Kids were everywhere Friday morning at Altona Lagoon Park, helping local officials open a new feature designed to help parents interact with their young children.
The Born Learning Trail is part of a program by the Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands to enhance early childhood development.
The trail features six signed stations ringing the playground area where parents and their small children are given suggestions about an activity. One suggests looking for rocks and lizards. Another asks participants to hop, shake, clap and wiggle. Since the small children can’t read the sign, it gives the parents an opportunity to talk to their kids.
"That’s an opportunity for a parent with a young child to say, ‘Do you know how to hop?’ ‘What can you toss?’ ‘How can you shake?’ ‘Show me how you wiggle,’" said Dee Baecher-Brown, president of the CFVI. "It’s teaching them vocabulary, it’s making them active, because the way they learn is by moving. The more they’re moving, the better they’re learning."
Early childhood development experts are unanimous that talking to children, every day, is vital to developing the language skills they will need later in life. Statistics show that children in the territory enter kindergarten with lower cognitive and language skills than the national average, and a simple step such as talking to them when they are young can help improve those numbers.
"Some of what’s required is just so simple," Baecher-Brown said. "It’s simple things like talking to your children when you take them to the playground, hugging them, showing the rocks, shells, having them talk to you what you’re showing them. Having them show you."
The Born Learning program is part of a national campaign, and the local effort is part of the CFVI’s The Family Connection program.
Friday morning parents, childcare workers and children joined with Community Foundation members and government officials to formally open the trail.
Lt. Gov. Gregory Francis told the audience that the most important way to help a child is to "show love, teach love, and that starts at home."
Also speaking at the opening ceremony were Baecher-Brown and Ellie Hirsh of the Community Foundation, and St. Claire N. Williams of the Department of Housing, Parks and Recreation.
Hirsh said the contents of the signs started with national models, and then were edited to conform to local conditions. A sign that would make perfect sense in Boston – Look for squirrels, for example – would leave a very puzzled or frustrated child here in the tropics, she pointed out, so it was adapted to "look for lizards." Stationed as it is right on the edge of the Caribbean, she added, it made sense to have children tell their parents how many boats they saw, which wouldn’t make as much sense in Nevada.
After the speeches, the trail as opened with a traditional ribbon cutting ceremony. Baecher-Brown, Hirsh and the lieutenant governor were joined by two small children, and 10-year-old Tatyana Camacho wielded the scissors.
