For this recipe you’ll need:

• Vanilla and chocolate cupcakes
• Chocolate and vanilla frosting
• Vanilla wafer cookies
• Assorted candies for ears and bows
• Food coloring
• A pint sized glass
• A knife
• A spoon
• Spatula
• Scissors
• Gallon and sandwich sized bag

Eep the Mouse cupcake:

Add one teaspoon of blue food coloring to store-bought vanilla frosting and whisk, or add to homemade butter cream frosting.

Make a piping bag. Put one corner of a gallon sized plastic bag down in the bottom of your cup and fold the bag open over the edges. Scoop in your blue frosting until the bag is full. Lift your bag out, squeeze out the air and zip the bag shut.

Squeeze the frosting down to the bottom corner of the bag, and then snip off the end.

Starting from the edge of the cupcake, frost gently in a spiral motion until you reach the cupcake’s center.

To make the face, prepare two piping bags: one with black frosting, and one with white.

Using black frosting, draw little eyebrows, eyes, a nose and a mouth on your vanilla wafer cookie. Use white frosting to add a little sparkle to his eye.

Place your cookie in the center of your cupcake.

To make the ears, cut a chocolate circle in half and place them.

Trace over the chocolate with blue frosting, and finish with two blue candies.

Mother Goose Club’s Teddy Bear cupcake:

Use a chocolate cupcake.

Make a piping bag with chocolate frosting, frost starting at the edge and work your way to the center.

Place the cookie face and chocolate circle ears. Trace over the ears with chocolate frosting.

For Teddy’s special bow, add two blue candy-covered chocolates.

Baa Baa Sheep cupcake:

Use a vanilla cupcake. Add eight drops of red, and two drops of blue to vanilla frosting to get the right color. Make a piping bag.

Make a series of dots with pink frosting around the edge of the cupcake.

Using your spoon, smear each dot towards the center of the cupcake.

Make a second circle of dots, just like the first in the center.

Add the cookie face and two purple chocolate-covered candies for ears.

View on YouTube!

Even if babies can’t sit through an entire story, they can interact with books, and every interaction is good. Holding a book and turning its pages are great practice for reading someday. The more familiar babies are with books, the more likely they are to pick them up to read when they’re older.

Talking about the cover or the pictures inside shows kids that pictures are a part of the story. You don’t need to get through all the pages, pictures or even past the cover with really young kids. The important thing is to make book time fun.

View on YouTube!

If your child is learning her ABC’s, making the alphabet out of Play-Doh or modeling clay is a fun hands-on activity to help them practice!
For this activity you’ll need:

• Play-Doh
• Tools (for rolling, cutting, etc.)
• A smooth surface

Objects from around the house can make interesting textures or shapes. Get creative!

View on YouTube!

View on YouTube!

View on YouTube!

View on YouTube!

Organize, have fun and sort through the clutter!

Parenting requires multitasking! So why not kill two birds with one stone by having your children participate in a neat sorting game? You’ll get a hand with cleaning up and organizing while your little ones learn some basic and useful math skills!

Thinking about the attributes of different items builds early math and science skills. Identifying, comparing and ordering helps children develop the problem-solving skills necessary for higher level math operations such as addition and subtraction.

The key to this game is to get your kids thinking! Look at what items need to be sorted around the house, and ask them how the items are similar and different. You can suggest sorting by color or shape and see what other ideas they will come up with! Let their creativity run free and have fun with it.

We suggest sorting items like crayons, markers, and pom-poms. Stuffed animals can also be grouped by type of animal and size. Make sure to have some bins ready to put the like items together.

Tips:

1. Create a space designated for sorting. You can tape the floor area or draw lines on a big sheet of paper.
2. Another idea is to draw or make a Venn diagram by overlapping two hula hoops. Make sure to explain to the kids that some items can share the same attributes but also be different.
3. Setting a timer to sort all the items adds another level of excitement to the game.

We promise this fun and engaging activity will help your kids clean up the next mess while also flexing those early math skills!

How to Sing “The Wheels on the Bus”

Singing “The Wheels on the Bus” is great for kids because the repetitive words and structure help them memorize, and hand motions help them understand what words mean.

The wheels on the bus go round and round,
Round and round, round and round.
The wheels on the bus go round and round
All through the town.

The wheels on the bus go round and round,
Round and round, round and round.
The wheels on the bus go round and round
All through the town.

View on YouTube!

Your child is always learning and growing! Talking, playing games, creating art, singing along to a favorite nursery rhyme or watching parents and siblings are all valuable educational experiences. Taking five to ten minutes to watch a “Show Me How” video can empower parents, teachers and caregivers to create and make the most of these early learning experiences with accessible activities and games that are fun, challenging and rewarding on many levels.

Parent-Child Bonding

Babies and young children are naturally curious and inquisitive, so it’s never too early to start spending quality time as modeled in “Show Me How” videos. When you create opportunities for quality interactions and model healthy behavior, children will naturally follow your lead, learn social cues, develop empathy, problem-solving skills and more. Spending quality time with children also benefits adults as they get a chance to learn about, and from, the child’s perspective. It’s a mutually beneficial experience!

These “Show Me How” videos explore opportunities for valuable bonding experiences between children and adults:

Learn how rhymes can be used as a bonding and educational tool.
Learn why it’s important to talk to your baby.
Have fun singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” together.

Playtime

Don’t underestimate the power of playtime! When children play, they learn deeply about the world, develop imagination, creativity, teamwork, persistence and more. Through their successes and failures, children learn how to face difficult challenges and learn from their mistakes. When parents and teachers play with their children, they not only validate their children, but the importance of all of these experiences.

These “Show Me How” videos celebrate playtime, offering fun ideas the whole family can enjoy and learn from:

Boost letter recognition with this letter hunt game.
Boost imagination and social skills with pretend-play.
Boost vocabulary and observation skills playing “I Spy”.

Motor Skills

When children work on their ability to move and control their bodies, they are developing their motor skills. Crawling and standing develop gross motor skills because these activities engage larger muscle groups. Coloring and eating develop fine motor skills because they engage smaller muscles. We often take these skills for granted, but they’re closely linked to brain development in children!

These “Show Me How” videos offer fun physical activities that can help promote creativity and motor skill development:

Get crafty with a cardboard box.
Get creative and express yourself on the drums.
Get crafty with play dough.

We Want to Hear From You!

Have “Show Me How” videos helped foster learning and bonding in your family? Share your own tips and learning experiences with us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter!

Happy rhyming!

View on YouTube!

The more you talk to your kids, the easier it will be for them to learn how to read and write.
One easy way to start conversations is to ask a lot of questions. You can ask your kids questions any time, even during everyday moments like breakfast. Questions get kids thinking.
It doesn’t matter if your kids know the answers to the questions, or even answer them all.
It is OK to ask questions that are silly, scientific or questions you don’t know the answers to.
Try asking questions at home, in the car, or even in the grocery store.

View on YouTube!

Rhyming teaches a skill called phonemic awareness – that’s when kids can tell that words are made of sounds. It may seem simple, but it is very important for growing brains to practice phonemic awareness.

Playing with words and sounds help kids become better talkers and readers.

For this rhyming game, put different objects in a bag (you can use a container, a gift bag, paper bag or a pillow case).

Take turns pulling one object out at a time and see how many words you can find that rhyme with that one thing.

For example, if you take out a sock, your child could say “rock.”

Then you could say “clock,” and she might say “block.”

Keep taking turns for as long as you can. Best of all, you don’t have to use real words. The important thing is to play with sounds and have fun!

View on YouTube!