Parenting Skills

Why, Forbrain® Headphones are a worthwhile investment

How we we perceive, assimilate, analyse and adjust to new information through sound is a natural process which relies on the listener being able to discriminate between sounds, patterns of sound in language and integration of rhythm – but for some children, the process is more difficult, not because they have hearing issues but their brains struggle to decipher and make sense of sounds for…
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Books

Memoir Writing: a literary journey into human resilience

By Francesca Lombardo – I was 25 years old when I asked myself questions such as “why can’t she see me?”, “why can’t she hear me?”, “who is she?”, “who was she really when she was a child just like me?”. The person I wanted to ask all these questions was my mother. A mystery to me as a child, as a teen and as young women that I longed…
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Books

Book review: The Good Little Devil and Other Tales by Pierre Gripari

The Good Little Devil and Other Tales by Pierre Gripari is a French children’s classic book that is recently being published in the UK for the first time. It is a collection of absurd and improbable modern fairy tales for good little devils everywhere! It was first published in France in 1967 and has sold over 1.5 million copies worldwide and translated into 27 different languages…
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Books

To read or not to read – that is the question?

With the end of the summer holidays and beginning of another school year, many students will be getting to grips with their new reading lists. However a new survey from Opinium Research suggests that for UK adults, regular reading often ends when school does. To read or not to read, that is the question? We want to hear your opinion on this London Mums. How many books do you manage to read in your…
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Get Creative

Exclusive fairy tale: Four cheeky monkeys and the big snake by Giovanna Bindi

Here is another great story by our in-house artist Giovanna Bindi, a true inspiration for London Mums & kids. Come & meet her at our art club Mondays in Putney. In the deep forest lived four monkeys, mum, dad, boy and girl. All the family liked jumping up and down the trees and play together. One day the boy and the girl said to their mum and dad: ‘We would like to go around…
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Books

Top First Children's Books

Despite loving the technology and the new ways of reading books via tablets, we still love reading stories to our kids by turning pages. There’s no question about it. Here is London Mums’ selection of top first children’s books for 2013. My First Touch and Trace: First ABC Great interactive first ABC text for little people that enables toddlers to use fingers to follow the…
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Books

Books to read with the kids over Easter

Celebrate Easter with the kids with some great new books. Duck Says Don’t Really funny but also educational story for young leaders in the making, a good lesson to be learnt! Goose has gone away and left Duck with the job of looking after her beautiful pond. Duck promises to take good care of it but he soon gets annoyed by the splashing, swimming, racing, fishing, jumping and diving going on…
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Competitions

Win 1 of 15 'Alphablocks - Phonics First Steps Volume 1' DVDs

Enter the magical world of reading with the hit CBeebies show, Alphablocks. Learn to read with the Alphablocks Phonics First Steps Volume 1 DVD released on 25th February 2013. The Alphablocks are 26 living letters who fall out of the sky and discover that if they hold hands and make a word, it magically comes to life! Based on best-practice phonics, your child will laugh and learn with the…
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Schooling

Early readers should be taught meaning, not sound

Children would find it much easier to learn to read and write if they were first taught how the English language works and what words mean, rather than trying to sound out words. According to new research, English is so complex that relying on phonics – the common practice of teaching children to read by sounding out words – makes learning English much more difficult than it needs to be. Dr…
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BooksCultur-Italy Ezine

Becoming bilingual: great starter books

Icklelingo has created a series of books that are ideal starter kits for all those kids who live in multilingual environments as well as the bilingual ones. We loved 100 Words / 100 Parole (Italian – English). My 6 year old son was born in London and he speaks English at school but at home we speak Italian. He has been raised bilingual and the biggest challenge for me as a parent is to…
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