1. Involve your child in environmental "earth saving" projects, such as planting a tree in a nearby park or putting her in charge of recycling efforts at home.

2. Limit TV watching. When you child does watch a program, talk about it together afterward. Pose questions about the content of the show, whether the characters changed, and how your child would end the story if she could change it.

3. To increase your child's concentration and attention skills, work on a fifteen or twenty minute project together: assemble a small puzzle, color in a coloring book, or whip up a microwave snack. Focus on just the task at hand until finished.

4. Play "Concentration" to develop your child's visual memory skills. Shuffle a deck of cards and turn them all face down in rows on the table or floor. The first player turns over two cards, trying to make a match, then puts them back face down. The play proceeds until someone makes a match, which rewards that person with another turn. The player with the most matches at the end of the game wins.

5. Use colorful sticky notes to remind your child of chores, homework, and other tasks that need to be done.

6. Count out fifty dried beans (large size such as pinto or great northern) and with a felt-tip pen or marker, print a letter of the alphabet on each bean. Put these in a jar and ask your child to draw out a bean and say a word that begins with that letter. Then have him pick out three or four more beans and make up a sentence by thinking of a word for each.

7. Buy packets of seeds and let your child plant a vegetable or flower garden, learning science by growing things. Either in a fertile area of the yard or in a "barred garden" (half of a big wooden barrel filled with potting soil and fertilizer), she can grow potatoes, marigolds, or anything that thrives in your region. Don't forget to let her water and weed her garden, too.

8. Let your child clip coupons out of the Sunday newspaper and estimate how much money you'll save. When you go to the grocery store, let him find the discount items, give the coupons to the checker, and keep half of the savings.

9. When you have your next garage sale, let your child help you price items to be sold, act as your "banker", and serve customers.

10. Make sure your child has a nutritious breakfast before school. Avoid sugary foods because they can cause hyperactivity, restlessness, and lack of focus.

11. Make sure your child gets enough sleep, primarily on school nights and especially the night before a test. Lack of sleep leads to poor performance and anxiety.

12. Check the weather forecaster's accuracy. Watch the weather news each day and have your child draw her prediction on a calendar (picture codes for sunny, rainy, cloudy, etc.) Later, mark what the weather actually was. After one month, compute the percentage of correct predictions by dividing the total number of days by days right.

13. READ aloud a high-action story to your child and ask her to try to picture the characters and action in her mind's eye or "make a movie" in her head as you read along.