16-MONTH CALENDAR

4 Ways Families Can ENCOURAGE DESIRED BEHAVIOR at Home

For example, instead of just assigning chores, you could create a list and allow each family member to pick what they want to do. Link consequences to behavior.

Activities adapted from Helping Your Family Thrive by Meme Hieneman, Sarah Fefer, Shane Isley, & Missy Sieders, Brookes Publishing Co.

STORYTELLING AND PLAYING TOGETHER support communication, language, and the beginnings of literacy.

4 Tips for Structuring Inclusive Activities

1. Support participation. Use a variety of ways to help children join activities and sustain participation. Provide lots of interesting materials to entice children to the activity.
2. Children can be successful and feel trusted and safe when adults provide consistent expectations and responses.
3. Be consistent.

3 Ideas for Teaching Kids About Emotions

1. Choose a book about feelings to share with children. Be sure to point out all the actions or ways in which the characters behave when they're acting on their feelings.
2. Create a spinning wheel that features different feeling faces. Give each child a chance to spin. Ask them to identify the feeling and talk about an incident that made them feel that emotion.

4 Fun & Easy Language Boosters

1. Role Play. Kids love taking on new and different roles—and it's the perfect opportunity to help them expand their language skills. As you engage in everyday activities, join them in pretending to be favorite characters from storybooks or TV shows.
2. Let children handle, smell, and taste diverse foods with different flavors and textures. Chat about the colors, tastes, and textures, as well as where the foods come from and how they are harvested or prepared.
3. Practice the ABC song rhymes, and counting.

3 At-Home SPRING ACTIVITIES to Boost Your CHILD'S DEVELOPMENT

When April showers put the brakes on backyard play, ask if your children would like to build a special hideaway.
Have the kids build a tent by draping old sheets or blankets over furniture. Once they make their tent, they can play in it, eat lunch inside it, or read books together with a flashlight.

5 Steps to Cultivating Empathy

1. When did you feel the same way?
2. How does the other person feel? How would you feel in that situation?
3. Ask what the person is feeling.
4. Let them know that you care through your words and actions.

3 Skill-Building Summer Activities To Do with Young Children

1. Fill a small plastic pool with sand and bury seashells in the sand so that children can dig for them. Put on sunglasses and lay out on beach towels together (don't forget sunscreen!).
2. Bring the beach to your backyard or balcony.

5 Things Caregivers Can Do to Ease Young Children's Anxiety

1. Provide increased structure.
2. Prepare children for events they might find scary.
3. Select age-appropriate activities. Be sure that young children are engaged with activities that are appropriate for their developmental level and don't contain frightening imagery that can increase their anxiety.
4. More structure in the home environment (as well as child care and school) is likely to ease anxiety in any child.

3 Fun Indoor Activities that BOOST Young Children's Development

1. Make a simple concentration game with pairs of duplicate playing cards, or make your own cards out of duplicate pictures or magazine ads. Start with two or three pairs of cards. Turn them face down and mix them up. Let your child turn two cards over to see if they match. If they don't, turn the cards face down so they can try again.