Category Archive: Best Books for Kids

Best Interactive Print Books for Kids

Reading a book to a child is a lot harder than it looks. While writing Born Reading: Bringing Up Bookworms in a Digital Age, all the experts told me to be more interactive when reading. However, not all books will create an enthusiastic reading experience. At the American Library Association annual conference, I had the awesome privilege to […]

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Free Born Reading Newsletter for Parents

Born Reading is a work in progress. In Born Reading: Bringing Up Bookworms in a Digital Age, I share hundreds of books and apps that parents can use with kids. Now that the book is published, I still find great new apps and books every week. To keep parents and kids informed, I launched a free newsletter […]

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How Comic Books Change a Kid’s Life

Have you read a comic book with the kid in your life lately? I’m heading to Comic-Con International with my daughter next week, and it is a good time to remind parents and caregivers: comic books can change a kid’s life. I passed my childhood comic book collection on to my daughter recently, and we […]

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Sanjay’s Super Team Inspiration

Did the kid in your life love Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur? The film included the Academy Award-nominated “Sanjay’s Super Team,” a brief animated movie that told the story of a boy learning to appreciate his father’s religious traditions. The animated short ended with an epic superhero-style mythological battle inside the kid’s imagination, and all the art was literally inspired by “The […]

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How To Beat Math Anxiety

Do you have scary memories of math? If you suffer from math anxiety (and I most certainly do), you need to work hard not to pass on this fear to your kids. While researching my book, I turned to Laura Overdeck and her excellent Bedtime Math books for support. Overdeck worried that most math workbooks and […]

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Why Kids Need Nonfiction

When was the last time you read a nonfiction book with the kids in your life? As schools around the country adjust to new Common Core standards, children will spend dramatically more time with nonfiction reading, or “informational texts.” If you are interested in learning more about informational texts, I will tackle Common Core standards and nonfiction books during a free […]

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Best Children’s Book Treasuries

My daughter Olive loves it when we discover a new children’s book treasury at the library. These special collections include multiple storybooks in a single book, giving her a chance to choose stories from the table of contents and keep reading her favorite books. Over at Goodreads, I created a list of The Best Children’s […]

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Book Shrines for Children

Over the weekend, we made a very simple “Shrine To Children’s Literature” at home, celebrating some of my daughter’s favorite books. In her wonderful book, Happier at Home, author Gretchen Rubin describes how she built a “Shrine to Children’s Literature” in her home. She found joy in seeing “all my beloved titles lined up together” in […]

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Shel Silverstein & the Art of Interactive Reading

When I was in grade school, Shel Silverstein’s books were perpetually checked out at the library. His silly and mischievous poems will inspire any kid. It was the first poetry I encountered as a young reader. If you struggle to keep kids entertained while reading a book, you should listen to Silverstein’s rock star reading style. He can make […]

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