Posted in Child care, Family engagement, Infants and toddlers, Quotes, tagged #PaidLeaveForAll, #PassPaidLeave on May 5, 2023| Leave a Comment »
“Welcome to the world, baby. Your parents have to return to work just days after you were born thanks to America’s lack of paid leave. Which means you’re on your own, baby!
“The average mommy or daddy loses $4,600 in just six weeks without paid leave, and you cost even more!”
— “Get your sh$t together baby,” Glamour
Posted in Boston, Family engagement, Infants and toddlers, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, Strategies for Children, tagged #AdvocacyNetwork on March 16, 2023| Leave a Comment »
The second cohort of Strategies for Children’s Advocacy Network is underway, and we’re excited to share the stories of this year’s participants.
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MyHanh Barrette
MyHanh Barrette moved from Vietnam to the United States when she was 11 years old, and her path to advocacy started with figuring out her own strengths and then helping to elevate the strengths of the families she works with.
One tool she uses in her work is love.
“If I don’t love my community, if I don’t love my country, then I won’t want to change anything,” she says. “If I don’t love an organization, if I don’t love my school, I won’t want to improve them.”
Barrette’s professional story began years ago with a practical question.
“My Mom and Stepfather said, Okay, are you going to be a doctor, a pharmacist, an engineer, or a lawyer?”
Barrette made a practical choice and graduated from the University of California, Irvine, with a computer science degree – which she never used in her work. Instead, she became a court-certified interpreter, helping families who spoke Vietnamese access the legal system.
“Language was used as a commodity, as part of the power dynamic: You don’t have access to language and I do, so I’m going to assume that because you don’t speak English, you’re ‘less than’ in every other aspect,” Barrette says.
“As an interpreter, I was there to remove the language barrier. When I did that, I saw other barriers that these families faced. But even with these barriers, families were thriving in their own ways. They were facing so much, but they were resourceful, and they were strength-based. I learned so much from them, and I came to see myself as a facilitator, as someone who empowers families.”
In her spare time, Barrette helped lead a co-ed Scout troop, which built on her love of children. She went on to raise her own children, and as they grew, she thought she might want to be a teacher. A trip to the library changed that. A career coach, who was volunteering at the library, listened to Barrette and said, You don’t want to be a teacher. You want to be a social worker.
(more…)Posted in Developmentally appropriate practice, Infants and toddlers, Language development, Quotes, Research, tagged #earlyed, #ece, #InfantsAndToddlers on February 24, 2023| Leave a Comment »
“During a recent BabyTalks webinar Beth Zack, PhD and Marley Jarvis, PhD shared research findings on infants’ and toddlers’ inherent capacity to learn multiple languages and identified strategies that educators and adults can use to support DLLs’ [dual language learners’] development. Through the course of the webinar, Zack and Jarvis also addressed several misconceptions about language learning in the first three years of life.
“Misconception 1: The brain cannot accommodate learning more than one language in the early years.
“Reality: Infant and toddler brains are more sophisticated than adults give them credit for and there is no better time to solidify bilingualism. As Zack and Jarvis shared, language development starts before a child is even born as babies begin to hear their parents’ voices in the womb during the third trimester. Because of this, babies can actually identify their parents’ home language as soon as they are born, and what is more, they are born being able to distinguish between the different sounds of all languages. Additionally, research has shown that babies can recognize a “foreign language,” that is, a language that differs from the predominant language used in their environment. They are also more interested in sounds from foreign languages because they are less familiar with them.”
— “Dual Language Learning Among Infants and Toddlers: Addressing Misconceptions About Babies’ Brains,” a blog post by Leslie Villegas and Nicole Hsu, New America, February 8, 2023
Posted in Child care, Federal, Infants and toddlers, National, Quotes, tagged #SolveChildCare on January 13, 2023| 1 Comment »
“Last week, while history was being made on the floor of the House of Representatives, a (mostly) quieter, but no less historic event was happening in the Democratic cloak room.
“Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) brought his 4-month-old baby to work. In between votes, he changed diapers on the Democratic cloak room floor and bottle-fed his child. And Gomez wasn’t the only one on daddy duty in the House. Other parents — including Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) — brought their children to work as well. Yes, it was adorable and brightened up an otherwise dour C-SPAN feed. But the tweets about bringing babies to work, swapping parenting tips and taking breaks to feed and change also highlight a problem that is no stranger to the vast majority of this country’s parents.
“Child care is out of reach for many families in America. For most, it is too expensive and too hard to access. Parents, early learning providers and program administrators are overwhelmed, overburdened and under-resourced — and everyone is feeling the impact. Even our members of Congress.”
— “America 2023: When even members of Congress don’t have child care,” by Michelle McCready, The Hill, January 9, 2023
Posted in Developmentally appropriate practice, Early educators, Facilities, Head Start, Infants and toddlers, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, National, Play, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, tagged #OutdoorLearningEnvironment, #OutdoorPlay on November 17, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Playing outside is a source of joy for children — and an opportunity for early educators to teach amazing lessons.
But many early childhood programs don’t have the information and resources they need to build engaging outdoor play spaces.
A policy brief from New America — Rethinking Outdoor Space for High-Quality Early Learning –addresses this by sharing the many options for creating an engaging “outdoor learning environment” or OLE.
The brief starts with a story about butterflies:
“Tiny monarch caterpillars arrived at the school, not floating through the air, but with the thud of a package on concrete.
“Our postal carrier had no idea how many lessons were going to emerge from that box for the prekindergartners at our public school in Washington, DC. First, we created a mesh net habitat and placed it in the tiny side yard of our concrete school building, which is just a few feet from a busy street known for nightlife, not nature. Within a day, the caterpillars doubled in size and the students watched, fascinated, commenting on the bite marks in the plants and listening closely for crunching.
“Over the next four weeks, children took turns watering the plants in the garden beds and tore off leaves to place in the mesh cage for the very hungry caterpillars.”
(more…)Posted in Achievement gap, Boston, Child care, College/career readiness, Cost and affordability, Developmentally appropriate practice, Infants and toddlers, K-12, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Pre-kindergarten, Strategies for Children, tagged #TheEarlyChildhoodAgenda, #ZeroTo24 on November 9, 2022| Leave a Comment »
One of the most important lessons you learn in a conversation with Mo Barbosa is that everything in youth development work is – or should be – connected.
“The better we do with zero to five,” Barbosa says of working with young children, “the better we’re going to do with the next 10 to 15 years of development.”
Barbosa is the senior director of Community Engagement at Health Resources in Action, where his goal as a trainer and facilitator is to professionalize the youth work field. He is the facilitator for convenings of The Early Childhood Agenda, which are hosted by Strategies for Children.
Barbosa’s sweeping focus is on the zero-to-24 age range – “or 24-ish” he says, “as we’re starting to understand the brain, we’re going a little bit later.”
But instead of a well-paved road that leads from birth to early adulthood, children and families in Massachusetts — and the rest of the country — face a fractured system.
“There has been this historic difference between where you get child care and how much of it is early education and how much of it is just a place to put your kid,” Barbosa says. “And that difference has dictated quality. It has dictated pay. And it has dictated opportunity.”
Barbosa recalls running an early childhood program in St. Louis where children who lived in local housing projects would not go to kindergarten because they could not pass the screening test. Instead, they would enter first grade as six-year-olds with no early childhood classroom experiences.
The solution?
(more…)Posted in Boston, Child care, Family child care, Infants and toddlers, Pre-kindergarten, Quotes, tagged #bospoli, #earlyed, #InvestInChildCare, #preK, #upk on July 8, 2022| Leave a Comment »
“Mayor Michelle Wu today announced a $20 million investment in early education through Boston’s Universal Pre-K (UPK) program, a partnership between BPS [Boston Public Schools] and the Office of Early Childhood. This investment builds on Mayor Wu’s commitment to universal, affordable, high-quality early education and care for all infants, toddlers, and children under five.”
“For the second year in a row, Boston UPK will increase the number of seats available to both 3- and 4-year-olds at community-based providers. Specifically, UPK will now offer up to 992 seats at community providers, with up to 627 seats for 4-year-olds and up to 365 seats for 3-year-olds.“
“ ‘The greatest investment we can make in our future is to support and center our young people,’ said Mayor Michelle Wu. ‘With this historic investment in early childhood education, we can kickstart an increase in high-quality Pre-K seats, bring family child care providers into the UPK network, and ensure all of our families have access to free and accessible early childcare and education.’ ”
— “Mayor Wu Announces $20 million investment to expand Boston’s universal pre-K program,” Boston Mayor’s Office, July 6, 2022
See also: “Boston to spend $20 million to expand pre-K program,” by Stephanie Ebbert and Adria Watson, The Boston Globe, July 6, 2022
Eye on Early Education is a blog of Strategies for Children, an organization that works to ensure that Massachusetts invests the resources needed for all children, from birth to age five, to access high-quality early education programs that prepare them for success in school and life. The blogger, Alyssa Haywoode, comes to Eye on Early Education after a career in journalism.
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