Great bedtime stories like Traci Osborn's 10 Not So Snoozing Monsters are a lifesaver when it's time to settle down and call it a night. But have you ever thought of pulling those bedtime stories out during the day for a little interaction?

When your child just can't get enough of a bedtime story ("One more time! Please!"), that's your cue to do something a little more with it.

To that end, we've created a Tolman Hall Follow-up for 10 Not So Snoozing Monsters. Print the pdf and let your kids draw their own monsters, imagine what monsters might dream about while they're sleeping, and more.

And don't forget to visit Traci Osborn's site. She's an fantastic illustrator. You'll love getting to know her better.

Aside from academic and religious reasons, some parents decide they want to homeschool their children to teach them how to live in a more holistic and thoughtful way. One way you can do this is to integrate volunteer work and community service into your children’s school schedules. The benefits of including volunteer work in your kids’ curriculum are many; here are just a few:

• Regular social interaction with a variety of people in your community
• A feeling of worth gained through meaningful service
• A strong focus on others, diminishing preoccupation with self and entertainment
• Compassion for other members of the community 

The above benefits are rich, and they’re difficult to come by through traditional educational methods, but you can easily make them a part of your children’s day-to-day lives by arranging for your family to become involved in one of the following volunteering efforts.

Visiting Nursing Homes
As the population ages, more and more people are living in nursing homes and assisted living centers, and all too often, these people don’t have regular visitors. Coordinate with a local nursing home to arrive at a set time each week. Residents will look forward to visits from your polite children. If your kids play instruments, provide a weekly or monthly concert, giving your kids ample motivation for practicing during the week. Or you could keep things casual by bringing card games, board games, or coloring pages.

Serving As Museum Docents
Some museums and zoos, such as the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, have volunteer opportunities for kids who want to give tours or man displays and booths. When kids volunteer at museums and zoos, they get real world work experience and they have contact with people who are experts in their fields. They learn their material well as they teach others about the museum’s or zoo’s offerings. Kids also feel very proud when they can educate their peers about a topic they’re interested in.

Working at a Food Bank
Food banks always need volunteers to sort, organize, and shelve donations. This is especially true during the holidays when they’re inundated with donations from canned food drives. Working at a food bank helps your kids to develop an appreciation for what they have and to be more sensitive to those who have less. In addition, they learn about dependability, good work habits, and courtesy.

Tutoring
Common sense says that if your child is good at math, she should be a math tutor, but think beyond the obvious. Maybe your daughter is having trouble with reading comprehension. Why not set up a regular tutoring session where she works with a younger child on reading skills? She’ll realize that she knows a lot more than she thinks she does, and in her zeal to teach her young pupil, she might just rediscover her own enthusiasm for reading. If at all possible, find pupils for your children who are not members of your family. They tend to take their responsibilities more seriously when they’re not tutoring their siblings. If you know another homeschooling family in your neighborhood, set up a tutoring swap.

Organizing Group Service Projects
Volunteering doesn't have to be something that takes up a regular slot on your homeschool calendar. It can be something you do from time-to-time and can involve other homeschoolers in your co-op or neighborhood. For example, LACES, a homeschool service group in Columbia, Tennessee, volunteered as a group at The People's Table, which is sponsored by a local church. Projects like this build unity among homeschoolers and put many hands to work to serve the community.

Children who learn to volunteer during their growing-up years always find ways to serve their communities as adults. After all, it's been a way of life for them. Helping others becomes second nature when time has been set aside for meaningful service. Homeschoolers are in the unique situation of having great flexibility over their schedules, and this opens many doors for volunteering. While everyone else is at school, your homeschool students can be docents at the museum or tutor five-year-olds with their counting and reading. Volunteering is one more way you can cultivate character in your children and introduce them to people who can genuinely use their help. You're raising kids who will change the world.

It's a privilege to have a guest post today by Omoyeni Adeyemo, a Ripple Foundation volunteer. The Ripple Foundation fosters creativity, education, and imagination in youth across Canada. It's an organization well worth supporting.

I spent my childhood with my head buried in books. In elementary school, around age seven, I decided on a friendship with a girl in my class based on two events. The first was her introducing me to a Jacqueline Wilson book which spurred an unremitting love for Wilson’s books till my mid-teens. The second was that she let me in on the secret of using the library outside of library period. I also liked to write, though I never completed any of my stories because there was always something lacking. However, I never saw reading as a gateway to spurring my creativity and improving my writing.   

As I grew older, I started to read less because it seemed a quixotic past time in relation to school work or keeping up with the other responsibilities of a child. I also stopped writing much as a result. It was not until University that I reconnected with the necessity of holding on to both.

Presenting Ripple Foundation. Created by Ivy Wong and run fully by volunteers, Ripple Foundation’s goal is to educate our youth and foster creativity by encouraging them to read and write. The organization offers a creative writing challenge called Kids Write 4 Kids (KW4K) for students in grades 4 to 8 to support its cause. The competition is in its fourth year and accepting ongoing submissions till March 31st 2016. The winner(s) selected by the judges, get their book published in print and in digital forms and net proceeds from all the KW4K books go to the school of the winner(s) of the year. In addition, the winning authors have the opportunity to be part of the judging panel for the next contest, alongside teachers and people in the book publishing industry.


In the past three years, KW4K has accepted more than 500 entries and had 8 winners’ books published, the latest being Mika’s Fortune by Faith Emiry and Escape From The Taco Shop by Christopher Smolej. Because of the success of the contest, Ripple Foundation was registered as a non-profit organisation in August 2015. Prior to receiving not-for-profit status, the programs operated under Ripple Foundation were run by Ripple Digital Publishing, a Toronto based digital publishing company specializing in educational digital learning products for children. Ripple Foundation is primarily funded by donations from Ripple Digital Publishing and accepts donations-in-kind from supporters. All donations are poured back into the foundation’s programs and initiatives.

When I first learnt about Ripple Foundation, what came to mind were the opportunities it would have afforded me as a child.  Ripple Foundation would have enriched my childhood in a few ways: as a reminder that reading and writing go hand in hand, as an incentive to write, with the chance to be a potential author thereby fostering creativity. Also, reading other children’s published books would have given me proof of the prospect that I too could be an author. 

Even better is that Ripple’s focus is boosting creativity and educating youth in general, writing is simply a medium. Writing was chosen because it is less exclusive than, for example, music or art. Ripple might eventually have more contests and incentives to build other sorts of creative abilities, only time will tell. But for now, my childhood self is grateful that there is such an organization to nurture my reading habits and cultivate better writing practices.

Many thanks to the Ripple Foundation for the wonderful work it does to promote literacy, creativity, and imagination in children. Encourage the children in your life to enter the Kids Write 4 Kids challenge. 


Thank you, Omoyeni.

When your students learn to tell the difference between static and dynamic characters, they'll gain deeper insights into the stories they read. Static characters are the same at the beginning of the story as they are at the end; dynamic characters change through the events of the story.

This is what happens in real life. As we encounter challenges, new people and places, and successes, we change. We may look at the world differently once we've been to a new place, or we may learn patience or forgiveness based on a humbling encounter with another person. These life lessons are part of what makes us human, and reading about them helps us to see the world from different points of view.

Additionally, learning about static and dynamic characters can help your students to become critical thinkers. When introducing the concepts of static and dynamic characters, it can be helpful to start with a story everyone already knows. For example, you could use a movie most kids saw when they were younger, like The Incredibles.

In The Incredibles, there are lots of different characters. Some change over the course of the movie, and others don't. For example, Mr. and Mrs. Incredible change quite a lot. When the movie opens, they are young and fearless. They seem indestructible. In the middle of the movie, they are beaten down by the challenges life as dealt them, but then they learn to overcome those challenges and evolve, and in the end, they are changed once again. They are dynamic characters.

Fro-Zone and Edna Mode are good examples of static characters. They're not as important to the main action of the plot, and they don't change over the course of the story. They provide comic relief, and they show us interesting aspects of the main characters, but they don't change.

Once you have explained static and dynamic characters using a story everyone knows, you can introduce the new book you're going to read. Old Yeller is a great book for teaching about static and dynamic characters. Travis is a 14-year-old boy who is given the job of being the man of the house while his father is away herding cattle to Kansas for several months. The experiences of those months change Travis forever; he's a very likeable, relatable dynamic character.

Minor characters, like Little Arliss and Bud Searcy, are important to the action of the story, but they don't change like Travis does during the story. Interestingly, although Bud Searcy doesn't change during the story, Travis learns to see him in a different way because he has grown up and learned to understand people better. These insights make for great discussions and essay topics for your students.

Last summer I was visiting with my grandmother and a couple of aunts and uncles when I learned something I had never heard before in all my 38 years: my great-great-grandfather had a mail-order bride, and it "didn't work out."

This was unexpected news to me. I knew that his first wife had been tragically gored by a bull while her husband was away from home and her three young children had watched from the house. That part of the story had been passed down. But this new part, this mail-order bride part, had been shut up in the closet with who-knows-what-other skeletons.

My great-great-grandfather and his three little kids lived in Wyoming, which is not the most hospitable place in the world, and he needed help. So apparently, he sent off a letter to a service, and a woman arrived some time later. Nobody seems to have known what happened, but she decided not to say, and g-g-grandpa was apparently so upset about her leaving that he ordered his children to not look at her while she drove away. But they loved her, so they watched her anyway, even though they knew they would get in trouble. 

That's how my grandmother told the story, and I'm sure it's true as far as she knew it. My grandmother was a very truthful person. 

I hadn't thought too much about that story until I listened to the audio-book version of Sarah, Plain and Tall, yesterday. It's a beautiful little story about a usually-not-for-children topic: mail order brides. The father in this story was in a very similar predicament to my g-g-grandfather's. He is a widower with two young children to raise. He gets matched up with a plain and tall woman from Maine, and after writing a few letters back and forth, she arrives.

What I found so beautiful and haunting about Patricia MacLachlan's story were the children's thoughts and feelings and desires. They adore plain and tall Sarah. They fear that she might leave, and because this is children's literature, she stays. Maybe what made it so haunting for me is that I've heard the story about when "it doesn't work out," and the children and lonely man are left on their desolate farm with no one to dry flowers for them so they'll have something beautiful to look at during the winter. 

That's what's so amazing about literature. It takes the heart of humanity and reminds us of who we are. I don't like to define fiction as "made-up" or "untrue" because what could be truer than the longing for a mother?