Author Archive: Jason Boog
BOB Books & Early Reading
November 23, 2016
A few months after I published Born Reading: Bringing Up Bookworms in a Digital Age, my daughter took an interest in learning how to read. We started with a set of BOB books, a beloved 35-year-old series that helps kids take baby steps into the world of reading. Olive loves shuffling through this boxed set of skinny books and […]
Sanjay’s Super Team Inspiration
February 28, 2016
Did the kid in your life love Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur? The film included the Academy Award-nominated “Sanjay’s Super Team,” a brief animated movie that told the story of a boy learning to appreciate his father’s religious traditions. The animated short ended with an epic superhero-style mythological battle inside the kid’s imagination, and all the art was literally inspired by “The […]
Professor Astro Cat’s Solar System
February 25, 2016
Does the kid in your life dream about visiting the stars? For the second year in the row, I served as a book app judge for the Cybils Awards–the annual Children’s and Young Adults Bloggers Literary Awards that celebrate the best books and apps. The winning app was Professor Astro Cat’s Solar System, an interactive science textbook […]
Homemade Digital & Print Books
February 3, 2016
In Born Reading: Bringing Up Bookworms in a Digital Age, I included a whole section about making books and digital books at home. Homemade books will help your kids stay creative for the rest of their lives. My friend Ethan Minsker is an author and zine maker in New York City. For years, he’s created homemade […]
How To Beat Math Anxiety
November 10, 2015
Do you have scary memories of math? If you suffer from math anxiety (and I most certainly do), you need to work hard not to pass on this fear to your kids. While researching my book, I turned to Laura Overdeck and her excellent Bedtime Math books for support. Overdeck worried that most math workbooks and […]
Electric Company Collaboration
November 3, 2015
The primary advice I give parents in Born Reading: Bringing Up Bookworms in a Digital Age is deceptively simple: “Share a book, app, eBook, audiobook, or any kind of literary experience. Don’t let your kid spend too much time alone with a device.” It can be really difficult to find apps to play with your child, since […]
Creating Talk Time
October 5, 2015
How much “talk time” do you spend while reading with the kids in your life? The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) just released “How To Advise Families on Media Use,”a set of helpful guidelines for doctors, parents and caregivers. The new paper stressed how kids learn best through interactive experiences: “Neuroscience research shows that very young children learn […]
Drawing Contest Craft
July 12, 2015
How can you keep kids reading once the book is closed? I’ve never been much of an artist, but I created a simple game I call “Drawing Contest” to keep reading experience going in our house. Basically, my daughter and I take one of our favorite books and try to draw a picture of the main […]
Sharing Apps with Family
June 2, 2015
What’s your favorite app to share with the kids in your life? Last month, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center asked me to write about the “Preparing for New Experiences” section of its free interactive book about Family Time with Apps. My essay explored lots of different apps that parents and children can use together, but my […]