Fellow Dominicans, as the Honourable Minister for Education, Human Resource Planning, Vocational Training and National Excellence, I am indeed delighted about this, my first address to you in observance of Early Childhood Development Month, November 2020. Our theme chosen for the observance of this year’s celebration is “Embracing Opportunities for Early Childhood Development.”
The Collins dictionary describes an opportunity as a favourable combination of circumstances; a good chance or prospect.
So you may be asking, “What opportunities can there be for early childhood during such a worldwide pandemic?” Maybe it might just be paradoxical. It was the great Albert Einstein who told us that “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
To begin with there is always the opportunity to celebrate our children; no matter the circumstance. We know that our children are gifts from God and a gift from God is a gift indeed. For that we need to always embrace the opportunity to say thank you to the almighty for our little children; the future women and men of tomorrow; the future human resource of our dearly beloved country.
We in the Ministry of Education are grateful for the opportunity to work more closely with you the families in educating our children. If there is one thing that has come to the fore during this present situation, is the realization that we need the total involvement of families in educating our little ones. I am hoping that as families you would have noticed that active learning which is the approach for nurturing the minds of our children is not only for the classroom but very much for the home environment. What we do at school should always be continued at home and children should be given the opportunity to relive what they do at home. In other words, school should go home and home should come to school.
As a result of this worldwide pandemic, we have had to change the way in which we offer early stimulation to our children in the Roving Caregivers programme. In the first model, the caregivers would go into the homes and do the stimulation activities with the children. With the new approach, we are now engaging the parents/guardians in doing the actual stimulation activities with the children. What opportunities that this has presented to us. We now have a better platform for greater bonding between our children and their parents/guardians; we now have the opportunity to enhance the parenting skills of our parents/guardians as their attention can now go beyond that of generally caring for the physical needs and will now include the cognitive development of their children. This also presents us with a greater opportunity for sustaining the early stimulation programme. Once trained, families can now carry out their stimulation exercises independently with their children.
All early childhood educators as well as parents now have better opportunities for self-development. Because the situation is worldwide more training institutions have made it possible to access programmes in early childhood development. You do not have to be physically present at the institution; you can do so by following online.
There is now the opportunity for greater networking. Both parents and guardians as well as early childhood educators are have better opportunities to be in touch with others not only in their locality, but around the globe. There are countless numbers of forums for parents as well as forums for educators. We need to embrace these opportunities, because we also know that opportunities lost can not be regained.
