Child Stimulation Month 2020 Officially Underway

March is celebrated annually as Child Stimulation Month and there is an entire calendar of events that commenced today with a parade of kindergarten students, their parents and their teachers through the streets of Belize City.  This year has a new theme and the representative for the Ministry of Education’s Early Childhood Education shares with us the plans for the next few weeks leading up to the Festival of Arts.

Darlene Lozano, Early Childhood Education

“The theme this year is: Hug Me, Listen to Me, Read with Me, Help Me Grow.  Those are all characteristics that we want to develop in our students.  At the early childhood area we want to prepare our students for readiness for the primary school, so we want to develop them cognitively, we want to develop their social skills so that they are ready so when they enter primary school they can build up on the foundational knowledge that they get at the preschool level.”

Reporter

“Now every year it’s an adventure when Child Stimulation Month comes around because it’s the entire month and it’s not only the march.  Can you speak to the other activities?”

Darlene Lozano

Darlene Lozano

“Okay, it’s not only the march.  We have on Thursday the story telling competition.  That competition, we have representatives, teachers from throughout the country and they will be participating in a story telling competition.  They will tell stories.  Stories are a very important part of early childhood as we promote play strategy, we promote oral language development.  From that we have Festival of Arts for the Belize District, the Festival of Arts will be the sixteenth to the nineteenth of March.  It will be at the Belize Elementary Auditorium and so the children will be participating in drama, music and dance.”