Reading Incentive: KidsCash

Try KidsCash to get your kid reading.

If you’re looking for an incentive to get your kid to read, you may want to take a look at KidsCash.

I saw this product on Breakfast Television, and I think it could be applied really well to help encourage kids to read.

You reward your child for reading by giving him "KidsCash," printed kid-friendly coupons that look like money. You can dole out the KidsCash for each book read, or each page he reads, or for reading for a certain amount of time.

Here’s the twist: your child then spends the KidsCash to do something he really wants to do, like video-game time or TV time. Or he spends it on a toy, switching out with you for real money which he then takes to the toy store.

The KidsCash website has lots of ideas, including reward charts.

KidsCash comes in six different colours—they recommend a different colour for each child in the family—and it sells for $25 (plus tax and shipping) for a box of 250 coupons.

Related posts:
Using real money.
Create a reading reward chart.

So, I sent the KidsCash people an e-mail, asking them if I could see some samples of the cash or post a .jpg, but I haven't heard back from them. I got tired of waiting and thought I'd post this anyway--I think I've got the idea. Meanwhile, my friendly little e-mail is probably sitting in their JunkMail box and they have no idea I've even e-mailed them. Another potential friendship scuppered by technology!

UPDATE: The nice people at KidsCash did get my message and they e-mailed me the above image of their coupon. Friendship has triumphed over technology! A happy ending.

Dry-Erase Crayons

Things that make you go "d'uh!"

This is one of those inventions that you wish you'd thought of.

Dry-erase crayons. How good is that?

No mess, no smell, no drying out. But do they work? This is the best part - they really, really do work well.

The colours are deep and rich, and they write smoothly. Kind of like a cross between crayons and lipstick. Even on paper, which I don't advise because they smudge, they are vibrant and smooth-writing.

Combine this product with the idea about using a plastic plate as a mini-whiteboard, and you've got yourself a fun literacy-building activity. That wipes right off.

The dry-erase crayons come in packs of eight, with an "E-Z Erase Mitt" (in Canada it's an E-Zed Erase Mitt, which makes no sense but still wipes off just fine) and a built-in crayon sharpener.

I bet it won't take long before you're seeing them in classrooms and boardrooms. Fun! Crayola's selling them here for $5.48 a pack. Incidentally, I just Googled "dry-erase crayons" and found out that Sargent also makes them.

Sorry if this article sounds like a commercial for Crayola. I'm not affiliated with them, I don't get money from them - heck, I didn't even get a free box of crayons, just two sample crayons (which everyone at the For the Love of Reading conference also got). I just happen to like this product. Still, the article is a bit gushy. I will try to curb my enthusiasm just a titch in future.

Finger Puppet Book Bags

A little gem from the literacy conference.

It's a knitted book bag, with finger puppets that adhere with snaps to the bag. A knitted string lets the child hang it around her neck and take it anywhere.

Each bag has a theme. For instance, the Ocean bag has a handpainted ocean scene, and it comes with a clownfish, a crab, a mermaid, an octopus, a sea turtle, a seal, a shark and a starfish.

The idea is that you put a book, or a couple of books, into the bag.
There's a list of book suggestions for each bag. For the Ocean bag, they suggest Baby Beluga, by Raffi and Commotion in the Ocean, by Giles Andreae (and eight others).

Then, wherever your little reader goes, she carries an entire puppet show with her.

Interacting with literature is definitely a great way to get kids reading.

The bags are made in Bolivia by indigenous peoples; it's a Fair Trade project, benefitting both countries and helping families in Bolivia earn a living wage.

You can purchase a bag, a product the owner calls 3 Bags Full, from her website.

And speaking of the owner - here she is. Her name is Sue Berlove, and boy, she is passionate about what she does. Do visit her website. For one thing, they have way better pictures of her bags than the one I've used here (taken myself, as if you didn't know.)

Great reading tool - Boggle Jr.

I'm excited - I've got a great reading tool your (young) kids will love.

I e-mailed Hasbro and asked them to send me some word games and I'm really glad I did. (I have no affliation with Hasbro, by the way.) I tried Boggle Jr. with the six-year-old I'm working with, and it was really helpful.

Boggle Jr. has a set of large dice with letters on the sides. And it has flash cards - a picture of a car with the word "CAR" underneath it, for example.

A holder sets the flash card in front of the child, who finds the appropriate letters and builds the word using the dice. You can also hide the word and get the child to spell the word just from the picture.

There are tons of ways to use the game, depending on what the child needs to learn. I used them to talk about vowels. He had to find the vowels and tell me what each one says.

We also put letters together to discuss what the letter pairs say (th, sh).

What's so great about it is that the dice are bulky and just perfect for little hands. There's a game aspect because the child has to turn the dice over to find the right letters. And the flash cards allow for four levels: three-letter words and four-letter words, with and without looking at the words.

I'm excited about this new discovery because it's going to make teaching easier, and learning more fun. I think there will be a limitation - for instance, my own eight-year-old wanted to play with it, but it was clearly far too young for him. However, the six-year-old had a great time playing with it.

Update on my sessions with the six-year-old. They're going great, and we're both having fun. But guess which book he picked - from the 15 on offer? SpongeBob Squarepants. Oooooof course.

New Tag books

Tag has some new books for learning short and long vowel sounds.

You know I love the whole LeapFrog system. My son learned so much from it when he was little.

So when I received these book kits, I was excited.
What I discovered, however, is that you have to:
a) Find your Tag reader (difficult enough, if you have the kind of kid I have - which is to say, not particularly organized).
b) Find the original box in which you've kept the Tag cord and CD.
c) Go through the books one at a time and download audio for each one from the LeapFrog website.
d) Save it on your Tag reader, ensuring you don't go over 20 MBs.

I managed to get 13 books on my reader before it told me I was over my limit.

Then I was ready to begin. Now, if I was the child, all of this would be transparent to me. My parent would be doing all the work. (So like life.)

The books look pretty good. Kids can read each one, using the Tag reader (by pointing to the words or letters, or the page icon to let it read an entire page out loud).

There are games in the back of each book that reinforce the ideas from the book. For instance, help a cook find ingredients for his "short-a" cookies - all the ingredients have the short-a sound.
So all-in-all, Tag is a pretty decent value for the money, and worth the up-front work to prepare it for your child.

If you want to know more, here's an awesome, in-depth review on the Tag system by KidsTechReview website. They give it 4.5 stars out of 5.

Disclosure: LeapFrog gave me a Tag system and the books to review. However, I don't work for them or receive monetary compensation from them and I'm free to write whatever I want about their products. If they sucked, I'd tell you - or more likely, I just wouldn't blog about them.

Product review - I'm going to have one or two of the neighbourhood children try this product, and the books, out. Then I'll let you know what they think. Much better than hearing about it from me.

The mark-my-time stopwatch bookmark

Please give us your ideas about how to use this reading tool.

It’s a bookmark with a stopwatch on it. So - kind of cool.
As soon as my son saw it, he wanted to use it right away – for sure, that’s a good thing.

But then I got thinking. If I was a kid who wasn’t that into reading, would I want to have that inexorable clock, ticking down the minutes? Mightn’t it make reading more of a chore?

So I spoke with some teachers at my son’s school. Here are their ideas:
*It’s good, because the child knows that when time’s up, they’re done for the day.
*You can use it to “count up” the minutes – and give them a reward after a certain amount of time.
*Kids can set it to two minutes. When the two minutes are up, that’s their cue to stop and think about what they’ve read. In this way, it could be a reading comprehension tool.

So I’m thinking that the mark-my-time bookmark could be really great for some kids. Anyway, for about $10 (or $8.95 US), it’s worth a shot if it’ll get your kid reading.

Disclosure: When I read about this product online and decided I wanted to blog about it, I contacted the company and they sent me the product to review. I haven't received any monetary compensation, and can write whatever I want about the product - if it was no good, I'd tell you. (Or probably just not blog about it.)

You probably have other ideas about how to use this product, or some other kind of "reading-timing" device. Please post 'em in the comments!

Yes, I took this picture in my garden. Don't ask me why.

A cool way to get kids reading

Your child's Nintendo DS is a reading tool.

Betchya didn't know that. And maybe your child doesn't either. And just maybe you're about to be the coolest parent ever. Well, this week.

Your child loves the DS, right? Well, there's a "PICTOCHAT" function that lets two DSs talk back and forth. It's like instant messaging, and you don't need any software. After the main menu (the DS on the right), click on PICTOCHAT (see the DS on the left).

Then you enter a "chat room" - don't worry, it's private and it's not on the Internet. Then you use the stylus and the virtual keyboard to type and send messages back and forth between the two units. You can also draw pictures and send them to each other.

On your child's next playdate, imagine how excited they'll be when you show them how to send cool messages back and forth, like spies! Put one kid in one room and another down the hall, and they'll have a great time. You'll hear the giggling.

You can also stash a DS in your child's room, and send him a message when he walks in. He'll hear a little tinkling bell and wonder what the heck's going on. Send him goofy messages, or better yet, send him on a hunt to find cookies.

It's one-on-one time, on his terms. And yours.

You don't have two DSs? OK, so you can't send him messages - but you can suggest that other kids bring their DSs over. If your child's not a great reader you might not think this will work, but the "drawing" function levels the playing field. So one kid can type and the other one can draw. They're kids - they make it fun.

Writing in light

So, here's a pretty cool product.

Crayola's Glow Station is essentially a flexible white board made of a phosphorescent material. It comes with a pen-flashlight so kids can "write" (or draw) using light.

At first, I thought it was a one-trick pony. My son used it the first time for half an hour and then didn't really go back to it.

However, as time goes by, I'm liking it more and more. Here's why. It hangs on his wall, so it's always handy.

Come bedtime, our family inevitably writes messages to each other.

So actually, it's becoming a pretty good literacy tool. It's getting my son to write more, and that's hard to do. (He loves reading, but writing - not so much.)

The Glow Station also comes with stencils and an adapter that creates little starbusts of light.

But the real genius of the thing is the fact that kids will use it, again and again, to pass messages back and forth. In the dark.

By the way, check out this website that'll explain why things glow.

I couldn't take a picture of my son's Glow Station because it's, like, really hard to get a picture of stuff that glows. You use a flash and it doesn't glow - you don't use a flash and you can't see it. So you get the Crayola image, and they're drawing not writing. Your kid will write.

Lunchbox surprise

Put a note in their lunchbox.

I like to put a little note in with my son's lunch. Notes are great for kids who aren't that into reading because they're short, they're fun, and they're from mom. I keep my notes to the point, and very upbeat. Something like: "Hope you had a great morning. I put a treat in the outer pocket. Enjoy! I love you - Mom xoxoxo"

I don't tell him to eat his veggies, or remind him to check the lost-and-found for the mittens he lost. I want him to look forward to my little notes, and that's good "reading reinforcement" behaviour. When what they're reading is fun, they'll look forward to reading.

Check out these Crayola "mini lunchbox messages" I found at a Michaels craft store. They even have a little envelope. But of course, any piece of paper will do - and don't forget the xoxoxos.

I've got a call in to Crayola, to find out if you can purchase these notes online. When I hear from them, I'll let you know. And yes, I did photograph this on top of snow. Tres Canadian, n'est-ce pas?