News and Events

We invite our community to join The Family Place in a virtual celebration of the Week of the Young Child (WOYC), April 11-17. An annual celebration by The National Association for the Education of Young Children, the week highlights the needs of young children and recognizes the early care providers and caregivers who meet those needs.

Did you know that a child’s brain grows more between the ages of birth and 3 years old than it does across their entire lifespan? 80% of brain growth and development happens in those years!

During this time of uncertainty with COVID-19, we want to support our community to focus on relationships and family engagement. We’re all working together to encourage the future successes of our young children.

We will celebrate early learning all week by sharing virtual family activities here on our website and @FamilyPlaceVT on our Facebook Page. We will have daily readings of children’s books on our Facebook Page, and each day will have an activity on a specific theme.

Lunchtime Storytime!

Join us every day during our Virtual Celebration of the Week of the Young Child for a read-aloud of our favorite children’s books by members of The Family Place Board, Advisors, and Staff!

One of our goals for the year was to create a warm and cozy area in our toddler classroom where children could go to relax. We call this our “feelings place.” We are encouraging our parents to create such spaces in their homes, and Cathee is reading her story today from her own “feelings place.”

4/13 Music Monday:

• Celebrate Music Monday, the first day of the 2020 Week of the Young Child, and sing along with Erin! Erin Jenkins Smith, from the Upper Valley Music Center, teaches the Music Together program at The Family Place, which provides high quality music and movement to the young children, their parents and adult caregivers involved with our child care center and Families Learning Together (FLT) program. When children sing, dance, and listen to music, they develop their language and early literacy skills while being active and encouraging movement. Erin put together a video with a song that highlights the theme of each day. Hopefully you’ll get some fun ideas to keep singing and playing at home together all week long! Watch the video on YouTube.

4/14 Tasty Tuesday:

This fun, food-themed day is about more than just cheese and crackers. Cooking together connects math with literacy skills, science, and more. With the rise in childhood obesity, you can encourage healthy nutrition and fitness habits at home and in the classroom.

• Celebrate Tasty Tuesday, the second day of the 2020 Week of the Young Child, with a “Smoothie Movie” featuring Anya and Finn! Watch the video on our Facebook Page and learn how to make a healthy smoothie with your children! Anya, CIS Family Support Home Visitor, shares tips on how to cook with your kids and how it benefits their growth and development. Recipe ingredients include: banana, avocado, spinach, frozen mango, old-fashioned oats, and canned coconut milk, full-fat variety (or use plain whole milk yogurt).

• Did you know that cooking with young children benefits their growth and development? Here are a few of those benefits:

~ Scooping, pouring, stirring and chopping all help with fine motor development.
~ Cooking and baking allow children to explore with their senses.
~ Measuring helps build math skills.
~ Being involved in making a meal helps expand children’s palates, decreasing picky eating issues!
~ Cooking with parents increases a child’s confidence and self-esteem.

• A great activity for Tasty Tuesday is Edible Finger Painting! This is a great “messy play” activity for children of all ages. Messy play provides a sensory activity, which is very important for creativity, stress relief, and it helps to build nerve connections in the brain’s pathways. An inexpensive, safe, tasty, fun activity that can be done inside or outside. Click here to learn how to make pudding finger paint.

4/15 Work Together Wednesday:

When children build together they explore math and science concepts and develop their social and early literacy skills. Children can use any building material—from a fort of branches on the playground to a block city in the classroom, or a hideaway made from couch pillows at home.

• An Outdoor Adventure Hunt is a fun activity for your family to get outside and work together to find these objects in nature! Look for: something colorful, a pine cone, something smooth, two kinds of leaves, something bumpy, something pretty, something you think is a treasure, and a flower or petal.

Preschoolers learn through exploring their world, so a “scavenger” hunt is a great way to help direct some exploration play and make discoveries outside. Use the activity to notice and name objects, including their textures, colors, and shapes. Ask questions about how they are finding and feeling the objects. Did you know that teamwork develops young children’s social skills? Experiences also help build the connections in a young child’s brain and exploration play is a great way to do this! Click here for more scavenger hunt ideas.

• Young children LOVE to be helpers around the house, so another way to “work together” is to involve them in housework. It helps set a good example of how everyone in the family contributes to taking care of the home. With young children, it’s important to keep expectations appropriate, while encouraging growth and development. Families could work together on laundry tasks, helping to set the table for meals, sweeping or vacuuming (if you have a small handheld one), feeding pets, or taking out the trash/recycling together. The focus is more about engaging together than the amount of “help” provided, and early participation paves the way for learning how to care for one’s home. Click here for more resources and information about how to incorporate family chores in your life.

• Work Together Wednesday is a great time to talk about working together to keep kids safe! We are all experiencing higher amounts of stress and uncertainty at this time. Unfortunately, our youngest members of society are at a greater risk than ever for feeling the effects of this stress. April is Child Abuse Prevention month and we want everyone to be aware that with less “eyes on kids,” there is a greater risk for child abuse and neglect. Let’s all Work Together and check in on friends and neighbors at this time. A phone call or video chat (like Skype or Zoom) can keep people connected and even help lower stress levels. It’s also a great time to chat and check in with kids!

Here are some conversation starters when chatting with children, whether you’re a teacher, friend, neighbor, family member, etc.

~ What do you like most about staying at home? What do you like least? Why?
~What was the best part of your day? What was the hardest part of your day?
~ If you were stranded on a desert island, what would you need? Are those things in your house right now?
~ What did you have to eat for breakfast today? Yesterday?
~ Who do you talk to when you are worried or upset about something? Do you have a way to talk to that person now?

Remember, if you are concerned about a child’s safety, contact your local child protection agency, even though you may have limited information. We are all in this together and looking to help children and families get through this difficult time. If you suspect a child is being abused or neglected, call 1-800-649-5285 to report it — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

4/16 Artsy Thursday:

Think, problem solve, create! Children develop creativity, social skills and fine motor skills with open-ended art projects where they can make choices, use their imaginations, and create with their hands. On Artsy Thursday celebrate the joy and learning children experience when engaged in creative art making.

• Are you ready to get creative for Artsy Thursday? Painting with young children stimulates their brains and supports their creative development. Most children enjoy a good messy painting experience! Click here to view “Different Strokes: Painting with Natural Materials” which outlines the innovative ways children can express themselves using natural and found objects.

4/17 Family Friday:

Engaging and celebrating families is at the heart of supporting our youngest learners. NAEYC applauds family members’ role as young children’s first and most important teachers.

• The Week of the Young Child up today with Family Friday and we would like to share a Mindfulness Activity for Everyone! Practicing mindfulness is an important way for all of us to better manage stress and anxiety, but can be especially empowering for young children. De’andra, one of our child care teachers at The Family Place, shares a quick and simple activity for children (but also for everyone!) when they have feelings of stress and anxiety. For this activity, children are asked to clench their hands and then relax with a big breath. Watch the video on our Facebook Page.

• For many, our earliest memories are sculpted from our families, parents, caregivers, and our communities. As the Week of the Young Child comes to an end, The Family Place Staff wishes to share our memories with you all. Our intention as you read through is to hopefully spark a favorite pastime of yours, it may convince you to try something new, it may bring up a memory, it may signify that we all share more in common than we ever knew. Maybe it will give you a sense of support and hope that our community, at this challenging time, is doing the best we can do. May it reinforce that we all have an important role in the lives of our young children. Enjoy!

What do you remember as your favorite tradition from childhood?

“Biking as a family to the river and going on the rope swing” ~ Anya Gendal, Children’s Integrated Services Family Support Home Visitor

“My family used to play board games like Monopoly and card games like Crazy 8s together in our living room. I also really enjoyed going on hikes and flying kites at Tilden Park, a large green space near where I grew up. Those were times when we played together as a whole family with both of my parents” ~ Hayley DeLugach, Innovation and Evaluation Coordinator

“Playing board games on Saturday nights” ~ Julie Gaudette, Director, Windsor County Unit for Special Investigations and the Child Advocacy Center at The Family Place

“Helping my parents prepare the stuffing for Thanksgiving Dinner and using an old-fashioned meat grinder.” ~ Kelly Wallace, Children’s Integrated Services Coordinator

“Going out to breakfast with my dad on a weekend day while my mom had some time to herself. Special for all involved. My sister and I, my dad, and my mom.” ~ Kim Toland, Child Care Director & Teacher

“My family spent the summers camping in various campgrounds. I remember sitting around the campfire roasting marshmallows, sleeping in our tent big enough for 6 people and waking up in the morning and having breakfast cooked on the camp stove.” ~ Melissa Hunt, Child Care Assistant Teacher

“Thanksgiving with the whole family. I always got to celebrate my birthday – which meant more presents.” ~ Sue Olmsted, DULCE Family Specialist

• To continue our TFP staff memories, we want to acknowledge that families are spending more time together now more than ever. Family Friday has a whole new meaning! This comes with many challenges and stresses. However, being together more can also come with positives. As you read through some favorite family activities, we hope you are inspired to take the time to enjoy each other and perhaps create some new memories. Wouldn’t it be great that if when our young children are someday asked to answer the questions that our staff has answered today, they refer to this strange time as some of the most memorable family moments of their childhood? A child’s job is to play and grow. We hope this week has helped you all enjoy being an important part of that!

What was your favorite family activity?

“Camping!” ~ Lori Stever, Families Learning Together Program, Children’s Integrated Services Family Support Home Visitor

“Then, watching prime time TV with my dad. Laughing and laughing. Now, cooking wild, complicated suppers with my son and spouse. Singing and dancing to old R&R.” ~ Giavanna Munafo, Families Learning Together Program Educator and High School Liaison

“My current favorite thing to do with my family is packing a picnic lunch and taking off on a hike or a MYSTERY RIDE!” ~ Deb Cross, Children’s Integrated Services Early Intervention Developmental Educator/Physical Therapist

“Our favorite family activity now is anything we do together: a family outing to explore a new town, a game night, a movie night with popcorn, etc. It’s a time when we are connecting and together and focused on each other and enjoying the time with one another.” ~ Kelly French, Children’s Integrated Services Early Intervention Program Supervisor and Family Support Nurse

“Many of my favorite childhood memories are about playing pretend with my sister. We loved re-creating things we experienced outside the house. In our basement, at one time or another, we had a school, a hospital, a restaurant, etc. We loved making things to set the scene for whatever we were pretending. My mom taught us to sew when we were little, and we also had giant rolls of white paper and boxes of paperboard scraps given to us by my Grandpa – leftovers from where he worked. We used the paper for painting, but we also used it to make costumes – capes, hats, or whatever was needed. My mom gave us empty margarine tubs, egg cartons, paper towel tubes – we loved ‘trash to treasure’ and re-purposed everything we could get our hands-on. I was lucky to have a sister so close to my age to do all of this with!” ~ Nancy Bloomfield, Executive Director

“My current favorite thing to do with my family is to travel. Every April break we have traveled to a different destination for a few days or longer to explore somewhere we had never been to together. Those are memories we will never forget!” ~ Sarah Schneider, Children’s Integrated Services Early Intervention Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) and Developmental Educator

“I loved taking walks as a child. We lived next to a brook so we would walk with the dog to the swimming hole and jump into the water! It was often freezing cold but that was part of the fun!” ~ Tia Howard, Parent Education Coordinator

“Our parents used to send us into the yard so they could get some work done, and my older sister would make our salads from the garden my dad had when I got hungry. Family dinners hold a special place in my heart.” ~ Sasha Garfinkle, Administrative Assistant