The Recipes of Dorothy Rich

The home-learning activities were designed to take up little time, be easy to do, and cost nothing. But the payoffs can be great, Rich asserts.

Take Mystery Word Box for ages 5 to 9. With a recipe-card box, index cards, and alphabet dividers, families can help their children learn new words. The youngsters pick five words that appeal to them, and the parent writes them on the cards. Then families discuss the words and save them to use another day. Rich herself did the exercises with her daughters.

"During the day, I would sometimes find my child on her bed, the contents of the mystery word box set out before her," Rich writes. "These were her very own words, and she would be playing with them, saying them aloud, caressing...