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Interacting with Your Child
You can create rich, interactive environments for your child that support their brain development and physical growth. Home visiting programs and the other resources below can support healthy development and learning through play, reading, and hands-on learning.
Interactions with your child shape their brain architecture. When an infant or young child babbles, gestures, or cries, and an adult responds appropriately with eye contact, words, or a hug, neural connections are built.
- Watch this short video clip for details on your important role in the development of your child’s brain.
- Much like a game of tennis, volleyball, or Ping-Pong, the back-and-forth between adult and child—known as serve and return—is fun and helps build young brains.
The Kansas Home Visiting website provides everything you need to know about home visiting including what it is, who the various home visiting programs serve, and locations/contact information of programs around the state.
- Universal Home Visiting is a supportive program for prenatal through postpartum families with infants up to 12 months. Every Kansas family can receive up to three visits through this free program.
- The Kansas Parents as Teachers program offers home visiting services and provides resources online including behavior checker tools and a Kindergarten preparedness packet.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is open to any Kansas child from birth to their 5th birthday.
- Families who enroll their child receive free, age-appropriate books mailed directly to their home every month.
- The Imagination Library also offers reading tips and introduces you to Story Adventures, an interactive, literature-based stroll to take with your child at state parks in Kansas.
Child Start, a Head Start program in the Wichita area, has produced this storybook and accompanying activity guide, free to download and use with your child to explore the outdoors and learn about the Oregon Trail.
- Brookes Publishing, provider of screening tools and curricula, suggests 24 at-home learning activities.
- Vroom.org offers a mobile app with daily tips for interacting with your child along with explanations of how you are brain building together.
- The Center for Disease Control (CDC) offers many free materials for monitoring your child’s growth and development, including a mobile app.
Spotlight
Health Insurance Resources for Child Care Professionals
The Insurance Stipend Program for Childcare Providers will provide a stipend of up to $3,600 a year to assist with the cost of purchasing health coverage in the State of Kansas.
1-800-Children
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