Your child’s been invited to a get-together within walking distance of home—but in unfamiliar territory. Here are your choices: Tell him how to get there; jot down the all the lefts and rights to be taken, noting a landmark or two; draw a map to accompany him along...

You’ve become a master at it. Had to. No choice. According to a recently released Salary.com survey, stay-at-home moms put in about 91 hours of work a week. And if you’re also employed outside the home . . . Well, you get the picture. Now think about kids. Most spend...

In my carefree kid days, homework was often left behind—sometimes on my desk, in my unmade bed, or even under it, falling victim to the morning rush. And, yes, I usually left assignments for the last minute—when I remembered them at all. Made my grades suffer and my...

Ageless, limitless, and always a pleasure, read alouds are a hit with everybody, so gather your child about you and give this ending from Roald Dahl’s “Three Little Pigs” a try: “Ah, Piglet, you must never trust Young ladies from the upper crust. For now, Miss Riding...

In 1941, Dr. Francis Robinson made a name for himself with his now classic study method, SQ3R--Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review--a systematic and very effective approach to learning. Instead of your child jumping right in and reading an assigned chapter,...

So many lectures, discussions, textbook pages . . . How can your child be expected to remember it all? Dante said, “He listens well who takes notes.” And that’s the key-- listening with the intent to learn, getting it all down, and then studying out loud to insure...

About his three D’s and two F’s, Joey said, “We went to Canada to visit relatives. Then I was sick for a couple of days.” Now, what do a trip to Canada and a nasty cold have to do with grades? Everything! As educator Richard White put it, “It may seem obvious that...

Books: knowledge, choice, power—a refuge that exercises the imagination, an invention that changed the world and put it in our hands. Actor Michael Caine said that the greatest thing he’d ever done was learn to read. Would your child agree? Does he curl up with a book...

Kids don’t usually love them. Some actually hate them. There’s seldom anything in between about essay tests. Where objective tests are tests of recognition—all a student has to do is identify the correct answer or whether a statement is true or false--essay tests,...

Says Avi, “Read your first draft, and, if you think it’s good, you’re in trouble . . . The more you rewrite, the better your writing will be.” For many kids, though, the top writing priority is getting the thing done—often measured in length rather than quality. Hit...

I bet you can read this definition of a joule: “Tihs is a uint of wrok euaql to one nwteon-mteer.” Your child probably can, too, because, as Cambridge University researchers suggest, the oredr of the ltteers in a wrod deosn’t mttaer as lnog as the frist and lsat...

It’s all the rage and even comes with bragging rights. Cheating, that is. As one webber proclaims, “I have cheated on tests, homework, projects, and other assignments all through my scholastic career . . . It’s something I take pride in.” This site, like some others,...

Your child’s all set for school, and you’ve got a handle on it, too, but here’ something else you can do: get up close and personal with your daily newspaper—and share it. Besides being a resource that can change how your child thinks about the world, it can help hone...