves. Check out Daughters and sign up for free enews at Daughters.com. Subscribe to New Moon Girls and help keep this media outlet supporting girls going strong. New Moon.com.

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 add to enhance your reading.

I once asked Gore Vidal, one of my favorite writers, what advice he would give to children who are growing up right now. To the best of my memory, this is part of what he said, “Read, read, read, and don’t worry too much what others say about you.”

Vidal’s words have stuck with me over the years, and I like to think they apply to more than just reading books. Cultivating a love of reading, for me, means you read everything you can get your hands on—fiction, non-fiction, newspapers, magazine articles, comics, graphic novels, poetry, cereal boxes and more. Except for the cereal boxes, I encourage you to incorporate all kinds of reading into your family’s routine, be it for a book club or other everyday activities.

Literacy in general applies to more than just reading for fun, but reading for fun helps contribute to overall literacy. And overall literacy has been connected to everything from success in school for students to success in life for adults. You can continue to find ideas for promoting literacy by visiting the blog for the National Center for Family Literacy.

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.

Friedman’s opinion piece cites a study conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., that looked beyond students’ performance on tests to help determine why some were more successful than others. Not surprisingly, parental involvement was found to play a key role. Of particular note was this finding: “Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family socioeconomic background.”

To see the findings from O.E.C.D. and to see other studies, including one that looks at how reading for pleasure affects success in school, visit the PISA home page.

These findings strengthen the case for family books clubs. When you have a family book club, it helps you prioritize reading with your child and talk about what you read. Reading groups are also a way to keep everyone in the family reading for fun, even as the kids grow up and become involved in more activities that take them away from home.

November is National Family Literacy Month. Now is a good time to consider starting your own family reading group. To help you get started, I’ve written a few articles about reading with your family. Also, I’m giving away a copy of my guidebook for mother-daughter book clubs to someone who comments by the end of the day this Friday, November 25. It’s called Book by Book: The Complete Guide to Creating Mother-Daughter Book Clubs, and many of the recommendations found there can be adapted for reading groups created within a single family. Here’s where to find the other articles:

Tips on Starting a Family Book Club

Books for Family Reading Groups to Read Out Loud

Activities and Games Extend the Fun of Reading in Family Book Clubs

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 daughters, the tips you find there can be adapted to most any kind of reading group you want to start. That includes father-son and parent-child as well as kids only and adults only.

What’s so important about family literacy? For one thing, being able to read and understand well are crucial skills that help both kids and adults be successful at both school and work. And reading for fun is especially important, as a study by Scholastic, Inc. found that children who read for fun are more likely to think of themselves as good students and be successful at school. Book clubs are a way to keep reading fun.

Throughout November, I’ll be sharing tips on ways you can get your family reading together and talking about what you read. Along with the book lists I publish with suggestions by age group, you can use these tips as inspiration to start your own mother-daughter book club, family reading group or something else that promotes reading. For more in depth advice on getting a group off the ground, you’ll want your own copy of Book by Book. So don’t forget to leave a comment on this post talking about anything related to literacy. You could list some of your favorite books or say why reading is important to you. If you’re already in a book club you may want to say what you like about your group. Each Friday, I will choose a winner from the comments posted. If you don’t win the first week, your comment will be considered among the list of entries for the next three weeks.

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 fact, I was thrilled when Elaina Daniels from the Summit Series for Families contacted me recently to talk about how parents can create book clubs with their kids. Here’s the story she wrote after we talked. It’s called How to Start a Book Club With Your Kids.

You may want to check out lots more information while you’re at the Summit Series for Families website.

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 easy to read and implement. They are also gentle to both parents and children. To find out more, you may want to read this interview with Jacobson at Christina Katz’s website. Then head over to Malia Jacobson.com for complete info on the author and her very helpful guide.

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. You may want to take a look at the recommendations that Laura Vanderkam makes in her book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Thank You Think. One of the premises of her book is that you have to learn how to block time for important stuff first, and hold the line against whatever keeps you from having more time to do what you want.

For more information you can check the website: http://www.my168hours.com/. You may also want to check out the ideas from this article in USAToday.

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 had one of the rainiest winters on record, and it feels like we’re beginning to rust. So after all that time stuck indoors, we’ll be looking for a place to meet outside it it’s at all possible.

Recently, I discovered the Be Out There Campaign from the National Wildlife Federation. And even though nice weather makes it easy for you to decide you want to be outside, the website has great suggestions on how you can get outside in all kinds of weather. You can also sign up there for an e-newsletter with seasonal ideas, and find out the latest information about why being outside is good for kids, and it’s not so bad for adults either.

Rebecca Cohen, author of the book 15 Minutes Outside: 365 Ways to Get Out of the House and Connect With Your Kids (see my review) is the national spokesperson for the campaign, and between her book and the website, you’re sure to find ideas to help you get a breath of fresh air.

This month in my newsletter I referred to a recent study by Scholastic, Inc. that discovered a few interesting things about kids, reading, and their parents’ concerns about technology. The Scholastic Study found that from age 6 – 17, the time kids spend reading books for fun declines, while the time they spend going online for fun and using a cell phone to text or talk increases.

In the same study, parents expressed “concern that the use of electronic and digital devices negatively affects the time kids spend reading books (41%), doing physical activities (40%), and engaging with family (33%).”

But what is surprising is that more time with technology doesn’t have to point to a decline in reading. Scholastic says “the study also found indications that technology could be a positive motivator to get kids reading — 57 percent of kids (age 9-17) say they are interested in reading an eBook, and a third of children age 9-17 say they would read more books for fun if they had access to eBooks on an electronic device. This includes kids who read 5-7 days per week (34%), 1 to 4 days per week (36%) and even those who read less than one day per week (27%).”

While I’m still happily turning paper pages in bound books, and so are my daughters, I’m optimistic that reading devices of many kinds can actually increase reading and possibly have a positive effect on literacy. My local library is betting on that too. They are now holding classes that let people test-drive several models of e-readers before they decide if they want to buy one. They also feature Library2Go, a service in Oregon that lets patrons download books to an e-reader. As with regular library books, the electronic versions have a due date and disappear off the device when that date comes around. The library is also experimenting with a system that would allow patrons to check out e-readers.

It’s hard to imagine all this will go away even if some of us will hold onto paper and ink books until they are pried out of our cold, dead hands. As much as I love the physical aspects of a book, I’m not actively against e-readers. I’ve even added an iPad (gotta love Apple!) to my gift wish list this year, so I may soon get to see for myself how reading with technology will affect my reading habits.

Read more about the Scholastic study at their website.

Read a blog post by author Christina Katz as she reflects on how technology has and has not changed her reading habits.