He has really aged well, hasn’t he?!?! Eric Carle’s classic book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, is celebrating its 40th birthday today. The book is a much-loved children’s classic featuring a caterpillar that eats and eats, leaving holes in everything he munches on, until finally he grows large enough to become a butterfly.

The Very Hungry Google Logo

Even Google jumped on board with one of their famous logos! It features the caterpillar on top of various pieces of fruit, with the holes in the letters becoming the signature mark of what the caterpillar has eaten.

Eric Carle is a former art director who later became an author and illustrator. He has more than 40 books currently in print, including The Very Hungry Caterpillar, his most famous work.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar Stuffed Animal

ABC Game

We carry a variety of Eric Carle toys, including several based on The Very Hungry Caterpillar book:

You may also wish to visit Eric Carle’s official website for more information about his life and work.

I got a terrific idea from my son’s teacher this week.  This idea can be used with just about any subject being studied.  Take a piece of posterboard (12 x 18 inches) and have your child decorate it with anything that is currently being studied.  For example, if your child is learning his or her multiplicaction facts, have him or her write them around the edges of the posterboard.  Or, if your child is learning to identify colors or letters, do the same with that information.  Maybe your older child needs to memorize a timeline or a set of dates or events.  Write whatever subject it is on the posterboard, then cover it with clear Contact paper.  Viola!  Your child has made an instant, teachable placemat to use at mealtimes!

Bells are ringing across the country, in classes (and homes) as children make their way back to school for another year.  As a parent, I want to give my child the best possible chance at a successful school year.  Being actively involved in my child’s experiences at school by volunteering and assisting, as well as being a physical presence around the school, are great ways to take an active role in my son’s education.  I also like to find things to supplement classroom learning and bring it home as well.

WonderBrains is currently carrying two lines of materials that are perfect for homeschooled children and children who are educated outside the home.  Carson-Dellosa, a leading education publisher, has created a variety of activities and workbooks for children ages three through fifth grade.  For preschool-aged children, WonderBrains carries a variety of read-aloud, activity-centered books, such as Magnix: A Visit To the Farm.  The Magnix series of books also branches into early math and writing activities as well.  For school-aged children, WonderBrains carries Carson-Dellosa’s Summer Bridge series.  But, don’t let the titles fool you!  These are excellent tools year-round, and may even inspire your young learner to come up with even more activities.  These books are found as Summer Bridge Activities, Summer Bridge Math and Summer Bridge Reading and are available in several different age ranges. 

WonderBrains has also welcomed Remedia on board.  These reading activities workbooks are available for children from Kindergarten through high school with a wide range of reading skill areas.  For younger children, the Remedia Beginning Reading Program is a comprehensive collection of age and ability-level appropriate materials with an accompanying activity guide.  Choose from the sampler set or the small group set (three copies of each story).  As the students progress in their learning, so do the skill materials covered by Remedia’s materials: comprehension, vocabulary, context clues and life skills reading activities.  For reluctant readers, Remedia offers a line of activity books that are high-interest, low-readability to boost confidence and success in students who need it the most. 

Extending the learning to the homefront is a wonderful way to stress the importance of education with young people.  WonderBrains can help you find the resources to do so!

Here’s a fun activity to try with your child that promotes critical thinking and school readiness.  This idea can be adapted for any age from preschool through grade school and beyond.  Best of all, no supplies are needed!

Have your child turn his or her back to you.  Using your finger draw a letter on your child’s back and see if he or she can identify the letter.  After he or she guesses the letter, see if they can come up with a word that begins with that letter!

If this is too difficult for your child, try it out first on the palm of his or her hand.  That way, your child can see the letter being written.  With younger children who might not know their letters yet, try simple shapes, like circles, triangles and squares.  Older children will enjoy the challenge of entire words or a more complex picture, such as a tree, a plane or a house.

Have your child do the same to your back as well.  It is great practice for writing, spelling and simple fine motor skills and dexterity!

August is here, and soon (if not already), children will begin to head back to school.  Whether it is preschool a couple of mornings a week, a traditional grade-school program, college or even homeschooling, establishing a routine can make the next day run so much smoother.  The key to the entire process, though, is to start NOW, not the night before.

1.  If your child has been staying up later in the summer, chances are he or she is also sleeping in.  To adjust Little Timmy’s bedtime schedule, do it gradually over a couple of weeks.  Put him to bed 10 - 15 minutes earlier one night and for the following 3 -4 nights, then adjust another 10 - 15 minutes every several nights until the desired bedtime is reached.  A gradual change is much easier on our bodies than an immediate one (think jet lag!).

2.  One of our biggest adjustments is our morning routine when school begins.  The summer has been filled with leisurely breakfasts, cuddles under the covers and hours in our pajamas before getting dressed for the day - a stark contrast to the rest of the year!  To prepare for the get-up-and-go routine of school, I plan early morning activities for my kids that involved getting up and getting ready.  We plan early morning bike rides, watering the plants, taking a walk, or doing our grocery shopping first thing.  My kids are dressed and ready, and we’re doing something we enjoy to get our day started (okay, not the grocery shopping, but they tolerate it well!).

3.  If your child is attending a school that holds a “Meet the Teacher” night, then go MEET THE TEACHER!  This is the evening where it finally sinks in for my almost 9 year old.  He gets to see his room, his desk his teacher, and his friends, and we get to casually visit where he will spend the next 9 months during the days.  In our district, we also drop off our school supplies on Meet the Teacher night so that our son doesn’t have to haul all that stuff to school on the first day.

4.  For kids that are just getting into a formal education routine, following directions can sometimes be daunting, especially in a group setting.  Check with your local library for story times where you can go with him or her and learn how to be a listener in a positive, casual atmosphere.  Also check into local museums for programs for children; our local children’s museum has a storytime each day that lasts about 15 minutes, which is the perfect length for small children.  Parks and Recreation departments also offer similar programs.

5.  Begin those healthy habits before school starts.  Work with your child on hand-washing, not just after going to the bathroom and before eating, but at other times, too.  When children are in a group setting, germs are plentiful; teach your child to wash his or her hands frequently to limit the spreading of germs.  Also, evaluate your breakfast menu.  If you tend to be the “pop tart mom” or the “sugar cereal queen”, consider healthier choices for breakfast, such as yogurt, hard-boiled or scrambled eggs, fruit and whole-grain breads.  These choices are great for improving attention spans and limiting that “sugar rush”.

6.  Don’t wait for the homework to head home before working on school work.  Establish a reading time now for your kids, and limit the amount of time the television is on in the house.  Children of any age enjoy being read to, and what a great bonding time for you and your child.

Here’s to a great start to school this year, no matter where or when!

When kids hear the word “summer”, their heads are filled with visions of swimming, trips, lazy mornings in jammies and playtime - all the time.  The last thing on their minds is anything school-related.  But, summertime can be a great time to keep up those academic skills as well.  And, all it takes is fifteen minutes.

In our house, we set a timer each morning for fifteen minutes, and during that time period, we find something school-related to do.  For our first week home, we kept a journal of our caterpillars and eventual butterflies that we hatched.  We spent fifteen minutes each morning, reading and learning about their development, recording observations in a spiral notebook and drawing sketches of what we saw.  It was an amazing science lesson while still making it fun for the kids (by the way, I did it with them - why should just the kids get to have fun and draw pictures every day?).

Some mornings, we take out my son’s old math workbook from school and find a page or two to complete in order to keep our math skills up.  We alternate math work with our piano practice.  Piano during the school year is a 30 minute-a-day schedule for us; in the summer, I cut my son back to fifteen minutes, every other day.  It gives him a break from the regular routine while still giving him the opportunity to keep his skills sharp. 

Other academic activities could be incorporated this way: reading (my son is an avid reader, so I don’t have to prod him each day to read, but a timer and fifteen minutes would work well for many kids), writing (writing letters, filling out a shopping list for Mom, making a birthday list), measurement, and even art can all benefit from a bit of practice over the summer.

By the time my son’s timer goes off, breakfast is ready and our day begins.  Fifteen minutes a day is all it takes.  And, that fifteen minutes flies by!

Our last day of school is quickly approaching here, and my 2nd grader is definitely in tune to that.  Each day, he tells us how many more school days he has left, and then he proceeds to name all the fun things he’s going to do over the summer, from sleepovers to trips to the grandparents’ house to swimming and playing with the neighbors.  He also knows that many of the things he does in school now will be carried over to the summer.

While taking a break from formal learning environments can do everyone a world of good, it is equally important to maintain those skills learned during school in order to be prepared for the following year.  Personally, I’m a scheduler and a planner, and thankfully, so is my child.  We have a schedule of sorts that we set up for the summer (not set in stone - we must allow for those great trips to Grandpa’s house!) that is generally pain-free and can be fun for all of us.

No matter what age your child, spend some time this summer refreshing those learned skills and taking time to get to know the academic side of your child.  Here is a sampling of what we’ll be doing this summer:

READING:  My son and I hit the half-price bookstore a few weeks ago and chose books we wanted to read for the summer.  We have eight titles total that we plan on reading together and discussing.  I ended up buying duplicate copies of three of them so that we can each have our own book, and the rest I will hunt down at the public library when we are ready to read them.  The point is to READ, and READ CONSISTENTLY.  I’m not as strict on his book choices during the summer, although we do decide on titles together.  My son is a morning person, so we will dedicate about 15 - 30 minutes each morning before breakfast to reading time.  Then, over breakfast, we can discuss what he’s read for the day.  It is a great way to connect with my child, learn more about his reading preferences, and give him some much-needed practice in reading and comprehension.

MATH: The easiest math for us to work on during the summer is money.  This is about the time of the year that we re-evaluate my son’s allowance and make any changes that are needed.  My son is a part of that process.  We set up a budget for the summer, breaking down his weekly allowance into savings, church offering, and any special purchases he would like to make during the summer (a new video game or a special toy he really wants).  We set up a chart to track his money, and he is responsible for completing his chart each week. 

Another fun math activity my son does each year involves road trips to the grandparents’ houses.  We spend several days at each grandparents’ home during the summer.  My son is the navigator for the trip.  We equip him with a state road map, markers, and a ruler.  Together, we calculate how many miles total we will be driving, then we break our trip down into increments with rest stops.  We look for interesting places to stop along the way and work those into our itenerary.  He keeps a written log of our trip as well as the map, and it makes the trip far more interesting to him than simply sitting in the back seat!

SCIENCE: From cooking to water play, involving your child in some fun activities is a great way to bring science into the home.  Have your child help prepare a special meal or dessert, and find out what different ingredients do in the recipe (such as baking soda versus baking powder!).  When playing in the sprinkler, slip n slide or wading pool, give your child a variety of containers to explore volume and fractions.  Science is all around!

WRITING: Our son is responsible for writing one letter a week during the summer (although with the rising cost of postage, we may resort to email this year!).  His audience may be a grandparent, a cousin, a friend or even a former teacher.  We simply want our child to practice his writing skills, and composing letters is a great way to do it.  My son also loves to make “books”.  I simply staple paper together into a book format and he gets busy creating a story for himself, his brother, or even for a friend.  Our younger son will also be composing his own mail this year, too.  He is very excited about it!  Our older son helps create our shopping list at the store as well.  Any kind of writing a child can do is great practice.

By taking a look at the things you typically do during the summer months, it is quite easy to see where academics can be woven into the framework of the day without losing the actual fun.  Take a moment to find ways to actively and enthusiastically engage your child in learning this summer.  The payoff will be amazing when school starts again in the fall!

As a preschool teacher to four year-olds, I’m intrigued with one of Wonderbrains’ new products, Alpharings.  Alpharings are designed by Educational Insights, an educational product company that has a 50 year history of providing hands-on activities to reinforce early learning skills.  Alpharings come with 130 adjustable plastic illustrated rings (five of each letter) and an instructional guide.

So, my first question was, why so many rings?  Well, each letter is represented by five different illustrated rings to give the child five different relationships with the letter.  A child can find all the letter “Cc” rings, for example, and place one on each digit of a hand.  It is a great way to integrate sorting and classifying with the alphabet, and these are important pre-math skills as well. 

This set is also wonderful for children who tend to reverse certain letter pairs, such as p and q or b and d.  Children can easily compare the two letters in the pair by putting them on each hand.  The full-color illustrations on each ring are easily recognizable for each letter, so being able to identify b and d is a snap.

As children progress with their learning, these rings become excellent tools for working on word-building skills.  With the availability of multiples of each letter, words such as “tot” and “moo” can be built.  As children work on longer words, such as “letter” or “school”, these rings can be a great tool.  Older children will enjoy working on spelling activities with Alpharings.  They are a concrete tool that can be utilized in a number of ways over a wide range of age and development.

Alpharings retails for $19.99 and is a bargain at that for the variety of activities and age span that can appreciate and benefit from this product.