How to get your boy reading

Get him this book. I'm not kidding.

This is the "perfect storm" of a book for boys.

It's got what boys love - facts.
Short facts - fact bites, actually.
And those facts are about video games.
And there are cool pictures of people doing crazy things.
And the cover has metallic words.

You get your boy this book, and he will read it.

Unless he's not into video games, of course, in which case - get him this book.

"Project Bookmark" in Toronto

And to think, I was going to stop following Mayor Miller's tweets.

I'm glad I didn't, because today he was tweeting about an amazing enterprise called Project Bookmark Canada.

The project takes advantage of the incredible array of books set in Canadian locations. As the Project Bookmark website says, "when you walk through this country’s villages, towns and cities and explore the buildings and neighbourhoods, you are walking on fabled ground."

The organization is placing permanent markers, bearing fragments of text from Canadian literature, in the exact spots the text refers to.

Today they launched the first marker, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. The text is about a nun who falls from an unfinished bridge into the arms of a man, suspended below. The marker is located on the north-east corner of Toronto's Bloor Viaduct (near Broadview subway station).

OK, that's one for adults. The one they're doing after that (within the year, they're hoping) is Dennis Lee's children's poem, The Cat and the Wizard, at Casa Loma.

This will be an incredible way to view the city - and eventually the country - from a literary perspective, especially with your kids.

Now seriously, mayor. I love ya, but either you do too much in a day (entirely likely) or you're just over-tweeting. So maybe slow down, take a breather... knock it down to say, oh, just five tweets a day? Unless they're about literature, in which case go nuts.

Great game: Tick Tock Boom

Tick… Tock… Boom is an awesome game my son discovered.

You flip over a card that has two or three letters on it: for instance, OU or IRD or REW. Then, each person has to say a word that includes those letters. The catch is, after you say your word, you pass the next person a “ticking time bomb.” Whoever’s holding it when it makes its hissing sound, loses.

It’s a fast-paced game (a whole game takes about 15 minutes) and even more fun than you’d think, because inevitably someone accidentally comes up with some crazy word like “glarg” and then everyone starts laughing as the person madly tries to think of a real word.

I wasn’t too sure about the ticking time bomb. But it’s quite quiet, and it just ends up being more like a round, black timer. There’s also a “junior” version of the game that involves pictures rather than words.

In a pinch, you could make a version of this game yourself, using flip cards and an egg timer. But this game is quite well made and worth the money.

I went to the manufacturer’s website, Piatnik, but I couldn’t find the exact version of this game. But I did find it for sale here, at the Cyberboutique of the Canadian Museum of Civilization. I’ll contact Piatnik and see if I can find out more because I’m wondering if they have more word games. Stay tuned.

Likes video games, running

There are lots of fun literacy activities for active kids.

I was talking to a mom yesterday who said she has two sons – one of whom isn’t a good reader. He likes video games and is quite physically active.

Here are some fun suggestions:

* Write a simple sentence on a long piece of paper. Cut it up into words and place them around the room. Time your son as he runs around, finding words, and making a sentence from them. (Remind him to use clues like the period at the end of the sentence, and the capital letter at the beginning.)

* Sink Scrabble tiles into a large bowl of rice. As he finds the tiles, he makes words.

* Show him how his Nintendo DS can be used for messages.

* In the summer, toss letters into the pool. He can dive for letters and make words by the side of the pool.

* Give him 8 Scrabble tiles (for instance, E L R E T I A S). Get him to make as many words as he can in two minutes, using those letters. See if he can make more the second time around.

* Make everything a fun contest! Time him, or get him to compete against someone else or simply beat his own score.

For more active-kid literacy ideas, check out this post on kinesthetic learning.

Time for a little Spring cleaning

It must be Spring.

This week I found myself on the floor, in front of my son's bookshelves, clearing out and arranging.

The shelves were getting too squished, and they weren't really... well, appealing. My theory is that books should be laid out like beautiful fruits, ripe for the picking.

His bookshelves were more like spinach and liver than blackberries and watermelon.

So I spent a bit of time parsing his book collection. I took out everything that was too young for him, or that I knew he'd never read. Then, because I'm a bit of a librarian at heart, I put all his collections together - all the Scooby-Doos, the Time Warp Trios, the Geronimo Stiltons.

The non-fiction books - dinosaurs and ancient Egypt, the joke books, the "How to be Immature" book - went on a separate shelf. And there's also a shelf of "haven't read, but isn't this interesting" books. That's for when he's bored. He'll stumble across that shelf and I'll find him sitting in a chair, surrounded by books, reading.

A little Spring cleaning now... for a year-round harvest.

Sorry about the mixed metaphor in that last line; I don't like it any more than you do. But sometimes it's hard to come up with a good closer. Anyway, you know what I mean.

Great website - reading and math

I love Soft Schools.

A wonderful kindergarten teacher told me about it years ago, and I’ve used it ever since.

At Soft Schools you can create fun puzzles, tailor-made for your child, and then print them out or let your child do them online.

For instance, there are:
Word Scrambles
Use your child’s name, relatives, and favourite things in the puzzle. Hit “Generate” and it creates the puzzle for you to print out.

Phonics activities
Online flash cards and phonics games such as the phonics scramble using short and long vowels.

Games
Right on the home page you can access connect-the-dots games, fishing games featuring subtraction, math worksheets, colouring pages with the alphabet, money worksheets and a great balloon pronoun online game. It also has activities dealing with science, geometry, fractions, chemistry, integers, rhymes, and lots more.

I often use the site to create math worksheets for my son, who loves to solve math problems. You tell it how big the numbers can be (for instance, no solution larger than 100) and it creates a worksheet so your kids can show you how smart they are.

No, that's not an out-of-focus copy of their logo - that's their logo. It's soft. Get it?

Dial-a-story

I'm recording some books on CD for our school.

It (and another mom in the schoolyard) reminded me that the Metro Toronto Public Library has a wonderful service. It's Dial-a-Story, and all you have to do is phone a number -- and let your child listen.

Every day there is a new story for little kids and older kids.

Stories are available in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Polish and "other languages." Currently, you can also hear a story geared to black history month.

Even if you're not in Toronto, give it a try.
(416) 395-5400

This is the cool microphone my husband bought me to record the books on CD. I want to burst into song (and sometimes, I do).
Thanks, Kerry, for clarifying that new stories are posted every day (previously, this post said they changed every week). BTW, the "other mom"? Kerry!