Are Stories My Nana Tells Suitable For My Two Children?
Are Your Stories Suitable For My Two Children, Who Are Aged Eight and Five?
Our premium stories are written for 7 to 12 year old children, so your eight year old is just fine.
For a five year old, you can start them on Snippets – which are free, on the website and they are a great way for kids to start to love to reading “read stories”. Some of our Mums read them aloud and I we will be converting them into PDFs as well, so they can be printed more easily.
I suggest you join up, get the first story for free and then you can see how it works. Join our Asking Nana group too, on Facebook. It will be fun to have you there.
Warmest regards
Lesley Dewar
What’s Your Use By Date?
According to Billy Connelly, Al Capone invented the “use by” date on milk bottles. It is reported that during the depression, Al donated $1 million for school kids to get milk. In fact we wrote earlier about starting to get our school milk. But because he hated the sour milk he had as a child, he insisted the milk bottles be stamped with a “use by” date.
There were one or two variations on the theme: it was Al’s big brother who did it; Al did it because one of his brothers died from drinking rotten milk or that it was actually organized by one of Al Capone’s key henchmen, Murray Humpreys (aka The Hump).
Under the Volstead Act, passed into law in October 1919, all intoxicating drinks with more than 0.05% alcohol were banned – beer as well as spirits and wine. Notwithstanding that, whisky was allowed for “medicinal purposes”only and smuggling in large amounts of whisky from Canada became common. Al Capone persuaded the Chicago officials of the day to allow him to manufacturer “non-alcoholic” beer, [Read more...]
Should You Be Your Grandchildren’s Friend On Facebook?
This is an interesting question and it will get a lot of different answers, depending on family relationships and locations.
There are a lot of positives of being a Facebook Friend with your Grandchildren
It helps you keep in touch, especially if they live far away from you: interstate, overseas or in the country. It is amazing how far just a little “Like” click on one of their posts will go, in letting them know you are thinking of them.
Rather than being a way of spying on them, it’s an unobtrusive way of reaching out [Read more...]
Red Helicopter Heroes Rescue Black Cockatoos
MEDIA RELEASE
June 07, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Red Helicopter Flies To Rescue Black Cockatoos
An Australian-first website for families with kids has launched a major project to raise funds of $40,000 in support of the Perth based Kaarakin Black Cockatoo Rescue Centre and to help spread the story of Carnaby’s Cockatoos to children and teachers through 2,000 schools
- at Stories My Nana Tells
The site is the ultimate resource for parents who want to share unique and engaging stories with their children, encourage them to read and help overcome the anxiety of separation.
Children’s author and creator of the website, Lesley Dewar, said the recent launch of the film “On A Wing And A Prayer” had created a highly positive opportunity for parents, schools and P&C groups to join together and use the film for [Read more...]
Unveiling Our New Look – With A Sleek, Faster Red Helicopter!
It’s a very exciting time for Stories My Nana Tells – as our new livery is being released to our fans and subscribers. With a major review of our website well under way, we thought you would like a preview of how things are progressing, up to date. A new business card introduces our sleek, faster red helicopter and our website.
Introducing our business!
On the reverse side, we give a brief story of what we do and why and invite you to become a subscriber. [Read more...]
Welcome To Fans Of GTi Racing Girls
Welcome to Fans of GTi Racing Girls!
Stories My Nana Tells is proud to be a continuing sponsor of GTi Racing Girls team and to share the excitement of Targa racing with them.
What Do We Do?
We entertain, engage and educate children, through storytelling!
That is us, in a nutshell of eight words! But we do a great deal more than entertain, engage and educate children, through storytelling. We are not racing car drivers – but we are close!
As the writer of all the Stories My Nana Tells, I know quite a bit about cars and racing. One of my career highlights was becoming the first woman in Australia to sell cars! My name is Lesley Dewar and I spent about ten years in the car industry in Western Australia – in a variety of jobs. There is still a bit of petrol in the blood and running around the Kwinana Motorplex at 200kmh in the GTi Evo was great fun. One of my sons is an XU-1 expert these days, too and loves his cars!
Keeping the conversation going with your kids …
Whether you are away and calling home, or catching up at the end of a busy working day, kids are not the easiest of people [Read more...]
One Cup Of Top Of Milk
When we were young, the milk lady used to bring the milk around on her horse and cart. Her name was Maria, I think. She was Italian and, to my mind at the time, all Italian ladies were called Maria.
On the cart were huge silver steel cans and Maria would ladle the milk directly from them into our billy can, complete with its own lid. She came every day and I never thought about how many cows she might have had, or where they were housed. We lived in Big Bell, a gold mining town inland in Western Australia. It was hot. The earth was red and dusty. The milk was always creamy and white – and we never considered how Maria might tend her cows in that climate.
My mother cooked on a wood stove, cream and green with a Kookaburra on the door of the oven, and on the side hob she would bring the milk to a very gentle heat to scald it. We did not have a refrigerator. After an hour or so, the cream [Read more...]
What Kind Of Grandparents Do You Have In Your Family?
Nana and Pop Beaton – Grandparents on my mother’s side.
Family life is a bit different now to what it was when I was growing up. People are living longer; families are often “blended” families – having been through changes due to death, divorce or separation of the children’s parents, and families are often spread across the country or even the world. This can make it harder for Grandparents to provide the traditional role of days past.
If both parents are working, often Grandparents are needed to help with primary childcare or the support of a child who has special needs. With the rise of the Fly In Fly Out (FIFO) workforce, Grandparents can be invaluable in supporting the individual parent at home.
The African proverb is that “it takes a village to raise a child.” So, the [Read more...]
Interview With Ben (age 10) About Saving Forests
Today, we had an interview with Ben, aged 10, a school boy in New South Wales who is doing a project on rain forests and the need for conservation. Ben sent me his questions by email and we hooked up with Skype, so he could record the interview.
I would like to share his questions and my answers with you – along with some of the photographs I sent to him by email for his project. The questions were all set by Ben and I simply answered them as I saw fit. His mother was present during the interview and was very pleased with the information Ben received.
1) How can we best preserve our rainforests?
It is very important that we understand the depth of their bio-diversity and that habitat is not just trees. Many people overlook little things about habitat: it is the fallen leaf litter and the decaying logs in which the lizards and the beetles live, as much as the beautiful butterflies in the tree tops.
I have been to Cairns in Northern Queensland and to Sabah in Borneo, to visit rainforests and to try and understand how we can ignore their value as part of our environmental health. [Read more...]
Where Have All My Spiders Gone?
After a short visit to the US, (to attend a financial planning conference) I flew to Canada to visit my two sons and the young ladies who became their wives. By then, all four of them had temporarily stopped roaming around the world and were living in Toronto. In the early hours of an 1994 Easter holiday morning, while a snowy blizzard howled outside, those words spilled easily from my heart and soul to write a poem and a story for my second son.
Pointed, painted Christmas stars,
flags of white marking off their boundaries.
Red-legged bellies span my early morning walk
with webs to catch my steaming breath. [Read more...]