Family Ties
February 22nd, 2012
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Categories: Articles
A Year of Family Connections
February 1st, 2011
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“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”
- Herman Melville
The underlying philosophy of our book, The Parent-Child Book Club: Connecting With Your Kids Through Reading, is that we as parents need to be mindful about making strong connections with our children. With our parent-child book clubs, we strive to make connections with our kids through reading and discussing books, and engaging in related enrichment activities. We love the idea of creating connections and communities through literacy, and we are thrilled to be able to share our thoughts about organizing and conducting family book clubs.
Read more…
Categories: Family Connections
Working Writers Interview: Melissa Stoller
February 1st, 2011
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by Cherie, Working Writers
Many writers develop a love for words early in life with books they read as a child. A strong love of reading can definitely help parents bond with their children. That’s why I’m so excited to talk with Melissa Stoller today. Melissa took a love of books to a whole new level when she created the The Parent Child Book Club project. This is a great story about the love of words helping to unite people across generations. I know you’re going to enjoy Melissa’s story.
Categories: Articles
Enjoy this terrific review of our book!
August 31st, 2009
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Review: the Parent child Book ClubFellow Georgetown Law Alum, Melissa Stoller has written a book with research librarian Marcy Winkler on connecting with your children though reading called “The Parent-Child Book”.
With the onset of summer and end of the school year, many parents like me are challenged to keep the kids busy and mentally stimulated.
My boy Cboy is great at math and other subjects, but is more challenged at Reading Comprehension and Reading. Really, he’d rather watch TV or play video games. He is only just now getting into liking books for fun thanks to a great first grade teacher who cherishes reading and did a phenomenal job at stressing the fund aspects to reading. It’s so important to me and Trinidaddy that the kids get into reading because we both enjoyed reading books for fun growing up. I was a spelling bee champ and lived in the library.
From cover to cover “The Parent-Child Book Club” is a refreshing take on the challenge on getting kids into books and reading. It is unique in that it introduces the concept of a book club for kids run by their parents. How novel. I found the model, if effectively executed, could have a positive impact on getting a reluctant reader to embrace books.
The author’s share that the concept behind a book club is to encourage communication with children. The model presented in the book is for children ages four to nine. By the end, through several rounds of book club sessions, children should learn to predict outcomes, contemplate character traits and motivations, think about plot and dialogue and focus on writing. Very impressive. I earnestly believe reading for fun and love like this is the building block and basis for all types of learning and for being a good student overall.
The book offers ground rules on the technicalities of the group: how many kids to include, where to meet, whether it should be coed or single sex. It follows with helpful suggestions on how to create questions and dialogue about each book. There is a very generous resource section with suggested titles and a little info about each title. Each chapter thereafter, essentially, shares various models using specific age-appropriate books as examples. I especially liked the ancillary projects:the trips, foods to make, places to go that expands the experience of reading the book to real life.
Overall, its a great concept and great that the authors have put together a system that can be copied in various contexts for the early and middle years of a child’s education. Wonderful for supplementing their learning in school and it will be a great addition to our summer home school curriculum!
ORDER THE BOOK HERE
http://mschiefmakers.blogspot.com/2009/06/review-parent-child-book-club.html
Categories: Radio Shows
How to Get Excited About Your Vacation
July 23rd, 2009
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Enjoy this Fox News article that highlights our ideas about connecting with your kids through reading, movies, and travel bingo. The sections that discuss our ideas are highlighted.
FOX NEWS
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
By Paul Eisenberg
You’re forgetting something
You know you packed extra underwear. You’re congratulating yourself for remembering your cell phone charger. You double-checked that your hotel room was nonsmoking and you pre-printed your boarding pass. But something’s missing. What is it?
Well, did you remember to get excited about your trip?
If your goal is to retreat into the deep recesses of a rickety beach chair, you probably don’t need too much help here. But if you’re responsible for making sure that anyone traveling with you is having a good time, or you want to better understand what you’re seeing and doing, read on.
Dig through the tourism stuff
We’re all skeptical of sexy magazine ads, commercials, and Web sites designed to excite us about the almost unimaginable pleasures of vacation destinations. But look past the flash and dig. Tons of raw material is available from those very same Web sites – photos, videos, and free CDs that, while still carefully selected, may give you a less filtered view of what your destination looks and feels like.
Take your research further and call people in your intended destination’s convention and visitor’s bureau and chamber of commerce. Specify what your interests are and you might be pleasantly surprised at how personal a consultation you get.
On-the-ground tourism professionals “know the ‘must see’ spots and where to find the good happy hours and best brunch,” says Traveling Mamas blogger and former flight attendant Beth Blair.
Once armed with these details, see if they appeal to you and anyone in your party. If they don’t, keep calling or consider picking a different vacation spot.
Get a book or two
Buying a travel guide is an obvious way to get pumped about a trip, but when six seemingly worthy books cover precisely the same things to see and do, which do you pick?
Column Archive
* How to Get Excited About Your Vacation
* Cheap Tripping, Saving Cash on the Road
* How to Stop Getting Sick When You Travel
* How to Win in the Rental Car Racket
* How to Keep Your House Safe While You’re Away
Full-page Away Game Archive
“Go to the library or bookstore and select a guidebook or two that you feel ‘fits’ you, says travel writer Barrie Kerper. “Not all guidebooks are the same, so take some time to read portions of each and decide which ones you prefer,” she says.
If you live to eat, especially on vacation, “find cookbooks dedicated to the cuisine of your destination,” Kerper says, which as a plus “sometimes include recommendations of the authors’ favorite places to eat and shop.” Biographies, illustrated books, and novels are also useful supplements, she says, that will give you a clearer picture of the place you’re planning to visit.
Reading as vacation “homework” also enables you to connect more closely with your family, author and mother of three Melissa Stoller says. If you’re beach bound, for instance, she suggests “reading a book together about ocean life, or a fictional book set at the beach, and discussing the book together.” This shared experience “serves as a reference point when we’re on our vacation,” she says. “We can talk about the book’s characters and their adventures in the location, and then compare our adventures as we travel to those very same locations.”
Play “travel bingo”
If your destination doesn’t have obvious enticements like water slides and roller coasters, those photos and brochures you found have some unrealized potential in preparing your kids for a trip, suggests Stoller. “Cut out family-friendly pictures of interesting locations and create your own family bingo game to play as you investigate your location,” she says. Once you reach your destination, “kids will enjoy finding the sights.”
Live the movie
Particularly scenic movies set in your destination will also ramp up your excitement level, Stoller says, recounting that prior to a Rome trip she and her family watched such flicks as ”Three Coins in a Fountain,” “Roman Holiday,” and “The Lizzie McGuire Movie.” As with the books, her family immediately felt a sense of place. “As we were walking around the city, we thought about our favorite movie scenes and purposely visited many of the famous landmarks we had seen on the screen,” she says. Invite friends to watch the movies, too, especially if they’ve been where you’re about to go, and take it a step further, Kerper says, by “cooking a meal of your destination’s culinary specialties.”
Listen to friends, and a few strangers
While your friends are probably eager to tell you what they enjoyed doing in your intended vacation spot, see if they’ll also hand over any maps and books they used. One of the most useful books my wife and I ever had on a trip was a guidebook used by another couple filled with their scribbled margin notes and post-its, indicating what they liked and disliked as well as info on places not covered in the book. And assuming you’re prepared to trust a few like-minded strangers, consider immersing yourself in an online travel forum, brimming with travelers eager to share details and recommendations about where you may be going. Fodors.com has vibrant user forums and WeJustGotBack.com and familytravelforum.com are good sources of comments from family travelers.
Make the journey as important as the destination
If you’re driving to your destination, build some fun into the act of getting there. For her family trips, Blair says, she and her husband “love to pull out the map to let the kids see how far we’re traveling. Last summer we took a road trip from Tucson all the way up the California coast to the Mendocino Coast. The kids were enthralled by how far we were going to travel, plus it was a great geography lesson.”
You might also find that leaving some extra time for spontaneous stops like family-run restaurants, quirky-looking shops, and offbeat roadside attractions can yield the fondest moments of your trip.
“You only get out of a trip what you put into it,” notes Kerper. “Completely immersing yourself in your destination will not only pay you back in spades, but is really fun. Don’t just show up!”
Categories: Radio Shows
Our Book is Now Available!
June 14th, 2009
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The Parent-Child Book Club Website will help you connect with your family through reading. To get started, buy our new book, The Parent-Child Book Club: Connecting With Your Kids Through Reading.
Next, use our Model Guides to make this experience simple. Our New Model Guides provide updates for your group. Enjoy our tips for creating book club connections in your own home. Happy Reading!
Categories: Radio Shows