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Listen up parents – audiobooks aren’t just a great way to entertain the kids on long journeys; research also shows they’re brilliant in improving your child’s reading skills and a great way to get reluctant readers more immersed in stories. In her article ‘Listen and learn: why audiobooks are great for your child’, Lucy Dimbylow talks to Irene Picton of the National Literacy Trust about the benefits of children’s audiobooks. ‘Listening to a story can be valuable for all sorts of reasons,’ says Irene ‘one benefit of audiobooks is that children have the opportunity to hear speech patterns and rhythms that they might miss in...

The bigger the childhood library, the better adults perform in literacy, math, and accessing and processing information -- useful for any entrepreneur. Reading books can obviously make you a better, smarter small-business owner. But reading does other wonderful things as well.  Books can reduce stress; reading for just six minutes can reduce your stress levels by up to 68 percent. Books can slow cognitive aging; compared with nonreaders (people who read less than one book a year), readers experience a 32 percent lower rate of mental decline in their later years. Books can even change your brain, at least over the short term:...

Results of a new Gallup poll released this week may give us the sharpest look yet at how the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted American education and what may lie ahead. According to the poll, parents’ overall satisfaction with their child’s education dropped 10 percent over last year, while at the same time the number of parents saying they will choose homeschooling doubled in 2020 to 10 percent. Throughout the summer, parents have expressed their frustration with back-to-school plans, including disappointment over continued remote learning and strict social distancing requirements. Homeschooling registrations soared across the country, and many families began to...