Discovery Toys enrollment now online

It's official! You can now sign up online to be a Discovery Toys consultant! We're going paperless, and streamlining the process for you. Feel free to ask me about joining; you may have questions before you "sign on the dotted line."

"Never fear...

spoiling children by making them too happy.
Happiness is the atmosphere in which all good affections grow."
~~Thomas Bray (1656-1730), English clergyman & philanthropist

"The darn trouble with cleaning the house is...

... it gets dirty the next day anyway, so skip a week if you have to. The children are the most important thing.”
~~Barbara Bush, First Lady

"True Teachers Are...

... those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own."
--Nikos Kazantzakis, poet and novelist (1883-1957)

Literacy in the early years

Literacy includes reading, speaking, and writing.

At the Frederick Douglass Elementary School in Philadelphia (where 89% of the school qualifies for reduced or free lunch) college students from Temple University's Speech-Language program mentor underprivileged kindergartners and first graders in reading skills in an after school program. Research has shown that the poorest groups also have poor results in literacy, causing high drop out and unemployment rates, in addition to poor health.

The "Kids Write and Create Program," developed in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Temple, is attempting to turn this problem around. They know that children who do not read at grade level by the end of first grade are unlikely to ever catch up, hence the focus on the youngest students.

The above article also points out the need for children to have materials that span the various learning styles: auditory, kinesthetic and visual, particularly because at the youngest ages they don't yet have the ability to translate the spoken word to the written word.

Discovery Toys can truly make a difference in this population. Not only are there fun games like AB Seas that bring fish and the alphabet to life in a lively fishing game, and CDs like Sounds Like Learning that includes songs of the alphabet, opposites and manners, or The Big Hungry Bear book and companion CD (with a narrated version of the book on it) but there's also a sequencing, storytelling game that asks the child to put sentences into the proper order.

Please contact me at billietoy"at"gmail.com if you know of grants that will provide these types of products for kids in need.