.I'm a teacher so I work with little kids all the time and this is my favorite activity to help kids learn to read. You get an envelope and have your child color and decorate it and make it their own.

I was having a hard time getting information from my kids about their school day, so I thought a good way of doing this would be to integrate something we have been doing in other areas, which is doing good deeds. So when I pick up the kids from school, the very first thing I ask them is about their good deeds during the day. This opens up a whole area and brings back the day.

I try to be as organized as possible, which actually begins the night before. I make sure that the kids' school bags are packed and lined up so there's no hunting around for school bags in the morning.

One of the things you face as a parent is making sure your kids know their personal information. It is really hard for them to internalize this because it is so much data and young children don't usually do very well with that kind of information.

I had helped teach my daughter how to read and a friend of mine knew this. She approached me about helping her daughter, who had already been told by her teacher that she would not pass the first grade because her reading skills weren't where they should be to pass. The school gave the mother the summer to get those reading skills up-to-speed. This is where I stepped in.

One of my daughters is deaf and has had medical problems in her life so I have learned to be a parent advocate for her learning and medical needs.

We make a list of things that the kids will need through the school week and make a chart for each day of what they will need. The night before we make sure that they have their clothes and they get their lists and that they have everything on their list together before they go to bed.

My son, Robert, is an early bird. He gets up with me every morning at 6:00. The impact of that is that he is too tired to do his homework after 6:00 p.m. after dinner. Because he is an athlete, he spends a lot of time outdoors and the struggles do get his homework done after dinner because he is so tired. 

My 6 year old daughter thinks it is pretty neat to get mail, so I try to write her a letter at least once a month.

My daughter, who is now 11, was having trouble in 4th grade because she was required to read in the accelerated reading program at school and then take a computer test to earn points for her grade.