summer

While I don’t really have to worry about Vanessa not reading during the summer — she’s a bookworm, just like her mom — I must say I do love the idea behind iVillage PBS KIDS Summer Reading Community Challenge, which starts tomorrow, is free and lasts six weeks. The way it works is pretty simple. Basically you just sign up and you’ll start getting daily emails with literacy-building tips and activities from experts at PBS KIDS and Scholastic, two ofRead More ...

Ever since I met my husband, when he was an exchange student from Mexico at my U.S. university, he has been bragging about an amazing summer camp he went to as a child in Mexico D.F.: “There were sports and games, we would swim and have gymnastics every day, they taught us about leadership and did team-building activities.” He always said that one day, he would send his kids there. Fast-forward 13 years, when we had three kids ages 5,Read More ...

A busy blogger mom will take any opportunity to get pampered along with friends.  I really never get to host get togethers or parties like I used to (actually, nowhere near!), so I jumped at the opportunity offered to me by Aveda to gather a group of local LA friends for a morning of relaxation, bonding and learning about their Summer Solutions products. I used to be an avid Aveda hair care  user before our personal recession-woes hit and IRead More ...

They say that once you learn to ride a bicycle, you never forget – but is it true? Do we actually retain all skills and knowledge once learned? The truth is a skill usually must be consistently practiced or it can be lost, at least partially. This is especially evident in school children who go on summer break. At the start of each school year, precious weeks are wasted in the classroom as teachers try to get the children backRead More ...

A day summer camp is exactly what the name implies. Your child attends camp daily for however many weeks you're interested in (or you can afford.) Obviously, the longer your child attends, the better the end result. As far as I understand, the daily curriculum is taught in the target language, which depending on the program you choose, can range from Spanish to Arabic. Normally, age requirements are a bit more lax in this type of setting. At the one I've been looking into for Vanessa - the Denver Montclair International School - for example, they accept kids as young as three. By the way, their Spanish program is so popular, it's pretty much sold out for the entire summer! "Day camps work really well for really young kids," says Carl-Martin Nelson, the director of communications at Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota. "We find that half the time it's the parents who are not ready for regular summer camps and the other half it's the children" ...