Brain Building Desserts

After dinner treats aren't always a bad thing!  These dessert ideas from Parenting.com are packed with the super foods your little genius needs!

Blueberry Blast
Line a muffin tin with cupcake liners and sprinkle granola in the bottom of each one.  Stir fresh or frozen blueberries into vanilla Greek yogurt and add honey to taste (for kids over 1).  Divide yogurt mixture evenly between liners.  Freeze for 3 hours , or until firm.

AB&J Cones
Swirl almond butter and raspberry jam into slightly softened strawberry ice cream.  Freeze for 30 minutes.  Scoop into an ice cream cone and sprinkle with dark chocolate chips, dried cranberries, and almond slivers.

Curiousity Questions from Positive Discipline

Helping children explore the consequences of their choices is much different from imposing consequences on them. Exploring invites the participation of children to think for themselves and figure things out for themselves, and to decide what is important to them and to decide what they want. The end result is focusing on solutions to the problem instead of consequences.

When the solutions come from the children, or are brainstormed together and the child chooses what will be most helpful, they learn that they can make a valuable contribution when using respectful decision-making skills. Children learn that mistakes aren’t horrible if you don’t beat yourself up about them and if you look at mistakes as ways to learn.

Positive Discipline recommends trying Curiosity Questions to get "into the minds" of our children and help them come up with solutions.  The following guidelines will help when using curiosity questions:

1. Don’t have an agenda. You aren’t getting into the child’s world if you have an agenda about how the child should answer these questions. That is why they are called curiosity questions.
2. Don’t ask questions if either of you are upset. Wait until you are both feeling calm.
3. Ask curiosity questions from your heart. Use your wisdom to show you how to get into the child’s world and show empathy and acceptance.

 The tool card below gives some great Curiosity Questions to some common problems.  For more ideas and suggestions about these parenting tool, call Building Healthy Families.

DIY Shoe Tying Board

Instructions

1. Cut out a square of cardboard and place your shoes down on it. Trace around the sole of the first shoe loosely (be careful not to get marker on the shoe). 
2. Trace around the sole of the second shoe.
3. Make a straight line on the cardboard for the toe design at the top of each shoe. Draw ten dots on each shoe outline for the lace holes.
4. Lay the cardboard on top of thick carpeting and punch out the lace holes with the screwdriver (NOTE: Adults only!). Spin the screwdriver around to form the holes.
5. Thread the shoelaces through the holes, then let your child learn to tie!

An added bonus is that your child can color the shoe-tying practice board too! Happy tying!

How to Improve Your Child's Handwriting

From worksheets to short essays, there are a lot of assignments for your kid to crank out -- and his teacher has to be able to read them. "Despite the increasing amount of technology in classrooms, a child's schoolwork still is mostly handwritten," says pediatric occupational therapist Jan Z. Olsen, founder of the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum program. "Teachers think good penmanship is crucial for communicating effectively." In fact, less than half of first- to third-grade teachers said that their students' handwriting was fast enough to keep up with classroom demands, found a Vanderbilt University poll.  Still, many kids with penmanship problems simply aren't getting enough practice. Bridge the gap at home with these clever ways to start off right.

Invisible Ink

Trace letters and simple words on your child's back and see if she can guess what you're writing. Then, swap and have her "write" a letter or word on you. Focus on the letters that are hardest for kids this age. Another Vanderbilt University study found that j, k, n, q, u, and z account for 48 percent of the mistakes when kids attempted to write the lowercase letters of the alphabet.

Picture This

Take out the markers or crayons and draw a single capital letter on a piece of unlined paper. Ask your child to make the chosen letter part of a bigger picture. She might turn a capital I into a butterfly or transform an O into an octopus. As she decorates the letter, she'll also be focusing on its shape.

Outsider Art

Using sidewalk chalk, have your child write a giant note that could be seen from outer space, then a tiny one for ants to read. (Or if your lawn looks like a winter wonderland, ask your glove-clad kid to write letters in the snow.)

Mail Tale

Buy a notebook and ask your child to keep a journal for a week. Send it to a relative to add comments on your child's week, record a week in her life, and mail it on to another loved one. The last person should mail it back to your child. She'll get reading practice too!

Tools of the Trade

Stock up on office supplies. Collect awesome writing tools (gel pens, scented markers, funny-shaped pencils) and all sorts of paper (lined sticky notes, doodle pads). Stow them in strategic spots around the house. She'll also be more psyched to scrawl if her pencil has a cute eraser.

Make it Homemade

From Grandparents to classmates, babysitters to sibling, everyone loves a Valentine!  While store bought cards are an easy option, the benefits to creating homemade Valentines far outweigh the convenience of buying.  Depending on the age of your child, having kids write their own messages can sharpen skills from letter identification to the creative process of writing a pun or rhyme.  Handmade items also allow your child to feel the satisfaction of creating a final product, while spending positive time with an adult!  You can even make finding creative ideas on the Internet part of the fun!  Here are a few to get you started!