The long weekend is upon us, and families around the country are packing up – with a lot of excitement and just a little, well, fear. After all, traveling with kids can be as exhausting as it is exhilarating. “Are we there yet? I need to go potty!!! When can we eat?”
Not sure if your family is like mine, but we often seem to go in many different directions at once, and just getting the family around the table for dinner at the same time is deemed an achievement. Right now, however, we are at home and spending more time together than we are used to. To help, I’ve reached out to youth development experts Ann Saylor and Susan Ragsdale to share a good activity with our HOMER moms and dads to keep your family strong and intentional. Susan and Ann are nationally recognized trainers and best-selling authors with a collective 45 years of experience in the field of youth development and leadership. Their mantra “play, live, lead with purpose” is evident in all they do.
Have you planted your garden yet? Since I’ve been thinking about how to make sure my own vegetables grow (my peppers did well, but the kale not so much) and create unique activities to bond with my daughter, I reached out to Susannah Fotopulos, a mother of two, who started Plant the Seed, a Nashville nonprofit focused on helping young children learn about food, healthy living, and gardening. She and Garden Expert Josh Corlew impress me with their initiatives to get kids learning and growing through gardening. They not only teach kids about techniques, but they also challenge them on a social and emotional level, too. They happily passed along the following tips.
Every day at Homer, our team of educators and literacy experts is lucky enough to spend time talking to our amazing community of parents about the ways their children are using our program. We learn as much from their questions as we do from their positive comments.
One of the questions we hear over and over is this: “So many of the educational apps my child loves are highly entertaining. Can they really be educational?”
