Connected Parenting

Many parents know all about the importance of play, but don’t always have an easy time engaging their children in play at home.  To get the most from their play, children need: Time alone away from watching eyes to explore the world around them Time with a supportive adult to show what they’ve learned and […]

Play helps us deal with difficulties, provides a sense of expansiveness, promotes mastery of our craft, and is an essential part of the creative process. Most important, true play that comes from our own inner needs and desires is the only path to finding lasting joy and satisfaction in our work. In the long run, […]

Many parents are finding this time to be a challenge for them and for their children as we all work to ensure learning and social-emotional health during this tumultuous time.  How can we find joy?  A formal learning celebration at home can be an impactful, bonding experience between you and your child. Take a break […]

When I make a mistake, I feel frustrated, slightly embarrassed, and immediately want to forget about it and move on. Then, when I’m teaching, I turn around and tell my students how wonderful it is to make mistakes, how it increases our opportunities to learn and how it’s not only normal but preferred to make […]

We want our children to be eager readers, kids who stay up late with a book under the covers, who see books as portals to new worlds, who use reading as a way to learn more about themselves and the world around them. Many parents have this wish, especially if they themselves were readers when […]

We want our children to have the stamina to keep reading for longer and longer periods. By the end of kindergarten, a child should be able to read for 20 minutes at a time on their own. This requires a lot of work! Just like a muscle, the brain learns how to do something by […]

The Magic Word to Put in All Your Questions to Raise Curious, Confident Readers When practicing reading at home, and teaching literacy at home, we want to raise curious, confident readers who use literacy to find out more about the world, speak truth to power, and ensure that they have a voice and others do […]

Some of our best memories come from listening to a read-aloud. Many of us have fond memories of being read to when we were little, listening to a story, having that calm, connected time with our parent or family member and completely engrossed in what would come next. These cozy feelings and learning opportunities are […]

Why do some of our children have trouble retaining words even after they’ve seen them multiple times? For parents with reluctant or early readers, many at-home learning attempts look like this: we teach our child a word, have them write it out, they correct themselves, and then 10 minutes later, when presented with the same […]

Here at Talia Kovacs Consulting, I work to ensure that parents can take away bite-sized, easily implementable actions to boost literacy achievement at home, without it feeling like more school. This post was originally hosted on SpeechBlubs, a site that gives concrete speech and language tips for parents. A familiar scene in any home with […]