What Kindergarten Teachers Know: Practical and Playful Ways for Parents to Help Children Listen, Learn, and Coope Rate at Home

This book is a must-read for anyone who uses an "attachment parenting" approach to raising children. Holewa and Rice beautifully outline child-centered methods of creating a loving, nurturing home environment. They focus on understanding rather than controlling behavior. They give significant attention to the idea of defining your parenting style and letting day-to-day specifics flow from that. Once I embraced this idea, the daily conflicts became much easier to handle. This book is a marvelous, readable, engaging tool for any parent!

If you're a first-time parent like me, you probably have days where you feel absolutely clueless. This book goes straight to the experts - the best kindergarten teachers around the country - and reveals their common-sense secrets on how to bring out the best in young children. And the ideas are communicated in clear, reader-friendly fashion by Holewa, a mom who happens to be a former AP reporter, and Rice, a kindergarten teacher who really knows her stuff. If you want to figure out how to get your child to be as cooperative at home as they are at school, do yourself a favor and read this book! From organizing their room to teaching them to be more self-reliant, it's all here. Don't reinvent the wheel. The work has been done for you by these great teachers who were willing to tell their secrets to Holewa and Rice. This book makes the toughest job of all - being a parent - a little easier.

As a full-time mom with a full-time job, I am always open for ways to bring order to our chaotic home. This book is chock-full of good ideas but my favorite is the use of simple songs. My 3 and 4-1/2-year olds respond almost immediately and I feel like the Pied Piper! The book also has helped me get inside their heads better. For example, letting them put their "art" project aside to finish later when it's time for dinner or errands really does make them feel like I value their work and they have some control. These are simple solutions that in many cases will make you say, "why didn't I think of that sooner?!?!"

I'm not much on parenting books, but this one has such a different approach it's hard to resist. My 5-year-old's kindergarten teacher is amazing in how she keeps the kids orderly and well-behaved. The tips on getting them to pick up after themselves, and how to stop typical annoying behavior are priceless. This is book is like a coaching session from Supernanny, without the public humiliation!

I never seem to have time for the parenting books I'm "supposed" to read, but this one went down easy. That's probably because Holewa offers creative activities at the same time as she respects each parent's autonomy. The author made me feel like a collaborator in the complicated process of child-rearing instead of like a child myself (as so many how-to books do). I loved it's practical approach (i.e. you can read chapters that are age and issue appropriate or read the whole thing from start to finish). But, most of all, I appreciated the fact that she showed us how her fun solutions could be tailored to our individual styles.