Teaching your children literacy can be a lot simpler (and much more fun) than it sounds. Sometimes, all it takes to get through to your kids is a creative, entertaining way to do it, and this Alphabet Bean Craft/Game is a perfect example. This activity is great for helping kids visualize the letters of the alphabet and interact with them in a hands-on way. Here’s how it works!

Materials:

You don’t need too much for this craft. Everything you need can be found in your own home, or in your local supermarket. The materials are…

• Dry butter beans
• Muffin liners
• Small alphabet stickers (small enough to fit on a bean)
• Muffin tray (optional)

(Note: If you don’t want to use stickers, or if you don’t have any available, you can use a sharpie marker instead)

Step 1 – The Muffin Liners

After you’ve assembled all your materials for this activity, the first step is to take your muffin liners and let your kids stick one letter of the alphabet at the bottom of each one. Do this 26 times until you have at least one muffin liner for every letter.

Step 2 – The Butter Beans

Next, take the rest of your stickers and put a letter on each bean until you have one bean for each letter of the alphabet as shown in the picture above.

Step 3 – Have Fun!

Now, let the games begin! Let your kids match each lettered bean with the accompanying muffin liner to get them familiar with their ABC’s. When they’re done with that, there are a host of other activities they can do with these beans and muffin liners as well. For example, you can call out a word and let your kids find the right beans to spell it out. Or, you can put several different letters in a muffin liner and challenge them to come up with as many different words as they can using only those letters.

Using nothing but beans, muffin liners and stickers, you can come up with dozens of different ways to teach your kids about letters, spelling, words, and phonetics—all of which are skills they’ll need their entire lives. What Alphabet Bean ideas can you come up with? Let us know on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter using #mothergooseclub.

Rachel

Rachel is a Mother Goose Club producer and former teacher based in Las Vegas, Nevada. She enjoys hosting celebrations for all ages centered around crafts and activities. Rachel is excited to share her favorite things with you, and hopes to inspire your family to get creative!

I seriously love these broccoli cheddar egg bites. They’re so flavorful (I think it’s all about the lemon zest), the recipe is simple and it yields so many yummy bites – they’re great fresh out the oven for brunch (great for showers, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day) or reheated on weekday mornings for easy, no-mess energy when you’re on the go. I’ve been making these free form on a baking sheet, but you can do muffin tins too (see how in the recipe I originally found that started this whole love affair).

• 4 cups broccoli
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 1/2 cup bread, torn in small pieces
• 1/4 cup onion, grated
• 1/4 cup mayo
• 1 cup sharp shredded cheddar cheese
• 2 teaspoons lemon zest
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

Preheat your oven to 350, steam 4 cups of broccoli (I like to do this in my glass measuring cup in the microwave while I’m doing other things with the stove) and chop those florets up real good.

Beat your eggs and then add the torn bread, grated onion, cheese, mayo, lemon zest, salt, pepper and broccoli.

Line a large baking sheet with tin foil and coat with olive oil. Line heaping tablespoon bites on the sheet and bake at 350 for about 25 minutes until slightly golden on top. Remove the bites from the tin foil immediately.

When they’re warm, they’ll come up fairly easily – wait too long and the foil can stick to the bottom (which is one of the most delicious parts).

View on YouTube!

Oh do you know the Muffin Man,
The Muffin Man, the Muffin Man?
Oh do you know the Muffin Man
That lives on Drury Lane?

Oh yes I know the Muffin Man,
The Muffin Man, the Muffin Man.
Oh yes I know the Muffin Man
That lives on Drury Lane.

View on YouTube!