Highlights Magazine Teaching Kids To Read + Why Some Kids Hate School

Featuring Highlights Magazine

Highlights for Children delivers puzzles, science projects, jokes and riddles to challenge young minds, while characters in regular features like Hidden Pictures, The Timbertoes, Goofus and Gallant and the Bear Family, keep children coming back like good friends should.

Add 12 issues of Highlights For Children to your waiting area for $27.52, that's 42% off the cover price.

Teaching Kids To Read

It's so easy to plunk a kid down in front of the television or hand them their portable video game console to keep them entertained (and quiet).  Each form of entertainment has its advantages, television teaches social interactions by example, video games teaches hand-eye coordination and pattern recognition, but learning to read well is a whole different ball of wax. 

This is where books and magazines can make a difference.  Magazines like Highlights are perfect for young people with short attention spans. They offer reading lessons in small doses, plus mental games and puzzles to help exercise their IQ. Highlights for Children is designed for kids ages 7-12. You can also get a sister subscription to Highlights High Five for children ages 2-6.

Why Do Some Kids Hate School?

So school is starting again. (Insert children's groans here...)

It can seem difficult to get some kids to learn these days.  I personally feel that most of them are bored and distracted. My brother is a science teacher (four years running) and he expressed to me that higher percentages of his students are becoming more apathetic (towards science at least) each year.

Most public schools have not changed teaching wise and that may be a problem...with all the cool video games and increasing importance of social interactions in a child's life, school work and homework can look boring and forced from a child's perspective.  The whole system probably needs to change once a child learns to read and understands basic math. Textbooks and lectures have a tough time competing with attention grabbing audio/video/socially interactive Internet and video games.

Why not start changing the curriculums to include more competitions, demonstrations, and hands on projects once students get past 6^th grade.  It's probably about time to bring education up-to-date by making it more of an adventure than a system of memorization and benchmarking.  This doesn't have to be hard. For example, teaching spelling and vocabulary could possibly be a lot more fun if you sat through a class solving crossword puzzles based on having to look up definitions. It would be interesting to see if this improved test scores.

We as humans think and solve problems with mental images, not words. Strong emotions help our memories stick long term. The more senses we include in learning the more permanent the learning will be.  Kids love to discover new things, it makes them feel smart. Feeling smart boosts self confidence, and I see a whole of kids who need help in this department.

In my spare time I like answering science questions for kids, so I hang out in that section on Yahoo Answers. Lately, I'm seeing a ton of young people asking what they should do for a science fair project.  I always direct them to one magazine I wish I had when I was young.

Make Magazine is excellent since it shows easy projects that kids can learn from with the steps they need to recreate it. Currently, Make is cannot be found on our website since we lost our reception room rate, but we still offer it offline. If your child needs some ideas for their next science project go over to http://www.makezine.com/

While at lunch today I overheard some new mothers talking about Facebook.  One of them understood the website well, but the other two weren't sure how to use it.  With anything on the Internet these days, if you understand the lingo, then you are eight-tenths of the way to understanding the whole website. 

So if you have young teens gabbing it up in the carpool talking about Facebook, but it sounds like Greek to you, then crack open the September 2008 issue of Good Housekeeping and flip to page 103 in Good Family section.  They list several of the terms Facebook uses and it will hopefully give you a little more understanding about how it all works.

Find more family tips like this with a subscription to Good Housekeeping, you get 12 issues for $12.00...that's 60% off the cover price.