From a child’s first soccer team to recreational softball leagues to rooting for your favorite team, sports hold an iconic place in our lives. And they play an equally important role in helping children’s development in the early years.

It’s easy to see how sports can help with children’s gross and fine motor skills development. Less obvious, but just as critical, is the role that sports and play-based learning activities have in social-emotional development and speech and language development.

Be a Good Sport

As babies grow into toddlers, they gradually start to regulate their emotions. Playing sports with others gives them the opportunity to experience feelings such as joy, frustration, pride and patience in a non-threatening situation. To help them develop social-emotional skills, try:

1. Naming emotions as they play. “Suzy, great job catching that ball – you must be so proud of yourself!”
2. Help your child regulate his emotions when he is upset by talking about their feelings. “Tyler, I can see that you’re upset about missing the goal – let’s talk about why you’re upset.”

As children continue to grow and begin to play on teams, they develop teamwork skills that will be invaluable on and off the field. Team sports also provide a great opportunity to encourage empathy while learning new skills and celebrating successes. Try these tips to make sure your child will win the sportsmanship award:

1. Model the behavior you want to see – cheer as loudly for all the children on the team as you do for your child. Encourage your child to be a “cheerleader” for their team.
2. Reinforce the importance of taking turns at shooting the basket or practicing on the balance beam.

Hat Tricks, Fartleks and Setter

Every sport comes with a vocabulary of its own. Which means more and more opportunities to expose your children to new and varied language! From silly to repetitious to obscure, how do you make the most of this treasure trove?

1. As your child plays, name actions and items that are involved in their sport. Kick, run, pass, racquet, ball, tee, somersault…..the list is endless.
2. Have your child put the game into their own words – ask them to tell you how the game works.

We can’t guarantee that your child will become the next Serena Williams, David Beckham, Simone Biles or Derek Jeter, but we do know that time spent playing sports in the early years will pay off in many other ways!

Recommended for Infants

Materials Needed:

• Several small, interesting toys (rattles, teethers, colorful blocks, shakers)
• Soft blanket

Developmental Goals:

• Promote gross and fine motor development that encourages them to move, reach and stretch.
• Purposeful movement of own bodies.

In the Future:

• Infants need plenty of opportunities to increase their strength and motor development to eventually be able to crawl and then walk.
• Reaching for objects is goal directed behavior; as infants become successful at obtaining objects, it will encourage them to continue to act with purpose.

Activity:

1. This activity is appropriate only for infants who are able to support their body weight enough for tummy-time activities.
2. Spread the blanket on the floor in an area where he will be protected from other activity in the room.
3. Place him on his tummy on the blanket. Show him a toy and describe it to him. Look, (Child’s Name), I have a blue and white rattle.
4. Put the toy on the blanket just at arm’s reach from your child so that he has to stretch his arm out to grab it.
5. Give him time to shake, mouth and touch the toy.
6. When he shows you he is ready for a new experience, place another toy just at arm’s reach for him to grab.
7. Encourage him to use the opposite arm by placing the toy within closer reach of the arm he did not previously use.
8. Repeat the interaction for as long as your child is interested. Pay particular attention to his activity level. It is hard work for your child to lie on his tummy and reach for toys. You may notice that he is beginning to have a hard time supporting his head and neck, he is no longer reaching for objects, or he has an unhappy look on his face. When your child shows you that he is finished or that his body is getting tired, help him change position so he can rest his muscles.

As you are playing with your baby, consider how he moves his arms and the rest of his body to reach the toy, in what ways does he grasp and manipulate the toy, and how long is he able to attend to his experience.

Don’t underestimate the incredible thinking skills that young children have. Through this activity, your toddler will compare objects and ask questions to help understand their differences in quantity.

Recommended for Preschoolers

Materials Needed:

• Not a Box by Antoinette Portis
• Cardboard boxes, cardboard tubes, other recycled materials
• Bedsheets or blankets

Developmental Goals:

• Using language to share ideas.
• Using imagination in play.

In the Future:

• Being able to express ideas through language gives young children the opportunity to strengthen their vocabulary and develop their conversational skills.
• Imaginative thinking provides children with opportunities to develop flexible thinking, strengthening their ability to problem solve, which is important when attempting later math and reading problems.

Activity:

1. Introduce the book to your child.  As with any new book, take time to allow your child to explore the book’s pictures on his own before sitting down to read it out loud.
2. As you read the book together, invite him to talk about the different things that the rabbit makes with his cardboard box.
3. After reading the story, show your child the recycled materials you have collected.  Working together, decide what you will build.
4. Allow your child to take the lead, but don’t be afraid to join in and share ideas!
5. After the play space is built, ask him to describe what he built.

For older preschoolers: have them use writing tools to record a blue print of what they want to build prior to building. This provides them with the opportunity to analyze, plan and follow through on their ideas.

When the reality of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was clear many months ago, Start Early and our partners quickly pivoted to support our youngest learners virtually, and we’re continuing to innovate and evolve to ensure our most vulnerable children and families don’t get left behind as the pandemic stretches on.

One of our strongest partnerships is with the Educare Learning Network. In 2000, Start Early developed the first Educare school in Chicago to provide high-quality care, education, and a stimulating learning environment for children birth to age 5. Since then, we have partnered to create 24 Educare schools across the country to provide children in under-resourced communities with quality early learning experiences. In accordance with CDC recommendations, 22 of the 24 operating schools within the Educare Learning Network are currently closed, with 2 schools having reopened to provide essential services at a reduced capacity. But that does not mean our early learning programs have stopped. From online lesson plans to reading and singing sessions via Facebook Lives, our educators are helping to ensure children and families have the resources they need during these challenging times.

In this blog, Kristin Bernhard, Start Early senior vice president of policy and advocacy, identifies an innovative policy solution that is addressing our nation’s child care crisis. This approach, Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships, raises the bar for quality infant-toddler care. 

Our nation is in a child care crisis — particularly for infant and toddler care — and this issue is finally hitting the mainstream. Rarely a week goes by without a new article, report, or shocking statistic drawing attention to the sad fact that in its current form, the financing for child care in America is broken. The quality of services is inconsistent at best and most state- and federally-funded programs serve only a fraction of eligible families. This broken system is failing to promote the healthy development of our youngest learners and failing to support their parents, especially those who need child care so that they can work or go to school.

What’s more, child care providers in every state make near-poverty wages, while parents, especially those earning low wages, cannot afford to pay what it costs to deliver the high-quality early care and learning that research tells us sets the foundation for academic achievement, health, and well-being later in life.

However, this crisis is not purely a money issue. Current cries for additional funding for “child care for all” are shortsighted if they do not take into account the limitations of our current market-based system and the time and effort needed to make the necessary improvements in quality in order to truly realize the two-generation impacts of early childhood education. Access to child care alone is not sufficient if attention – and funding – is not also paid to improving the quality of the care provided and reshaping the way these services interact with families.

While the federally-funded, locally-run Early Head Start model was created in 1994 to address the comprehensive needs of children under age 3, the seemingly high costs per child, consistently low levels of federal funding, and increasing rates of child poverty have limited the program’s impact. As of 2017, less than 10% of eligible children nationwide were served by Early Head Start.

That is why the Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships (Partnerships) are one promising policy solution that should merit serious consideration by those tackling the child care crisis across the country. The Partnerships launched in 2014 as a new approach to delivering the Early Head Start model by supporting traditional early childhood centers and family providers in meeting and delivering early education and wrap around supports at Early Head Start standards.

This innovative approach allowed Early Head Start to extend beyond a limited number of centers and expand to community-based providers. As part of this effort, children enrolled in a community-based program received the wrap-around supports and comprehensive services, regardless of the funding stream paying their slot. Teachers in such programs also received enhanced professional development and coaching, resources to complete postsecondary education, and support in implementing research-based curricula — all while being paid a worthy wage.

Start Early has been involved with the Partnerships since the first funding was authorized. Six years later, it is important to tell the story of the Partnerships’ effectiveness; not just their influence on families and child care providers, but also their impact on state early childhood systems that adapted and innovated to support the success of the program. To tell this story, we interviewed a variety of state leaders to understand the impact the Partnerships had in reshaping infant-toddler child care in their states.

We found that the Partnerships raised the bar for high-quality infant and toddler care, as expected, but that they also served as an important impetus for systems-level change. The full story can be found in our report, Expanding High-Quality Child Care for Infants & Toddlers: Lessons from Implementation of Early Head Start — Child Care Partnerships in States.

So what do these findings mean for our current child care crisis? There is growing momentum around finding new and innovative solutions to this problem, which is certainly cause for optimism. However, as our nation pulls together to put new solutions for child care on the table, the lessons learned from the implementation of the Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships should be at the center of the conversation.

This Giving Tuesday, we partnered with KPMG’s Family for Literacy program who matched funds raised during the day with $10,000 worth of books for children at 26 early childhood programs. We are so grateful to have such a dedicated partner like KPMG who believe in our mission to ensure our earliest learners have the best start in school and life.

Recently, we sat down with Kerri Neis, associate director at KPMG, to discuss why fighting illiteracy and supporting Start Early is important to the company.

1. Why are literacy and early education essential parts of KPMG’s Corporate Citizenship initiatives?
   KPMG’s Citizenship efforts are centered on lifelong learning, which is essential to unlocking the potential in people, building economies, and above all, improving lives. Literacy is at the foundation of lifelong learning, and access to books is necessary to build strong reading skills. Specifically, the need is profound in Chicago. We know that by fourth grade, only about 27 percent of Chicago’s students are considered proficient in reading–there is a literacy crisis we can’t ignore. And in Chicago’s low-income neighborhoods, there is only one book for every 300 children, whereas in middle-class neighborhoods, there are 13 books per child on average. The statistics are so motivating for all of our leaders, partners, and employees—who have enjoyed an education and want to give back to the communities they love.
2. What is KPMG’s Family for Literacy (KFFL) program?
   KFFL is the firm’s flagship Citizenship program with a mission to eradicate childhood illiteracy by putting new books into the hands of children in need and developing the next generation of young leaders through reading. This unique program is particularly effective because it harnesses the energy and enthusiasm of KPMG’s extended family—not only partners and employees, but also spouses, children, interns, retirees, alumni, professional golfers, and KPMG Brand Ambassadors Phil Mickelson, Stacy Lewis, Mariah Stackhouse, Maverick McNealy and Olympic gold medalist Laurie Hernandez.

   Since its inception in 2008, KFFL has distributed over 5 million new books to low-income children in 100+ communities across the United States. KFFL also translates across borders having spread through KPMG’s global network to India, Mexico, South Africa, Zambia, the U.K., Kenya, Canada and China.

3. How does partnering with an organization like Start Early help KFFL support its mission of eradicating childhood illiteracy?
   Our organization and networks allow us to raise the funds to buy books, source volunteers to pack and deliver books, visit schools and libraries, and fuel the enthusiasm to share the importance of our mission. But we count on partners in the community to connect us with the right communities in the right way, which allows us to bring the books into the communities we most want to serve. Our core competencies lie in providing Advisory, Tax, and Audit services to our clients—our KFFL partners’ core competencies lie in serving constituents in communities. Those partnerships are so valuable to us as they provide the network, trust, and connectivity to carry out our mission.

   We have been so impressed with the holistic and critical services Start Early provides to their communities, that is why we were thrilled to be able to provide books to the schools, children, and families in their network. We hope that in addition to literacy skills, these books bring families together for quality time, spark the imaginations of young readers, and inspires their children to learn more. Because that is what we are all about at KPMG—lifelong learning!

Annaliese is an early childhood educator for 13 years and current teacher at Educare Chicago, Start Early’s (formerly known as the Ounce) early education school. Originally from Ohio, she moved to Chicago in 2010 to pursue a teaching license and master’s degree in early childhood education from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

She is dedicated to helping her students start early. She enjoys teaching them to learn, play, problem solve and how to discover the world around them, sometimes all at the same time, while also learning side-by-side with them.

Recently, we sat down with Annaliese to discuss how being an educator has impacted her life and why she is passionate about working with communities most in need.

1. Why is being an early childhood educator important to you?
   Being an early childhood educator is very important to me. While some people think that I get to play with kids all day, and sometimes I do, it is fast-paced and changes day-by-day. I am constantly juggling information and goals from parents, emotions from the kids, lesson planning, looking at data, paperwork, documenting the kids work. It is exhausting to even think about the amount of work I get done in a day, both with the kids and the paperwork and meetings that happen during nap time.

   And we all know the studies, showing that the first five years of life are the most important at predicting outcomes later in life. This makes teaching this young group so important. The impact extends for all of life. I want to instill a love of learning and exploration and allow creativity and critical thinking to flourish. When you teach older kids, you have to worry about testing and district restrictions. Working in preschool allows you to integrate all developmental areas into studies, and I love that. Every day I get to discover and learn with my students, and that is what keeps me going.

2.  How has your experience as an educator impacted your life?
   Being an educator has enlightened my whole life. Since my work is with young kids and having to know so much about development and watching kids develop so quickly, I have gained an appreciation for the way we all develop, throughout life. Even in my personal life, someone will ask me a question, and I’ll respond with, “Well, in Erickson’s Theory of Development…” I helped my partner learn to drive and thought about it like a teacher, like how can I “scaffold” how to parallel park?

   It has also opened my eyes to so many issues in the teaching field. Teaching is a profession that is made up of mostly women who are underpaid. Who work multiple jobs. Who spend their paychecks on their students. Who work over 40 hours a week. Who worry about their students at night and on the weekends. Who can’t afford childcare for their own children? And, some of us are working with and in traumatized communities. Traumatized by the government and the police. Working with families who don’t have stable homes or income. Families who worry about feeding their families and paying their meals. And it is hard when you work with these families and are one of these families, too. As a white woman, it is my duty to fight for these injustices and push for changes in the education field so that all teachers are supported and paid a living wage. I need to fight for more resources in the community I work in so that there is more equity in our world.

3. Why should parents seek out high-quality early education programs for their children?
   Right now, the parents in my classroom are applying to kindergarten for their children. They are stressed out and worried about their child getting into a good school. Getting into a good kindergarten is like getting into a good college. When you are a parent living on the South Side, where level one schools are few and far between, you are literally fighting for your child’s success. In order to get into a selective enrollment school, your child needs to be prepared for the selective enrollment test. Parents know their child needs to be in a high-quality preschool program to give them a foundation and skills to pass the test.

   Another point we remind parents is that school is more than just knowing your letters and counting to 100. Children need to know how to navigate the other side of school: being able to follow directions, control their emotions and work well with others. In my classroom, we focus a lot on these skills through role playing and problem solving. If a child cannot self-regulate than they won’t be able to sit quietly through a lesson in kindergarten. I think finding a balance of teaching and preparing these two components of school is a challenge that all early childhood educators face and when classrooms and programs can balance this, then high-quality care is happening.

4. What advice would you give to a new educator coming into the early education field?
   My advice to new educators is to make sure to take care of yourself. Go to counseling, get a massage, get your nails done, eat good food. If we cannot be there for ourselves then we will never be able to be there for our families and students. This is a difficult profession, and burn out is quick and easy. Create boundaries. Even if you are taking work home, either only do it through the week to leave your weekends open, or don’t do it during the week and spend a few hours on the weekend doing work. Just take care of yourself first and foremost.

Start Early has long believed that a child’s first and most important teacher is their parent. That is why we have been an early champion of recognizing home visiting as a key component of early childhood systems of care and education.

Our very own Nick Wechsler, director for program development at Start Early, has been influencing the home visiting field in Illinois for 30 years and was recently honored as the recipient of the Home Visiting Leadership Award at the Annual Prevent Child Abuse Illinois Statewide Conference.

A Passion for Building Relationships

Nick, who holds a master’s degree in Infant Studies, started his career in the early 1970s, working as a community mental health worker in Chicago, providing therapy to communities in need under the supervision of licensed clinicians. Nick credits his experiences as a stay-at-home dad and as a family day care provider for preparing him for what ultimately became Start Early’s home visiting approach: relationship-based work.

Home Visiting – Helping Parents Through a Life-Changing Transition

Nick’s personal and professional experiences with new parenthood ultimately showed him that home visiting services can considerably support both children and parents.

The days and weeks following the birth of a child can be a time of great joy and excitement for all parents. Developmental science tells us that these first interactions between parents and newborns lay the foundation for a child’s healthy development in school and life. This can also can be a time of extreme stress for parents, exacerbated by exhaustion during a period of physical, hormonal and emotional vulnerability.

Home visitors can provide much-needed support to help ease new parents’ anxieties and provide them with the tools and knowledge to develop the secure attachments that allow children to thrive. By helping parents engage in meaningful play and learning interactions with their children, home visitors influence the development of nurturing relationships that support a child’s ability to grow and learn.

Home Visiting – The Early Years

Today, early childhood home visiting is an established part of national policy and is a publicly subsidized practice here in the U.S. and in many countries around the globe. But it wasn’t always so, Nick reminds us.

Public policy and subsidized center-based care for very young children was limited until 1995, when Early Head Start (EHS) was established. EHS extended home visiting into the Head Start model and added group care as an option for children from birth to age 3.

In the early years, Nick says, childcare professionals didn’t have what we now know as evidence-based models for home visiting. In the 1990s, home visitors drew on the theories of emerging brain science to inform what simply made good sense in supporting parenting: that a child’s early experiences and secure attachments with parents and caregivers lay the emotional, social and cognitive foundation for healthy development and learning.

Championing Home Visiting in Illinois and Beyond

“When I started working at Start Early,” Nick remembers, “we were primarily focused on providing home visiting to teenage parents. In fact, we were the only publicly-funded statewide network for home visiting.”

Throughout his first decade at Start Early, Nick trained and supported home visitors, helping them expand their base of knowledge and enhance skills and practice. He credits this early period for laying the foundation for Start Early’s own approach to home visiting. As early pioneers in the field, Start Early ultimately became a leader in innovating service approaches and advocating for better access to home visiting across Illinois.

The landscape is much different today – home visiting has become more professionalized and is evaluated with the highest level of scientific rigor. The federal government has created guidelines and funds home visiting services through Early Head Start programs. New legislation made possible by the 2010 Affordable Care Act allowed for $351 million to be appropriated annually to support approximately 150,000 parents and children through almost 1 million home visits a year as part of the federal government’s Maternal Infant Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) programs.

Reaching More Children and Families

Over the last three decades, the scope of Start Early’s home visiting work has expanded, and Nick’s work has been key to this development. Under his purview, work that was limited to teenage parents at the beginning has grown in its depth and breadth.

Start Early designs, delivers, trains and supports home visitors who work in under-resourced communities, including home visiting for mothers experiencing homelessness, as well as those in the criminal justice system. Nick and Start Early have also been working with state advocates and local communities to establish a new approach to this work – universal newborn supportive services – which offers all parents home visiting in the first weeks after birth.

“Nick has dedicated years of professional service to support and promote healthy interactions between babies and the people in their lives they count on most to nurture, teach, love and protect them. He exudes a reflective mindset that has shaped many of us as professionals, and he is a trusted and highly valued thought partner, mentor and colleague,” Kelly Woodlock, vice president of national home visiting, says.

Start Early congratulates Nick for this great recognition and we thank him for his commitment to serving children and families!

“The recognition is a bit awkward, yet it also fills me with great gratification and joy. It truly makes my career’s work visible. Knowing that ideas and labor that came from within me have become useful tools for home visitors, that my creations reach into homes and become meaningful in the lives of children and parents during home visits throughout Illinois – this is a personal and professional treasure,” says Nick.

Ireta Gasner leads Start Early’s (formerly known as the Ounce) Illinois policy team, in the words of Ireta herself, “a smart, committed team of folks, who work every day to improve the systems of support for young children and families – especially those who face the greatest challenges.”

Currently, Ireta and her team are working hard to prepare and develop its legislative agenda for the Fiscal Year 2021 legislative session, so we are grateful to Ireta for taking the time to chat with us about her passion for advocacy and discuss why early learning is a cause she cares so strongly for.

1. Why did you choose to pursue a career in early childhood advocacy?
   I’m originally from Wisconsin but have lived in Chicago since after college and started out as a teacher. After obtaining a master’s degree in social work, I provided direct services to families with young children experiencing homelessness – through home visiting and Head Start programs.

   I loved it. Seeing what challenges families were facing seriously perked my interest in policy and advocacy, and I desired to make change on a broader level.

   In my work with families over the years, I have become a true believer that by making sure families have the support they need at the earliest point possible (ideally prenatally), we can maximize the chance for all children to have the best start in life. We’re still going to need supports along the way, but we could be doing so much more and earlier for children and families in our nation.

2. What does early childhood education, care and learning mean to you?
   Engaging and supporting families at the earliest point results in healthy births and strong attachments with parents, ultimately providing a continuum of rich, quality and developmentally-appropriate experiences for young children. Whether these experiences are with parents, in programs or in a community, they are necessary to help launch children on a path of learning and success.
3. What is the Illinois Policy Team focused on the most right now?
   We’re going to have some real conversations about what it will take for Illinois to have the early childhood systems that children need and deserve. While we’ve had a lot of successful investments in early childhood in our state, it’s going to take so much more to truly provide the best to our youngest children.One of the biggest issues we face now is attracting and keeping professionals into our field because we do not pay our workforce nearly enough for the sophisticated, complex work they do. We must tackle this problem.

I’d like to encourage us to be bold – supporting the healthy development of young children and their families is among the most important things we can do for our future. We shouldn’t be afraid to talk about what kinds of investments we will need in order to truly move the needle for the well-being of our kids.