Do your books have characters that look like the children in your neighbourhood?
Do the books on your centre’s bookshelves reflect the ethnic make-up of your families? Can every child in your centre read books, lots of them, every day, about children who look like them? These are important questions for anyone responsible for young children’s wellbeing. If you are of European descent, you’ll find thousands of picture books filled with people that...
Six lovely Christmas picture books
Books and Christmas are a great match! If you would like your children to have an idea of why some people have a special holiday at Christmastime, here are some lovely picture books you might want to add to your collection. For a good laugh, read Jesus’ Christmas Party, by Nicholas Allan This hilarious book tells the story of Jesus...
Better Books: Does Your Book Collection Encourage Gender Equality?
Are you a huge fan of reading with children? There’s just about nothing better, is there, than cuddling on a sofa with small people, watching them learn to love the world of books. Every parent and teacher wants the best for children, and for them to grow up able to navigate through the world by being able to read and...
How to Help Children Cope with the Loss of a Loved One
We are fully immersed in the holiday season, and we love it, right? This is the time for magical moments with family pulled close to our hearts. There are treats to bake, decorations to display – and plenty of music, celebration, and togetherness. But for children who have lost a parent or close family member in the last twelve months,...
Self care part 2
In part two, the thread of self-care continues with some ideas about control, choices, and saying yes. In this two-part blog, I talk about self-care as not being a ‘one-shot deal’- it is more a bunch of little things repeated time and time again to ensure that you are at your peak. In part one, I talked about ideas about...
Self Care
Self-care is one of those trendy ideas right now. It’s a funny mix with people who are ‘typically Kiwi’, and are ‘just getting on with it’, and for the most part that’s ok. But, sometimes it’s not. Leading up to Christmas, I find it an ideal time to reflect on what I can manage, and what I have to do...
Putting the love into Christmas
What do you want your children to remember about family Christmases? The world is a pretty diverse place so Christmas will mean lots of different things to us, but I bet your list has ‘love’ on it, and something about having a lovely time together. The reality for lots of parents, of course, is that as well as all that...
Supporting relationships and attachment in the early years
Relationships are broadly defined as the state of being connected or related. This can mean an association by blood or marriage, a kinship or the mutual dealings, connections, or feelings that exist between two parties. It is also recognised as a type of dependence or alliance in the way that we behave or regard one another. When considering the National...
Family engagement makes a huge difference for children at Auckland YMCA early learning services
Lorraine Duncumb, Group Manager ECE for YMCA Auckland In New Zealand wrote about her experiences using Storypark to engage families in their children’s learning and communicate important information about their services events and procedures. Storypark has been a huge part of our development in communicating with our families in our early learning centres. When we were using a scrapbook to share...
Healthy recipes for children
Finding new, delicious and nutritious recipes for young children can be a struggle at the best of times. We have created a printable selection of recipes that have been tried and tested by some of our youngest scrutineers. This involved testing using all of their senses, and we can safely say the selected recipes passed with flying colours! Cauliflower Tots Healthy Fruit...