How can you help a child grow with Mister Rogers' Neighborhood activities? Click on a topic, or note the same tips at the bottom of activity pages throughout the site.
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Online Activities
Recipes
Water Play
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Show and Tell Activities
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Online Activities
Traffic Light
It is hard for children to develop control over their bodies. Playing games about "stop and go" help them practice control, so that they may be more likely to have self-control and be able to stop in other situations.
Build a Neighborhood
As children grow, they move from being family-centered to understanding there is a whole community around them. Creating neighborhoods in their artwork can help them realize that people live in all kinds of communities of neighbors and friends.
Picture Picture
Seeing the factory visits can help children understand that most things happen through a process- with a beginning, a middle, and an end. When they make something, they will know that everything takes time toaccomplish. Then they may not give up so easily when they're frustrated in the early stages.
A Neighborhood Story
Making up their own stories is one of the best ways for children to enjoy stories and become successful readers. Your child's own stories are especially important because they are about the things that your child thinks and feels.
How Do You Feel?
When we can talk about our feelings, they can become a lot less overwhelming, or upsetting, or scary. Just having a caring listener makes hard times more manageable.
Talking about feelings can be a challenge for young children. While you can encourage talking, you can also help them find other creative ways to express their feelings -through artwork or making up puppet stories, and other ways that you have found to be helpful in your family.
Peek a Boo
Why do so many children love "peek-a-boo?" Good-byes are hard for children. They are learning to trust that you will return. Playing peek-a-boo helps children practice seeing someone go away and come back...over and over again.
Mister Rogers' Story Corner
Here's a way to "read" a story to your child and have some interactive fun at the same time. The best part of all is that the message of the story and the activity is about "giving."
Show and Tell Activities
Shoe Box Harp
It's more than music you'll be making; you'll be encouraging an interest in sounds and science, helping your child develop listening skills, and most important of all, sharing some time together.
Milk Carton Haulers
When children make toys from throwaways around the house, they are actually recycling. One of the best gifts we can give children is the experience of growing up in a family where people use resources wisely. That's a gift that never wears out.
Making Parachutes
Children seem to have a fascination for anything that flies or floats in the air. "How do these things stay up?" "Why don't they fall like we do?" These parachutes won't stay up long, but you may find your child wanting to see their seemingly magical floating descents over and over again.
Rag Ball
Ball games can be hard for young children, especially at first. But if you make the task easier (like bringing the bag closer...and closer) and encourage practicing, children often find they get better and better. Besides that, when you encourage the use of ordinary household things for games, you're helping your child become inventive, creative and resourceful by finding new uses for things.
Coiled Pots
Many children like to get their hands into modeling dough. It's an acceptable way of getting "messy," especially if you help by setting limits (like keeping it on a cookie sheet or on a layer of newspapers on the table). Pounding on dough can even help on a day when your child is feeling angry.
Car and Masking Tape Roads
When you share an activity like moving a toy car carefully along a taped roadway, you're giving your child a fun way to practice staying "on the road." That's something your child needs for learning to use fingers carefully for writing. That kind of outer control can help your child develop inner self-control, too.
Nature Mobile
When you're out in nature, you have wonderful opportunities to encourage your child's curiosity and an interest in looking closely at things. Attitudes about respecting nature, like most other attitudes and values, are caught, not taught. When your child sees that you enjoy and marvel at things in nature, your child is more likely to grow into an adult who respects all living things.
Newspaper People
Drawing around your child's body is one way to let your child sense where his or her body begins and ends. That awareness is the first stage of developing of self-control. Children need to know their body boundaries before they can stop from hitting out at others. So besides giving your child a fun life-size doll, you're also giving your child a boost towards an important life skill.
Sorting Laundry
Play and learning go hand in hand, and giving your child these experiences doesn't take extra time or involve extra materials. It can happen naturally in everyday family life, especially when you make something fun out of a chore, like setting the table, putting away silverware, or helping to make the bed. As children take in information about the world, they are often fascinated by sorting and categorizing things.
With the laundry game, you can help your child understand that the same things are likely to get re-sorted differently for putting them away: while the pre-wash sorting may have been by color, the post-wash tends to be by size. That can help your child learn that things (and people) are alike in some ways and different in other ways. Just working at something "grown up" alongside you can make any such activity a treat for your child.
Crayon Window Hangings
Children can be wonderfully creative with crayons, markers, or paints -- when they are given the freedom to use those materials responsibly in whatever way they want, to make what they want. Sometimes unusual art activities like this one can spark and excite children's imaginations and creative expressions even further and in different ways. With a project like this, you can help your child be creative with hue and enjoy making something that's full of bright colors.
Softee
There are times in life when children need comfort -- maybe it's a sad or lonely or scary time. Sometimes they want to be close to a favorite adult or cuddle up with a favorite stuffed animal, like a "softee." Just knowing you helped make it can give a "softee" even more value. Sometimes a bit of comfort is all a child needs in order to refuel and renourish before feeling ready to move on.
Newspaper Tree
While this newspaper tree grows instantly, it seems to young children as if their own growing takes forever. Often it's only by helping them look back at where they have been, that they can see they are growing at all. You can help your child feel proud by talking about all the "inside growing" he or she has done. That kind of growing is about learning to wait, learning to keep on trying, being able to talk about their feelings and expressing their feelings in constructive ways. What important growing that is! Often the most important growing is the kind that takes the longest!
Drums
Drumming can help children find an outlet for their feelings. While we tell children, "It's okay to be angry, but it's not okay to hurt," we can also it give them other acceptable ways to express their anger, like beating on a drum. When we encourage children to drum to rhythms in a song or in their name, we're helping them develop careful listening so they can hear sound patterns. That's one way your child learns to hear sounds in words -- that's a skill your child needs for learning how to read and write.
Musical Bottles
What causes things to change? That's a basic question for learning about science. Through this activity, your child can see and hear that different levels of water change the pitch. It may even take some practice for your child to make a musical sound, so then you're encouraging persistence -- an important tool for school.
Dollhouse
With this activity, you'll be helping your child appreciate recycling by using imagination and creativity to make playthings from things you might otherwise throw away.
Make Your Own TV Show
Using a pretend tv set may encourage your child to have some creative fun with puppets and stories. The added benefit of this kind of "tv play" is that children may be better able to talk about the things they see on television. If your child has seen something scary on tv, this activity may help them turn it into their own story about "taming" the scary thing.
Bookmarks
Here's a craft idea that lets your child know books and reading are valued in your family. If the bookmark is a gift, encourage your child to think about decorating it with things that are important to the receiver. Since young children tend to be ego-centric, you're also helping them see things from other people's point of view when you suggest they think of what the receiver likes.
Trumpet
Find a new use for an empty paper towel tube, and you're encouraging recycling. Making a toy trumpet also lets your child put his or her unique creative mark on something -- as well as find a constructive way to express feelings.
Birdfeeder
Children know they need adults to give them a great deal of care in order to have food, shelter, daily needs met. How good it can be for children to be the caregivers and have the opportunity to care for others, like offering food for the birds. And how exciting it can be for children to watch the birds as they come to feed and to have a closeup opportunity to learn about some of the birds' habits.
Rocket Ship
Even young children can learn basic scientific concepts -- like wind makes the air move -- and that, in turn, can be an energy source to move an object. Children know best what they can see and experience first hand, so you're giving them a way to be involved with some physical principles of science.
Straw Necklace
This activity requires careful threading, so it takes controlled finger movements. That's the kind of control your child will need for being able to use a pencil for writing or a crayon for drawing You're also giving your child that good feeling of being able to control his or her hands and fingers -- something important for developing control at angry times so your child won't hit or hurt someone.
Matching Shoes
Matching games give children a way to practice careful looking. One of the early steps in learning to read is the ability to see similarities and differences in the letters of the alphabet. Preschoolers can also be fascinated with matching games because they're just learning about the world around them, and in order to make some sense of all there is, they work on classifying things into different categories.
Water Play
Wash Toys
Water play is such fun for children. It's soothing and doesn't put pressure on a child to "make something." It's a great activity for the outdoors, but it also works well indoors, using the sink or bathtub or a pan on the kitchen floor. You'll probably need to find a place for some of the toys to dry before returning them to the shelves.
Experiment with Water
Water play can be soothing. It feels good and it doesn't ask for a "product" to be made. Playing in water can also be the beginning of scientific discoveries. For example, children tend to think that big things sink and small things float. When they experiment, they can learn about different properties of objects. They also understand more about water and how it moves.
Wash Doll Clothes
Activities like this give your child an appreciation for people who design machines that help make our work easier. Your child can also feel proud of the work he or she does that makes the doll clothes come clean.
Wash Dolls
While your child is involved in this kind of play, you can remind him or her of the message in the Neighborhood song, "You can never go down the drain." Not even dolls can go down the bath drain -- only water and suds go down, never ever people!
Mix Colors
Young children are like little scientists, continually experimenting and trying new combinations of things. Here's a way to give them a first-hand experience with science where they can see the changes in colors right before their very eyes.
Wash the Car
One of the benefits your child gets in working alongside you in a big project like washing the car is being able to spend time with you. That in itself is treasured time. Your child can also see with his or her own eyes the value of work, as the car gets clean and shiny. And what a great opportunity you have to stretch your child's vocabulary by naming the different parts as you work on them -- the hood, the bumpers, the side mirrors, the trunk.
Squirt Bottles
It can take a lot of control for your child to spray the water carefully. You might want to point out how well your child is able to keep the squirts in the tub or the pan. In toilet training, children need to be able to control their own fluids, and they learn they really can do that, especially with encouragement from caring adults.
Pouring Water
Young children need our help for so many basic things, but they do like to do some things themselves. Some toddlers and preschoolers insist on pouring their own juice or milk. If you see that your child can do careful pouring in this playful activity, you could offer a small pitcher at mealtime. You might also find fewer power struggles at breakfast by putting some foods like cereal in a cabinet at your child's level.
Recipes
Graham Cracker Treats
Children learn so much when they are involved with making food. They learn about math when they measure and count. They experience scientific principles when they see how foods change at different temperatures or when they're mixed. They also learn about cooperation and can feel the joy and self-confidence that comes from doing something "grown-up."
Banana and Peanut Butter Sandwiches
Children are curious about the insides of things - especially when those things are hidden. When they peel a banana, they see that there's something very different on the inside. The peeling is a protection for the banana. What other foods do they know that have a peel?
Milkshake
Food and caring go hand in hand. From early on, a hungry infant becomes aware that a caring person brings the milk. So when you're making things with a child in the kitchen, you're giving double benefits of time with you and doing something that's connected with food and love.
Making Popsicles
If you pour the juice into a small pitcher, each child may be able to fill his or her own cup. An adaptation like a small pitcher helps children feel more independent and allows them to be more successful at careful pouring. With this activity, you're also giving children practice waiting because it takes a long while for the juice to freeze.
Applesauce
Working with your child in the kitchen can open the door to discussions about what's safe and what isn't. While some parts of cooking are for only grownups, other parts can be done by children. Being involved in making something good to eat can make that food even more enticing. Besides, your child can see firsthand that heat can make some things soft -- a basic principle of science.
Cookies
Making cookies takes a lot of work! As you read the recipe, you're showing your child the value of reading. As you measure, you're showing your child the value of understanding numbers and careful measuring. The other benefit of making cookies together is that your child learns to appreciate that most things are made by a "process" that involves steps and time. Then your child may not give up as easily on the first steps of other things he or she is working on.
Pancakes and Waffles
The ingredients for pancakes or waffles are easy to measure and easy to mix, so your child can help with much of the work of making the batter. Different people in your family might prefer different toppings -- syrup, jelly, or honey, or fruit. As the French say, "To each his own taste," and your child learns that people can have different preferences.
Strawberry Drink
What a fun way to eat fruit! And what a useful way for your child to use some pentup energy -- by mashing strawberries. You might also find that your child is more open to tasting something new when he or she has been involved in making that healthy snack.
Peanut Butter and Jelly Cookie
When children have to wait for things to bake and then to cool, they're developing patience, and that's something mighty important for their learning. What can your child do while you're waiting? Maybe your child can help you by drying the utensils and bowls that you used for mixing the batter or make up a story about cookies or look at pictures in a magazine or read a book. There's lot you can do while you're waiting!
Granola
There's a wonderful feeling about being able to give a gift of food. Food and love go hand in hand! Think about the early feeding times in infancy. Looking up at your face, holding on to your finger -- that goes along with the satisfaction of having milk to drink. So your love becomes connected to the feeding experience. No wonder there's something extra special about the feelings we have when we grow to be children and adults who can give something good to eat to someone else.
Noodles
This may be even more enticing to your child than most kitchen things -- because it seems like "playclay" fun. The mixtures are similar and so is the work of mixing and kneading and forming the dough into balls. And while your child may know pasta only from the dried form sold in stores, your child may not have realized noodles are easy to make -- and fun!
