Educators stretched their bodies and their minds in a recent Childcare Resources professional development workshop. This unique half-day session, presented by Childcare Resources in partnership with Kindergarten Readiness Collaborative, featured both yoga and early literacy and language resources.
Yoga instructor Ashleigh Whitfield kicked the session off by leading participants through a relaxing one-hour warmup. After a short break, educators came back together to learn about language nutrition in young children through the Talk With Me Baby campaign.
Talk With Me Baby, presented by Jennifer Faber, Director of Grade Level Reading at the Florida Children’s Council, is a collaborative effort aimed at nurturing language and brain development in early childhood. The campaign provides parents and educators with free tools, resources and strategies to help infants and young children develop the cognitive skills needed to read proficiently by third grade.
”The single strongest predictor of future academic success is the quantity and quality of words spoken to a child in the first three years,” said Mrs. Faber. She continued, “Just like you need to feed a child to nourish them, their health and their growth, you need to nourish them with language and with words.”