Mainting community and routines:
Virtual morning circle to support children and families
Since the outbreak of the corona crisis, the ban on entering daycare centers has turned the everyday life of families in Cologne upside down. Since the beginning of daycare closings, rainbowtrekkers has tried to support their children and families who stayed at home as much as possible. Within just four days, we managed to set up a daily, online daycare service. This participation has given the 160 children from all three institutions the opportunity to keep in touch on daily basis with their friends and educators from the kindergarten via video chat.
The aim of the project, “virtual morning circle” (VICI), is to maintain social ties and a regular daily routine for the children. As well as, to provide parents with a breather between home office and childcare.
The online morning circle offer maintains the existing group settings. The video chats are conducted by the educators whom the children know from their everyday life in kindergarten. Our VICI is usually on air between 9 a.m. and 11.30 a.m. Depending on the group, each session is about half an hour. The sessions accommodate each groups developmental abilities; more detailed for the larger children, more compact for the smaller children.
We offer our own games, assignments and discussion groups, stories, reading sessions, experiments, songs and projects – moderated by our pedagogical professionals. The idea behind this is that we didn’t just want to provide song lyrics and craft ideas by email and then call upon the parents to “do it yourself”. We wanted to continue kindergarten group life much as possible – in a different form.
Our music teacher Amira, who is already known to many children, has set up her own YouTube channel („Singing with children makes you happy“), where she uploads many of the songs that the children already know and also lots of exercises for children’s yoga.
A special highlight comes from the audio studio of our educator Bernhard Ankly from rainbowtrekkers Lindenthal. Before Corona, he had already prepared a series of audio recordings with the children of his group, which now during the Corona break are being emailed to the families involved. This week the “rainbowtrekkers radio” dealt with books; last week it was called “children explain the world”. Many thanks to Bernhard Ankly and the boys and girls from the snugglebuggs group for the great idea and the lovely implementation.
Many thanks over all go to the entire educational team of all rainbowtrekkers institutions. It is impressive to see the great flexibility with which you are adapting to the new situation and the commitment with which you deliver your services. You have built something that has never existed before!
Against this background, a big thank you also goes to the Marko Miosic, a father from rainbowtrekkers Lindenthal, who shared his technical expertise and supported us in many ways with the implementation of our virtual morning circle (VICI) offer.
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