Blogging in Mamapedia Voices ("Encourage Your Kids to Explore, Discover, Experiment, and Be Creative," September 27, 2010) , Kristin Fitch emphasizes the importance of discovery. She recommends ways to keep the magic alive and suggests, among other things, making up adventures.

With some imaginative effort on your part, you, too, can pull wonder from the world around us and introduce it to your children. As you take your children on these journeys, you'll no do ubt enjoy the linguistic landscape yourself.

Now, at Think Tutoring, we must deal with the metaphorical "meat and potatoes" of knowledge. (Standardized tests, after all, deal with facts and not fantasy.) But at home, you can experiment with luscious, linguistic desserts or appetizing "amuse-bouches" to keep verbal wonder alive.

Take, for example, the delightful literary device known as meiosis (pronounced my-O-sis). It's a means of emphasizing one's point by understating it. "Michael Jordan's not a bad basketball player" is a sentence that makes its point (he's really a very good player) by under- rather than over-stating the truth.

As you go through the ordinary moments of daily living with your family, look for opportunities to reinforce their understanding of this special literary device. As you do, you will be developing your children's awareness of the world around them. ("That spelling test today was easy...if you write dictionaries for a living.") You will also be helping to develop an appreciation for the words that will appear on all kinds of tests--from language arts & spelling tests to SAT tests --the kind our tutors prepare students for.

After all, it was no less magical a writer than Hans Christian Andersen who maintained that "life itself is the most wondrous fairy tale of all." We can all help children discover the wonder of words by applying meiosis to life as we live it.