Help Your Child to Succeed: The Essential Guide for Parents

Lisa Arsenault is a high-school English teacher who is involved in
several ministry campaigns to increase literacy.

Parents of children from preschool age up to the end of primary school
will find Help Your Child to Succeed a useful resource. The book
provides suggestions, tips, activities, and games designed to help
children discover, explore, and learn.

Recognizing that children need to feel safe in order to express
themselves as individuals, the book begins with tips for helping them
develop feelings of safety, a sense of identity, and an ability to
express feelings and cope with challenges. The next section deals with
learning through play, which involves being positive and supportive;
requires planning, goal-setting, and making connections based on
background knowledge; is dependent on hands-on experiential learning
through the senses; and uses review to help the child remember things.
Subsequent topics covered include how to help your child handle stress,
how to use the family home and yard as learning environments, and how to
use the community (libraries, museums, clubs, etc.), as well as family
and friends, to promote learning.

Each chapter begins with a number of questions that introduce the
topic, followed by a quiz and summary checklist. A handy primer for
teaching preschoolers the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic,
followed by a guide for preparing children for school, will be of use to
parents of very young children. Activities and games are clearly laid
out and useful websites are listed. The cartoon-style illustrations
reflect a multicultural reality and the text is gender-neutral.