Earth Day is an international celebration designed to “increase awareness, responsibility and action toward a clean, health future for all living things.” Depending on the ages of your kids, you can find many activities to commemorate this.  For older kids, parks in the area have “Clean Up” day, where you pick up the litter leftover after the winter. Even little kids can plant seeds in an empty egg carton or paper cup. If you want, you can start the seeds by putting them on wet paper towels in a plastic bag and leave it on a sunny counter. In a day or so, roots and leaves will start to show up. Talk to the kids about what’s happening and then plant the seedling. You can also try to come up with special activities to reduce waste or energy use. Have fun!

Alfred Butts who was born on this day in 1899 invented Scrabble, the game that uses letter tiles to spell words. As soon as children learn to read and spell they can play an easy version of Scrabble.  For very beginning readers you can create your own simple game by making letter tiles from index cards for each letter that is used in the words the child knows. Be sure to make extra vowels (a, e, i, o, u) as they appear most frequently. Uses these letter cards together you can help strengthen the children’s reading and spelling skills while having fun.