Butterfly Wings

I hope this post does not turn out to be thought of me boasting about my child's achievements - because I'm certainly not out to do that. However, I just have to share what I feel is a result of a program I was involved in back in my maternity leave days.

Butterfly Wings is a program that I ended up being involved with while on maternity leave with my daughter. I was attending a local playgroup hosted by the local community health centre. My memory gets a bit thin here - mummy brain - but I think they asked if anyone was interested in attending some training to become facilitators of an under 2's literacy and numeracy development program. Coming from a librarian background, I jumped at the chance and attended the training.

Gwen and Lisa are inspirational trainers and so passionate about their program it wasn't hard to get excited and enjoy learning. The thing that stuck out for me the most was a slide they showed of the brain size of a child who had been interacted with by their carers and one who hadn't. The size difference was amazing. As you may have guessed, the child who had interaction had a large brain from absorbing all that information, and the child who was neglected had a very small brain. If anything, this slide highlighted the importance of bonding with your child.

Once I became a facilitator, another mum from our group who also did the training and I sought funding to run the program at the Community Health centre. Not long after we were also approached to run it at the Gailes Neighbourhood House. These centres were in low socio-economic areas so funding for literacy and numeracy development was important.

Now I could go on and on about how good the program is - and I recommend my library friends check out the website I linked to above and follow up with Gwen and Lisa about some training for your library staff - but it is the impact it is having now on my child that I want to share.

When I shared this with Gwen, she said she shed a tear but said it was really my bonding with my child that is the cause of this - not necessarilly Butterfly Wings - I think it is a mix of both.

My daughter participated in the Butterfly Wings program from 6mths of age. I had also been reading to her since she was born - something that I highly recommend. You might feel a little silly and they may not always like it - but most of the time they love hearing your voice.

My daughter is now in the advanced reading group in her class, she is writing some wonderful imaginative stories and she speaks very well (we often get comments about this). I feel that a lot of this has happened due to the Butterfly Wings program and the time we spent together singing songs, doing interactive rhyme and sharing stories.

I hope that the other mums that participated in the program are sharing similar stories because I just feel that this program - and others similar to it - give our children the best start in life and it would be really interesting to do some research to show the statistics or evidence that those children who participate in programs such as Butterfly Wings do perform better later in school life!!