Bedtime stories are a long-standing family tradition in my family. Growing up I was read to every night before bed, a chapter here, a story there, and now do the same for my two boys who are three and five. Each night after brushing their teeth, my boys pick a couple of books off the bookshelf and the three of us hunker down in one of the big beanbag chairs we have sitting on the floor.
Parenting Resources
Book Magic
The “not learning to read thing” kind of creeps up on you slowly. For my son and me, it was like this:
We loved to read together. Well, actually, I read to him, and he loved his books.
Our shelves were overflowing with books. “Will you read to me?” I would ask him. “No, I like it when you read to me,” he would answer. “That’s ok,” I would think. Then I would tell him, “I’ll read to you. I like to read to you and soon you will be in Kindergarten and you will be reading on your own.”
Knowledge is Power- Evaluations at the Stern Center
Doubt creeps in at an early age… perhaps it starts in kindergarten, when some children are able to read with ease while for others it feels like running in sand. Maybe it is in second grade, when a child can spell a word one day, but that word is a stranger the next.
Preparing Your Child for an Evaluation
You have made the decision to have your child evaluated. Maybe your child has a learning style difference, which includes being a gifted learner; maybe a learning disability is suspected; perhaps your child has attention difficulties; concerns around adaptive behavioral problems, including autism, may be the issue, or maybe your child is struggling with a neurological handicapping condition.
Cool Literacy and Learning Links
Do we all have “attention deficits”? Or is there something else going on? Let’s try this little experiment, conceived by Simons and Chabris for their classic study on sustained inattentional blindness (1999).
Dyslexia: Failure is Not an Option
I wish I would have known what was going on when my eldest daughter, Madeline, started learning to read. She hated it. She loved all of her other subjects but reading was painful. She used to hide under the table to avoid it. The most frustrating thing about this was that the school kept telling me that Madeline was fine.
