Announcing Childcare Partnership Awards
The Trustees of the Sixpence Early Learning Fund are pleased to announce that two new grants totaling $450,000 will be awarded to school districts in partnership with local licensed early care and education providers for at-risk infants and toddlers. Omaha Public Schools, in collaboration with Omaha Educare, and Loup City Public Schools, in partnership with ESU 10, were each selected for grant awards of $225,000 after a competitive application and review process.
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Sixpence invests in programs built on practices proven to support the development of cognition and character of young children.
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Each Sixpence-funded program represents a community partnership between local school districts, service providers, and other agency stakeholders.
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Sixpence-funded programs work directly with parents, enabling them to better understand and address their children's earliest developmental needs.
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The more we understand about how early experiences affect brain development, long-term health and wellbeing, the clearer it becomes that investments in children in the prenatal to age 3 period are essential and financially sound.
NATIONAL GOVERNORS ASSOCIATION
Both Kim Chase and Amy Standley agree on a very specific detail about Nebraska Growing Readers (NGR) books: they fit well in small hands. While this may seem minor, it means that the children these early childhood professionals work with are holding the books, looking at the colorful pictures, identifying what they see; such moments are the early literacy moments NGR strives for.
The Nebraska Growing Readers (NGR) program, which is a collaboration between Nebraska Children and Families Foundation, the Nebraska Department of Education, the Statewide Family Engagement Center, and Unite for Literacy, has aimed primarily at providing free books for licensed childcare providers who can share them with their families, but the books have also been distributed to other organizations where children and families can access them. Al-Hindi said he learned of the program in December of 2023 when Nghia Le, the Director of the Learning Center, showed him the books, which they thought could be useful for the adults in ESL classes to use.
The Valley Child Development Center opened in the farming community of Red Cloud in 2018. The Center quickly found a niche when a board member’s niece, Bri and her husband Bruce, who lived in California, learned of the Edible Schoolyard, a program developed by food activist and chef Alice Waters to offer “students experiential learning opportunities that deepen their relationship with food, facilitate learning the skills of cooking and gardening” (edibleschoolyard.org).
A recent car seat check held by Sixpence of Fremont, in coordination with Dodge County Head Start and Three Rivers Health Department, revealed that when it comes to car seats, things aren’t as simple as they seem.