Sacramento Valley Chapter of CAAEYC – Men and Child Care
Our Men and Child Care Committee (MACC) has been hard at work this summer, participating in community events, sharing music and planning for our annual conference.
This July, MACC was asked to return to TIP Ministries’ summer camp program to encourage the participating children to engage in open-ended play that involved appropriate risk-taking behavior through our pop-up playground project. Pop-up playgrounds are exactly what they sound like! We bring in large cardboard boxes, duct tape and box cutters – which we then haul away when we’re done. The idea is to set up a couple of boxes, then let the children guide the work. We don’t allow the children to actually use the box cutters, but they tell us what they want and where and we assist them in creating a playground that’s all theirs. They jump, run, crawl and engage with one another while expressing their creativity. At our latest pop-up, a young man decided that he needed a credit card scanner on each “house” so that he could purchase them with his “card” and then distribute them to the poor. We typically include a musical component, as we have the good fortune of having Paul Morehouse as part of our team. In the coming year, we hope to develop a “how to” booklet that can be used by disaster response groups when they find themselves with bored children in shelters after a natural disaster.
Save the date for our Fourth Annual Men and Child Care Conference at East Los Angeles College on October 12, 2019. More details to follow!
Lola M. Cornish
President, Sacramento Valley Chapter of CAAEYC
Permission to reprint photos granted by Sacramento Valley Chapter of CAAEYC