Abacus Mom

Best Magazine for Preschoolers / Little Kids

Looking to get your child a magazine subscription?

As you may remember from your own childhood, kids love getting mail.  When I was a girl, receiving my Ranger Rick magazine was a thrill.

Even in the computer age, many kids like magazines.  If you want to get your preschooler or kindergartener a subscription to a quality magazine, this is the best one my clients and I have found:

Click

Click teaches kids about music, science, and nature, often including excerpts from quality picture books as well as original features such as "Click and the Kids".  

Best Books for Learning to Read

If your preschooler is showing interest in reading, you're probably interested in supplying her with some teaching materials.  I know that people ask me all the time about best learn-to-read workbooks. 

Over the years, I have spoken to a number of Manhattan reading experts, including Irene Daria, who runs the well-regarded Fun with Phonics reading course and tutoring program in Manhattan.

Remember that reading readiness occurs at different ages, so there is no need to rush your child.  I have known many late readers who once they learned, became great readers!  Hearing of this always reminds me of the slow but ultimately successful lion in the children's book, Leo the Late Bloomer.

If your child wants to learn to read and you're game, here are a few goodies reading specialists have recommended to me:

Explode the Code Workbook series

Bob Books, Set 1  Beginning phonics readers

Starfall Learn to Read Phonics Book Set  More beginning phonics readers, great to use along with Starfall website

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons  Just what it says

Best Kids' Books about the US Presidents

Is your child obsessed with American Presidents?  Mine is.  As long as it's not Bratz dolls.

I've met a lot of kids who like the US Presidents.  These kids love memorizing presidential trivia, just as other kids do with the dinosaurs and planets.

Here are a few of the best kids books about the US Presidents.  Each is part of an excellent US history series.  I think you will enjoy looking.

Don't Know Much About The Presidents

Smart About the Presidents

and try

Smart About the First Ladies

Time to Apply to Private School?

Neil Parmar of SmartMoney Magazine says that "there may never be a better time to storm the castle walls".  Ready to apply to private school or upgrade?

African Folktales for All Ages

At Packer, back in the '70's, my teachers introduced me to African folktales and Ananse, the trickster spider from Ghana.  At some point in the '80's, I forgot all about them.

Then a few weeks ago, I took my children to the Met for an African Festival.  We saw a series of animated shorts, all African folktales, and one about Ananse.  We were all riveted.  Inspired, we reserved some Ananse books at the library.  Ananse has six sons, each with a specific, essential skill, and numerous acquaintances, whom he is always trying to trick.  These stories are so much more thought-provoking than the usual picture book.

I won't forget Ananse this time, and hopefully my kids won't either.  What international children's folk tales do you like?

Are Computers Making Us Stupid?

The Times had a superb article yesterday by Motoko Rich, Online RU  Really Reading?  Are kids learning to read, write, and think now that they spend so much time online and so little time reading books?  Nicolas Carr dealt with this fascinating issue in this month's Atlantic,  Is Google Making Us Stupid?  Carr wrote:

The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

Thank you to Carr and to Rich for articulating such a critical contemporary issue.  Adults are losing the ability to concentrate and think deeply, and children who never read great works will never gain this skill. 

Do You Worry about Summer Learning Loss?

WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show explored today if over the summer, kids are at risk of losing two months’ worth of learning.  YMCA Summer Learning Center’ s Marty Forth and CUNY professor of education Ken Gold  were guests.

One very interesting point the program raised is that kids do learn important skills over breaks: socializing, choice-making, taking initiative, and following your interests, and they continue to exercise their critical thinking skills.

Professor Gold recommended that kids remain engaged with language over the summer.

Resources for Helping Young Children Learn to Read

Want to help your child learn to read?  I talked to Irene Daria, reading teacher extraordinaire and owner of the excellent blog www.goodcityliving.com recently, and she gave me some excellent tips:

1)  The Explode the Code workbook series.  These phonics-based workbooks are fun to work through, and will greatly improve your child's abilities to sound out words.

2)  The Bob books.  Easy readers that build kids' confidence.

Children I know have had great success with these books.  Also try the amazing website, starfall.com .  On Starfall, children teach themselves AND parents get a break.