Happy Mother's Day!

click to enlarge and see special offer for you, Mom!

Turn old sports shoes into places to Play

We love recycling and think it's the way to go!
Did you know that Nike has 300 locations where you can drop off your old, beat up sneakers? They will give them new life by grinding them up into surface material for basketball courts, tracks and playgrounds. You can find a map of drop-off locations for sneakers here.

Walk to school

Did you know that in 1973 60% of school age children walked to school?
In 2006 that percentage had declined to 13%.
What a dent we could make in childhood obesity (not to mention improving our environment) if we walked our children to school!

Read to your baby starting at birth

Thanks to research over the last decade, we now know a lot about how babies grow and develop their early language and literacy skills. Here are some of the facts:

• Babies begin to learn language from birth. Reading aloud exposes children to the sounds of human speech.
• By the age of two, children know between 300-500 words. Children who are spoken to and read to frequently have larger vocabularies and develop into better readers.
• Sharing books with your baby lays the foundation for learning to read.

Discovery Toys has some great board books for you to add to baby's first library: Baby Bear's Bedtime, Ladybug's Lesson and Rough and Tough Tractors and Diggers books. Visit your local library where you can find many more titles.