Have you ever thought about how much time you and your child spend in transit each day? What do you do when you drive a car and you and your child are together during that time? With a little planning, your journeys can become shared moments of fun. Before you go to the store, for […]

Humor is an important lives. As a form of intellectual play, it grows more sophisticated with age. The kind of humor children express depends, in part, on the level of cognitive development they have achieved. A child’s first experiences humor in the second year of life in the context of playing with objects. A three-year-old […]

Parents are children’s first and most influential teachers. Reading together is one of the earliest shared experiences of parents and children. When you read a story to a child, you are her reading teacher. Children learn to read by being read to. Research shows that early and good readers come from homes where reading is […]

Children are not born with fine motor control. The process does being early, when infants and toddlers reach for and grasp objects. But development and coordination of wrist and finger muscles – necessary for hand writing later – Come slowly and require lots of practice. Adults can help develop fine motor control by providing appropriate […]

Children are born without biases about other people of any race, culture, gender, or disability. We sometimes wonder if we can raise children without prejudices just by leaving well enough alone and making sure not to pass on the negative attitudes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way; societies messages are too pervasive. As parents and […]

We started learning a new skill this week so I thought it would be a good time to update what we are learning through our Heggerty phonemic awareness curriculum. We focus on eight skills: we do rhyming, onset fluency, blending, isolating final or medial phonemes , segmenting, adding to and deleting phonemes, and substituting phonemes […]

We have had a tough day. Being five is hard. Being five and a boy is especially hard. At five and six children’s emotions a little bit more tricky to understand. They laugh many times when they are frustrated. Children begin to be more independent and sometimes you hear that in a strong voice. Friendships […]

What does science and Valentines have in common ? Not a lot unless you make old school melted crayons First we took two cheap boxes of crayons and peeled all the paper off. That took a while and our fingers got quite a workout. Then we broke them all and laid them in silicone cups. […]

Today we read a new book that I have a called “Not a Stick.” This book really highlights the imagination that children have. They literally can turn a stick into anything. We even noticed some familiar things in the book. When we went outside of course they found sticks. And they also had the normal […]

Today we did our February self portraits. I’m always amazed at the progression The first pictures you see are from a boy who will be five in April. The second set of pictures is from a girl who will be four this month . And then I have one pic from a girl that is […]