Recent Articles
The Best Way to Boost Your Child's Writing
Surely you’ve gotten the memo: Read to your baby. Read to your toddler. Read to your 6-year-old, even if he can read to himself. Read rhyming books, fairy tales, short stories, long ones — heck, read People magazine if that’s what keeps you reading. Here’s what we know: Reading to your child helps
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Is your child a bully?
Admit it. In the back of your mind, tucked between anxiety about whether your child will ace his math exam or get chosen for the tennis team, lurks something you fear, maybe most of all: Will your kid get picked on by a bully? Left out? Pushed, shoved or taunted? No one wants her child to be bulli
Read More »Making airplane rides educational
Early on, my husband and I decided to make traveling with our kids a high priority. In fact, we ranked it right up there with "providing a good education" on the (pretend) "Important Things to Do as Parents" list. We knew that taking trips with our children would be fun. What we didn't know is
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Keeping your child's love for writing (not texting!) alive
Glanced at your child’s text messages lately? No? How about her e-mail or IMs? If you take a peek, you’ll find plenty of sentence fragments, emoticons and shortcuts like LOL (laugh out loud) and BFF (best friends forever). Punctuation? Forget about it. Which begs the question: Where has all the goo
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'I'm bored!' What your child is really telling you
When Dr. Danielle Kassow was growing up, every now and then she’d grumble, “I’m bored!” Few things irritated her mother more. “My mother would tell me, ‘Go play, go find something to do!’” says Kassow, research and development manager for Thrive By Five Washington. “Parents feel that kids are lu
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Creating a plan for peaceful parenting
Getting your child school ready begins long before she’s out of diapers, with a plan to ensure her social and emotional growth. When a Northwest couple — let’s call them John and Jane — discovered to their great joy that Jane was pregnant, they did what most expectant parents do: They began pla
Read More »Keeping girls interested in science
Not long after Mary Margaret Callahan took a physics exam at Whitman College in the late ‘90s, her professor said this to the class: “Gentlemen, I am so embarrassed. Every girl scored higher than every boy in this class. But don’t worry, men, trend is not destiny.” A few short years after that, L
Read More »Art from the start: An innovative art program comes to area schools
Remember art history class? That’s when your instructor showed you slides — water lilies, perhaps — and you took notes on color, composition and the techniques Monet used when he painted them. Chances are, you were in college at the time. And chances are, you were bored. That was then. These
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