What do you do when you have children who can read, but just won’t? Is a love for reading something parents and teachers can inspire in children, or is reading something we’re born to like or dislike?

To encourage your child to love and enjoy reading you first need to understand the factors that may be preventing them from enjoying reading.

More appealing pastimes

It’s no wonder that children prefer to play video games, chat with friends or just watch TV – these are more enjoyable activities because they don’t require much effort.

To make reading a more appealing alternative to video games why not introduce them to foolproof, age-appropriate, best-sellers? You can even start out with book that inspired a child’s favorite movie or television program. Before you know it, your child will be writing fan-fiction on their favorite books.

Boring, uninspiring books

Children don’t like wasting their time on things that are irrelevant or just plain boring, and who can blame them? Adults don’t either. Rev up the interest factor by trying out different genres and media for reading until you find what works for each child. For example, getting them an e-reader, so similar to the tablets they use for playing games, might motivate a child to read more.

Difficult and frustrating

If your child is having reading difficulties this will naturally draw them away from reading. Talk with the child’s teacher and focus on identifying and/or ruling out any learning difficulties. Ask the teacher if they have suggestions for a course of action that would help the child get interested in reading.

Often something as simple as assigning a purpose to reading (e.g. learning about how planets form) will make the activity seem more meaningful and appealing.

Cultivate a love for reading

It’s actually easy to get your child to enjoy reading. Here are the five first basic steps to achieve this:

1) Recommend reading material based on things you know they already like. If that’s Batman, give them lots of comic books to start reading.

2) Be a role model. Don’t sit with a tablet in one hand and your smartphone in the other. Read books, magazines, and newspapers. Put new books and journals in places your child usually hangs out. Even if it’s just out of curiosity, they will at least skim through an article or chapter!

3) Organize activities around reading, like frequent library visits. Join a parent-child book club, play reading-related games like spelling games, and make family evenings together the time to bring out word board games like Scrabble.

4) If your child is young enough for bedtime stories, make a habit out of it. Reading out loud will get your child to grow fond of reading and ask for more material to read on their own.

5) Start building a home library with books you read together. This will be soon considered an ongoing, open-ended project where newly read books will be added to an ever-growing library.

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Guest blogging —back when a handful of people were doing it — was a practice that aimed at creating awareness about like-minded professionals, their products, and their ideas. Today, guest blogging is widespread, and while it still serves a useful purpose, it’s often turned into a widely acceptable form of spamming used simply for the sake of boosting search engine rankings.

Although it seems that guest blogging has gotten out of control, it is a fruitful and needed practice, both in SEO terms and in terms of idea cultivation. So no, guest blogging isn’t going anywhere soon, and there’s still time to bring back its truly useful aspects.

Exposure

Targeted exposure is hard to achieve and guest blogging lets companies and home-based businesses get to audiences beyond their current reach. While other marketing strategies attempt to reach out to targeted audiences, few manage to do so with the level of accuracy guest blogging does. Undoubtedly, it’s too valuable a tool to let it wither.

Brand Awareness

Guest blogging is an effective way of building brand awareness in demographics that might otherwise be unreachable. A rich, high vocabulary knowledge and sound spelling skills will ensure guest posts are of high quality and as such won’t be rejected. Provided that the articles someone submits for guest blogging are carefully crafted and well-researched, guest blogging is the go-to source for many businesses with limited budgets and “solopreneurs” who cannot afford the marketing campaigns of multinational brands.

Quality Predominates

As with every trend, while many people have jumped on this bandwagon, only a few do it correctly. Guest blogging has its own set of principles and those who overlook them generally will not be getting much out of it. Guest blogging rests on the idea of authoritative individuals offering quality knowledge.

Practices where guest blogging is done under “black hat” circumstances will soon be exposed and penalized. So if guest blogging can be said to run the risk of ending, that only applies to those sites not doing it the way it’s meant to be.

It is even expected that Google will soon roll out a guest post penalty update for poor or “spammy” guest blogging, so again this shows how guest blogging will go back to what it ought to be.

Guest Blogging nurtures progress and innovation

Guest blogging is a non-intimidating way of getting to know the practices other companies or professionals follow, because it connects writers with new contacts they can benefit from and even introduces individuals to hard-to-reach communities and influencers that can offer new opportunities for career and innovation ideas.

Sales and User Engagement

Guest blogging was created out of a need to increase awareness on a company or service and ultimately to improve lead generation and sales by boosting overall page ranking for the blog post contributor.

This is still the case; guest blogging improves SEO and traffic in proven and irrefutable ways, so to proclaim it dead is to overlook its centrality in SEO practices and brand awareness campaigns.

Used correctly, guest blogging can stay a part of the online business future.

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“The Cloud” is more than a buzzword. Companies already taking advantage of its capacities are substantially benefiting from this technology, not least through a significant reduction in costs. By using this method, they can achieve global availability of their resources and technology and are able to scale up their business at any time and at a moment’s notice.

Companies – and especially start-ups – can use cloud computing technology to create a solid infrastructure upon which to center their business growth.

Cost-effective

By investing in cloud computing, a company immediately saves thousands of dollars that would be spent on buying costly hardware and other company-owned infrastructure.

With a substantial amount of money saved, a company can invest in other state-of-the-art technology and staff to ensure sustainable and steady success.

Seamless Performance

Businesses using the Cloud don’t need to face the usual headaches of repairs, services, and IT support. Since everything is handled remotely by the cloud company, the business doesn’t directly tackle any technical issues. The staff’s energy and focus is on the core matters of a business.

What’s more, the Cloud allows for easy and efficient sharing between colleagues. Staff can continue working at the most convenient hours, working from anywhere in the world. This techology promotes collaboration in ways not previously imagined.

In addition, cloud computing means having a much lower risk of data loss, since everything is routinely backed up.

Accessibility and Scalability

One of the most groundbreaking solutions Cloud computing offers is that of instant accessibility. Think of a limited-budget startup. Having traditional infrastructure and IT professionals on site is not only costly but also imposes an inflexible structure. Cloud computing makes outsourcing and remote work easier and efficient, while resource-sharing means that the company becomes more likely to boost growth and sales.

The Cloud is a new technology that has already had a huge impact on how businesses operate and grow. Although it is growing rapidly, in many was it is a technology that is still in its infancy. As it gets more sophisticated, it’s expected that more busineses of various sizes, budgets and orientations will adopt cloud computing. Innovation, growth and collaboration will be driven forward, and companies will be poised to take advantage of the next advancement in technology.

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Going to sleep at the same time every night helps stabilize a child’s circadian rhythms. These are the dark/light-night/day patterns that develop over time, and this development is particularly important when a child is very young. Like any other pattern learned in the early years, it’s something that will stay with kids over time. As tests done on children at age 5 showed, the importance of regular sleep patterns is crucial during this first period of intense learning, when most children are focused on learning to read, write, and spell correctly.

Routines also help kids get comfortable and promote independence. It might seem odd to say that a schedule helps a child take control over their own life, but it’s true. If you’ve established that homework and revision is scheduled between 5pm and 6pm every evening, your child can learn to take the initiative and follow the schedule by themselves. This promotes good study habits as well as a sense of responsibility.

To help your child become a better learner and a better speller, make sure that they’ve got a supportive routine that includes enough time to review their lessons, and enough time to get the sleep they need to develop healthy, active brains.

You can read more about the study here.

A preliminary study done by Prof. Paul Montgomery and Dr. Alex Richardson at the Centre for Evidence Based Intervention at the University of Oxford, UK has made the connection between learning (specifically reading skills) and levels of DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid found primarily in seafood. According to the study results published last year, children who started out with low rankings in reading and spelling skills showed significant improvement in both learning and concentration ability after receiving supplements of DHA for 16 weeks. In addition, since these omega-3 fatty acids help in lowering the risk of diabetes and heart disease, making sure kids get enough in their diet will also improve their physical health as adults, not only their intellectual health.

The study focused on fish-based DHA, particularly from salmon. However, other significant sources of DHA are also available, such as flax seeds, walnuts, soybeans, grass-fed beef, and other seafood like sardines and halibut. A handful of walnuts in a child’s breakfast cereal and regular meals containing some sort of fish or tofu as protein will go a long way towards improving that child’s progress through school, the study concluded.

Further study is being done currently with a larger group of students, and families who live in the UK may be able to participate in the study. For more information on the ongoing study, and nutrition tips for children, go to the DHA Oxford Learning and Behaviour (DOLAB) site.

Take a look at some of the words that knocked contestants out of the most recent Scripps National Spelling Bee (for the full list, click here). Can you pronounce, spell, and define these words?

cynosure
pergameneous
diplodocus
nubuck
witloof
pekoe
douane
prerogative
jicama
totipotency

Contestants in the Scripps Spelling Bee have been winning with words as well, ever since the competitions started in 1925. Here are some of the words that helped early champions win the match. How many of them can you define, pronounce, and spell correctly?

asceticism
chlorophyll
autochthonous
kamikaze
deification
vignette
canonical
meticulosity
gladiolus
appoggiatura

If you’d like to get involved in the 2014 Scripps Spelling Bee then you need to make sure that your school (or your child’s school) is registered before October 15th. You can get more information on enrollment, registration, and rules for the competition at the official Scripps site.

When Nathaniel Dancy’s father got sick and had to pull the car over, he wasn’t even able to call for help. It was up to the 5-year-old boy to rescue his dad, and he did that by calling home and helping his grandmother identify where the car was, using the words on the signs and buildings he saw nearby. Although he couldn’t say the word “furniture” that he saw on a storefront, he was able to spell the word out for his grandmother. Once the boy mentioned that the car had just come through a tunnel, his grandmother was able to figure out the car’s location and call emergency services to rescue the boy and his father.

Teaching children to spell at an early age can help them cope in situations like this, and the abilities they gain from an improved vocabulary and better reading skills will definitely give them an advantage as they get older. Use car trips or family walks to look for words on walls and billboards, and ask your child to spell the words out. If they already know the word, this will reinforce their ability to spell it correctly. If the word is new, it’s a great opportunity to add to their vocabulary as well as their spelling skills. Helping children develop the habit of good spelling will help them succeed in any situation.

In fact, as John McWhorter, professor of linguistics at Columbia University, said in a recent talk on the subject, being able to switch between standard English and its more abbreviated form is almost like being bilingual. As many research studies have found, when children are bilingual, they have better overall mental skills. When you look at it in this light, it’s actually a good thing that children – and adults – are using this second “language” to communicate. As McWhorter says, in his experience as a professor, students aren’t handing in test papers filled with words like l8r or 4get or 2day, even though they might be using those abbreviated spellings in the text messages they’re sending out right before they take those tests. This flexibility in language use shows that they’ve got flexible and agile brains, something that will help them academically in any field, not just English.

In addition, he points out, abbreviations and slang have always been part of language, English included. Some words like sonar and AWOL started out as simple acronyms, but are now recognized as standard English words. It’s impossible to say what text speak terms might make it into the OED in the future, but McWhorter and other linguists are now saying that we should look at texting as part of the ongoing evolution of the English language, and not as an aberration that is destroying spelling and vocabulary skills.

You can hear Professor McWhorter’s TED talk on text speak here.

Cross-posted on The Vocabulary Builder’s Blog.

Why will learning to touch type help you become a better speller? It’s because you’re training your fingers to automatically go to the right keys when you see or hear a word that you need to type. When you focus your mind on making the mental connection between the letter and the key, you’re moving that information and that connection into your permanent long-term memory, and that creates an indelible link in your mind. That link will improve your ability to remember how to spell a word, because you’re adding “muscle memory” to the mix. When you’re a touch typist, simply typing a word out once, correctly, will make that spelling automatic in the future. Your fingers, as well as your brain, will remember how the word is spelled.

This connection works in the other direction, too. When you’re a good speller, you’ve already got an excellent start on improving your typing skills, because you won’t have to consciously think about how a word is spelled before you type it. You’ll see the word, and your brain will be free to signal the proper fingers to hit the correct letter sequence, without having to stop and consciously think about the spelling.

So how do you use your spelling skills to improve your typing speed and accuracy? Use them in combination with Ultimate Typing, the latest product from eReflect. If you’re already benefiting from the advanced video and interactive computer-based training in Ultimate Spelling, you’ll immediately recognize the advantages you can get from using Ultimate Typing. You’ll find the same focused, effective, and personalized lesson plans and exercises in Ultimate Typing, with the same top-rated customer support and a money-back guarantee.

To find out how you can learn to type two and even three times faster than you do now, click here to learn more about Ultimate Typing and what it can do to help!

One mistake some business web developers make is to assume that the “text speak” and abbreviations used on Twitter and Facebook are also suitable for a virtual storefront. However, since there are so many spam and phishing scams trying to separate people from their money – and because one of the quickest ways to identify a spam message is the presence of multiple spelling errors – if a website for a business doesn’t look professional, the customers won’t trust it.

As a business owner, you need to make sure that you check every aspect of your website and your marketing materials before they become public. Make sure the people you hire to create your site have the spelling skills you want as well as the web design skills you need.