May 8 has been announced as Early Childhood Education Appreciation Day, to pair with May being Early Childhood Educator Appreciation Month, staff at the Southwest Day Care & Early Learning Centre are glad for the nod to their hard work.
Assistant director Natasha Dafoe always appreciates being acknowledged, as the work she does with the kids at the centre is important to both them and herself.
Southwest Day Care has programs running for kids at all ages, from 18 months to 12 years old; they run a music program on Tuesdays and work all kind of social programming into their daily routine at the centre.
Programming like that is very pertinent to children’s growth, said Dafoe.
“It keeps them interested and then they have different things to look forward to. So it's definitely important for their growth, for sure,” said Dafoe.
Dafoe got into this field because she wanted to work with children, and she truly enjoys her job and the work she does at the centre.
“I love children and I always have. I have children myself and I've always loved to be with them,” she said. “ It would be weird to not have children in my life every day. It's very rewarding.”
The board is taking the staff out to supper to celebrate their hard work, and Dafoe is grateful to be part of the team at Southwest Day Care.
“We have some really great educators in our centre. They love working with the kids and they feel like it's very rewarding, we all do. We like just being able to be with them every day and teach them and see them grow and learn,” said Dafoe. “[The staff here,] we're a team; I think we all have our little different roles and just, every single day, [the kids] are teaching us, we're teaching them.”
And while Dafoe is always glad to be recognized and see the government providing funding children’s development programs, she hopes to see even more recognition in the future.
“We definitely appreciate when they do recognize and give us more funding. However, we could always use more, because in the early years [group] and stuff like that, you don't always get enough recognition,” said Dafoe.
