Congratulations to Ruth Long! You are the giveaway winner for the two grammar books. Huzzah! Dance on the table tops. Eat a bag of M&Ms and drink a gallon of milk. Live it up and be wild in celebration of your winning.

Please send your mailing address to nina (at) grandmaideas (dot) com.  I’ll pop the books in the mail so that you can get them in time for this upcoming school year.

Oh, and I hope you enjoy the hedge hog cartoon as much as I did . . .

Grandmothers are concerned about helping their grandchildren develop into well-rounded, well-balanced individuals.  So I had great interest in reviewing the app (which is a book) called The Adventures of 7 Wonderlicious Girls.

You can choose to have it read out loud in American/ Canadian English or in UK/Australian English. (I liked listening to the UK/Australian English.  It is such a fun accent!) Or, you can turn off the sound so your granddaughter can read it out loud to you. The drawings are sweet and delightful which make it enjoyable to read.

This book discusses qualities and skills that are important for girls to develop:

•    leadership
•    learning
•    community service
•    public speaking
•    problem solving
•    having a healthy body
•    staying calm when experiencing problems
•    exercising to keep your body healthy
•    eating healthy foods
•    protecting the environment
•    learning about science
•    creativity
•    curiosity
•    learning math
•    teamwork
•    courage to try new things
•    courage to stand up for what is right
•    trying new things even though it is scary
•    sharing, doing chores at home

The 7 Wonderlicious girls come in different sizes, shapes, and colors.  They each have their own special hobbies.  They accept their friends for who they are and their own unique characteristics.  They appreciate and support their differences.

I like what the website says:

“We believe that every child is placed on this earth to accomplish something remarkable, something that only he or she can do.

“Our tribe was created with one single purpose: to help reduce all threats to girlhood that crush our girls’ true nature and potential.

“We focus on overturning the gender stereotypes that make girls obsess with body image, keep girls from taking leadership roles, that limit girls’ interest in sciences and math, and cause them to feel self-aware when playing sports.”

Their goal is to empower girls with confidence and self-belief. That is an extremely important goal – one that grandparents should support with each of their granddaughters.

I highly recommend that grandmothers, who have iPads, get this app and share it with their granddaughters. It will help the granddaughter develop a healthy self-esteem – and grandmothers can strengthen their relationship with their granddaughters by discussing the topics presented in this app.

I know we all think our granddaughters are absolutely darling and adorable. I have 2 cutie pie granddaughters myself. But instead of focusing on the physical appearance of their body (how cute they look), it is important to verbally recognize things such as their leadership skills, their intellectual abilities – especially in mathematics and science – their curiosity, and their courage. Using this app when your granddaughters are small, and having them use it over and over will ingrain these attitudes into their thinking.  The attitudes will be an internal part of them and part of how they view themselves.

It would be nice if the Wonderlicious folks developed different apps that focused solely on one individual trait. That way, our granddaughters can learn more in-depth about one specific trait and ways to incorporate it into their lives.

This app is for children ages 3 to 7 years old.  It is available for the iPhone and the iPad is sold in the iTunes App Store for $4.99.

Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this application for review purposes.

A week ago, our friend’s son got married.  We went to the reception. In Canada. Drove 2206.6 miles. My arrivederci was way tired of sitting in the car by the time we got home. Whew!

While visiting them, I spied a couple of things that I wanted to share with you.

Isn’t this absolutely darling?!  These little cupcake fellas would certainly be a hit at a grandchild’s birthday party.  And, they would be easy to make.

Then, I saw these little pots. Such a simple craft and so cute. Easy for grandchildren to make (and this grandma, too).

When our youngest son was a senior in high school, he was enamored with hedgehogs.  He tried to convince us that Santa needed to bring him one for Christmas.  Or that he should get one for his birthday.

Being the loving, giving mother that I am, I of course said, “No.”

I knew that in a few months he would be graduating from high school.  He would head off to college to begin his adult life.  Would he be allowed to keep a hedgehog in his dorm room at college? No.  So who, then, would be left to take care of said hedgehog while he was away at school if perchance he got one? Mother, of course.

I certainly didn’t want a hedgehog for a pet.

While our son lived in the Netherlands, he came across a hedgehog that lived in a hedge.  (Funny thing.) Our son named the hedgehog Gunther. I was happy for our son. I was happy for Gunther. I was happy that Gunther lived in a hedge on the other side of the world from me.

So, when I recently saw a cartoon drawing in a book, I chortled. In fact, I flipped back to the joke several times because I enjoyed it so much. The book was explaining that sometimes words ending in “ly” are not adverbs.  It gave this sentence.  “Hedgehogs are prickly.”

Below the sentence was a sketch of a hedgehog standing on his hind legs, hands clenched into fists, and his quills sticking out.  Nearby was a dog with hedgehog quills stuck in his nose. Beneath the drawing it said, “Tell me about it.”

Okay, so maybe this isn’t as funny to you as it was to me. I guess you’d have to see the drawing to really appreciate it — and to have the hedgehog background that I do.

This drawing was one of many clever sketches in the book Write (Or is that “Right”?) Every Time: Cool Ways to Improve Your English by Lottie Stride.

This delightful, lighthearted book gives fun to read tips about spelling, punctuation, and grammar.  The tips are broken into small-sized chunks that make reading and comprehension easy – and not overwhelming. You won’t feel like your ninth grade English teacher is hitting you over the head with a huge grammar hammer. (Grammar hammer!  Clever wording, isn’t it? See me pat myself on the back.)

This would be an excellent reference book to have on the shelf for junior high and high school students as they write papers. I loved reading this book from front cover to back. However, this book is best used when you are stumped and need to quickly find an answer to a grammar question and then be on your merry writing way. The table of contents and the index at the end of the book make it easy to find the correct page that has the answer to your problem.

Write (Or is that “Right”?) Every Time: Cool Ways to Improve Your English is published by the Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., and costs $9.99 in the USA.  I would give this book 5 stars out of 5.

My Grammar and I . . . Or Should That Be Me?: How to Speak and Write It Right by Caroline Taggart and J. A. Wines is another good book to have on your reference library shelf.

It explains split infinitives, dangling modifiers, prefixes, suffixes, parts of speech, sentence structure, and punctuation.  Can’t remember when to use ‘that’ or ‘which’ and which one requires a comma? This book tells you.  Scared to death to use a semi-colon?  This book explains its use. Do possessive apostrophes leave you quaking in your boots? This book gives you understanding and peace of mind.

This book also has a section that gives you the collective nouns that describe different groups of animals.  So, if, in your casual conversation with the man on the street and you need the word for these groups of animals, you’ll be in the know.
•    a shrewdness of apes
•    a sloth of bears
•    a grist of bees
•    an intrusion of cockroaches (I’d say!)
•    a sedge of cranes
•    a murder of crows
•    a convocation of eagles
•    a tower of giraffes
•    a business of flies
•    a tribe of goats
•    a parliament of owls
•     a prickle of porcupines (and maybe hedgehogs, too?)
•    a drift of pigs
•    a shiver of sharks
•    a streak of tigers,
•    a knot of toads
•    a rafter of turkeys

This book is not as lighthearted as the other book. Also, it has more depth than the other one.  The reading level would be a bit too high for a junior high school student. Because it deals with confusing aspects of writing and grammar, you might have to read it over a couple of times to understand the concept it is explaining.

The one thing that I didn’t like about this book is that it didn’t have an index. I think that an index would be really helpful.  I would give this book 4 stars out of 5.

My Grammar and I . . . Or Should That Be Me?: How to Speak and Write It Right is published by the Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., and costs $9.99 in the USA.

Giveaway

So, this gramma (that would be me) is giving away copies of these two books. If you would like a copy for yourself, your children, a grandchild, or the lady who works at the Arctic Circle, please leave a comment and share an interesting experience you’ve had with the proper or improper use of words.  Or just say hi.  I’ll put your name in a hat to select the lucky winner on August 30.

Full disclosure: I received free copies of these books to read and review.