​Easterseals Donation Helps Children with Creativity and Emotions

Easterseals’ work with children and families is often visible. After all, some of a child’s most obvious developments include how they progress from crawling to walking, how they learn to feed themselves, or how they learn to read. The list goes on.

But, as most know, Easterseals services attend to the whole child – including his or her social development, emotional development and creativity.

Thanks to a recently received financial contribution, Easterseals’ Early Childhood Education Center, Daytona Beach, soon will begin offering the “Create a Pal” program to its students, allowing teachers to help children better develop important social-emotional skill sets.

Through Create a Pal, teachers will be able to create magical experiences for the children already enrolled, while allowing new students to Create a Pal (stuffed animal) when they enroll at the Center. The fuzzy friends they make with through their own creativity can comfort them while they’re at school and go back and forth from home to school with them every day as well. 

“Being able to tie in the creativity of making your own stuffed animal friend with our curriculum is amazing,” said Principal Margaret Smith. “We can use the Create a Pal machine to enhance everything we do, particularly when it comes to social-emotional learning.”

 “We’re grateful to the donor who made this program possible in our school,” said President/CEO Bev Johnson. “With Create a Pal, our teachers are able to provide yet another way to encourage children’s creativity and support them in their emotional development. Those are two features of our Early Childhood Education Centers that truly set them apart from other centers.” 
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Teachers are being trained in how to bring Create a Pal to life and parents of students at the school soon will be able to register their children for the program. It’s only a matter of time before Easterseals’ Early Childhood Education Center is brimming with fuzzy friends and extra-wide smiles.  

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