Sparling – enhanced caregiving

The third element of the Abecedarian approach is enriched caregiving. Enriched caregiving is something that most people do intuitively, but we’re bringing this to a higher level of consciousness and a higher level of intentionality and a greater frequency in terms of interactions. Enriched care giving is the care act, whatever you’re doing – changing diapers, providing food, taking the coat off, combined with some teaching content, and those two things: care plus some educational content equals enriched caregiving.  

Many people do this intuitively, but people who use the Abecedarian approach do it very purposefully and they do it frequently; they do a lot of this kind of talk and a lot of this kind of interaction. You talk about the colour of the coat as you’re putting it on, you count the sleeves, you talk about the process of zipping the zipper; the zipper is going up, up, up, and you talk about the food, you name the food and the textures and you ask questions about the shape of the bowl. I was just doing a training today and teachers were asking questions about, they were talking about “let’s count the spoons on the table,” and they counted the spoons and they counted the forks and then they said “oh, spoons and forks together, are utensils, oh, how many utensils are there?”  

So they are doing this right in the process of caregiving, and it’s really interesting. I’ve talked to people who have used this and they say far from making my job more work for me, this makes my job easier because the kids are more engaged and they’re more happier and so forth, and so they’re learning at all times. Kids always learn during care giving, but they may only be learning that the adult just wants me to hurry up and finish my meal, or get that coat on quick, but they can learn good things and important educational content and the importance of enriched caregiving is that there is so much time that necessarily is taken to caregiving, and the way we make our program strong and powerful is by linking our education and our care, and our care carries the education forward. I often say there’s no extra time needed. You were going to use that time anyway for caregiving, so you just add that extra component of education to it.