reading

boy doing book report

Book Report Badness: Reader Q & A

Book Report Badness: The Trouble with Summarizing There is always some tension between teaching a subject and making sure that we don’t turn the subject into a source of pain and drudgery. It’s the art of teaching (and parenting, really). I’ve written about it before when I talked about the

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a girl reading with stuffed toys: Why Children stop Reading

Why Children Stop Reading And What To Do About It

I’m desperately concerned about why children stop reading, and I hope you are, too. Let’s talk about why children stop reading and what we can do about it. Too Few Of Us Read I came across an article recently called Harry Potter and the Death of Reading that was written in

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Reading Buddies – Ideas and a Freebie

Reading Buddies can improve reading fluency, decrease anxiety in reluctant or stressed readers, and add a bit of cuddly fun to reading, making it even more pleasurable than it usually is! A Reading Buddy can be another student, or, as I’m going to talk about here, a stuffed animal or

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The Day My Little Free Library Came Home

I hope you’ve seen Little Free Libraries. In fact, I hope you have a Little Free Library in your neighborhood or even in your yard. If you’re not familiar with them, Little Free Libraries were started by awesome Wisconsite Todd Bol, who wanted to honor his mom, a bibliophilic former

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Read Ahead Contracts

Reading is one of the great joys of life, yet for gifted children, reading can become a tedious exercise, fraught with difficulty and frustration. This happens when they are forced to follow along in class while others read aloud. You know how you feel when you’re stuck in traffic and

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24 Awesome Free Resources for Readers

Readers are always on the lookout for great resources to feed their reading habit. Here is a list of 24 awesome free resources for readers I compiled for Read Across America Day that we tweeted out from Mensa. 1. Find books for kids recommended by kids at Mensa’s Pinterest page

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3 Reasons I Loathe Accelerated Reader

Confession: I loathe Accelerated Reader. Perhaps the title of this post was a spoiler. My friend Jen Marten wrote this terrific article about what’s wrong with Accelerated Reader. I would like to add a few points to her wonderful list. Much has been written about the problems with Accelerated Reader,

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Inviting New Books into Your Life

The last post looked at how to find new homes for books you no longer needed to live with. This post focuses on the other end of the dynamic – how to invite new books into your life. And if you are parenting gifted kids, this is information you will

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Bread upon the Waters – Giving Away Books on Purpose

Gifted people tend to gravitate towards books (not always, so no hate mail from misobibliists –  I just made that word up, to be honest, and spellcheck is yelling at me in red squiggly lines). Sometimes all this bibiophilia creates a problem. Recently, I was in a used bookstore with

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