Tips, stories, and a few laughs about kids and vocabulary.
It started at breakfast. My daughter put down her toast, looked at me with complete seriousness, and said: "Dad, your coffee is getting cold. That is rather unfortunate." She was five. Here's what I learned about vocabulary development — and why I now own the word "fatigued."
Read more →I spent three evenings testing kids dictionary apps so you don't have to. I am not a hero. I am a parent with a child who mispronounced "library" as "lie-berry" for two years while I smiled and said nothing. Here is my completely scientific review of the App Store landscape.
Read more →Last Tuesday my son corrected my grammar at breakfast. I said "I feel badly about that" and he said "it's feel bad, Dad. Badly is an adverb." He's seven. He learned the word "adverb" from a dictionary app. I learned it in fourth grade and have apparently forgotten.
Read more →I spent twenty minutes teaching my daughter the word "exaggerate." She repeated it back to me. I felt like an excellent parent. The next morning I asked if she remembered it. "Something about eggs?" she offered. Here's why that happens, and what actually works instead.
Read more →We started doing ten minutes of dictionary app time before school. Results have been mixed. Delightful, but mixed. She described her broccoli as "adequate," called her baby brother "obnoxious" (correctly), and once told me my cooking raised a "dilemma."
Read more →Not all kids dictionary apps are created equal. Some give your six-year-old the Webster's definition of "ambiguous." One replaced "gentle" with a stock photo of a business handshake. We tested the real options — here's what's worth downloading across every age range.
Read more →The App Store has thousands of "kids learning" apps. Most of them are fine. A few are genuinely excellent. Here are the five worth the space on your child's iPad — covering math, reading, vocabulary, and more, with honest notes on what each one actually does well.
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