What's Happening?
Parent Child + Fosters Healthy Parenting
Luz Pereyra s
its in a small wooden chair in front of a small circle of children and reads from a colorful children’s book called “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.” Sometimes, she pauses to ask a question or make a suggestion. “Imagine you are driving the bus,” she says to the kids, who hold out their arms and turn, grasping imaginary steering wheels.
The children attend a bilingual home daycare in Rotterdam called My Little Miracle. Pereyra visits regularly, bringing books that she reads aloud and gives to the daycare. She teaches the kids about numbers, feelings, colors and more.
For the family who runs the daycare, Pereyra is a coach and a mentor, modeling how to use books and toys to engage and educate the children. On one trip to My Little Miracle, Pereyra gave the children toy buses to push along a cardboard brick road.
Pereyra works for Brightside Up, Inc., a non-profit organization that strives to improve the availability of high-quality child care in the Capital Region. She is an early learning specialist with Brightside Up's Parent Child+ program, which promotes childhood literacy and school readiness in Schenectady County by sending trained staff to read and play with toddlers at their homes and at in-home daycares.
“It’s a nice support for families who might not have other supports,” said Abbe Kovacik, executive director of Brightside Up, Inc., which oversees Parent Child+. One goal of the Parent Child+ program is to foster positive parent-child interactions and healthy parenting. “It’s amazing to see a parent and a child light up together around learning,” Kovacik said.
Funding for the books and toys provided to families and daycares comes from The Schenectady Foundation and the Carlilian Foundation.
Families participating in Parent Child+ get 46 visits over two years; home daycares receive 24. Children are given a developmental assessment; if the assessment indicates that a child needs extra services, such as speech and language support, Parent Child+ can help arrange them.
Virgen Torres-Ayala runs My Little Miracle out of her home with her husband and daughter. The program has taught her a lot. “It gives me a lot of tools,” she said. “It helps me build my skills.”
