CMAS

New Safe Sleep for Your Baby Booklet

Take a few minutes to read this important information on how we can help babies sleep safely and share it with families!

Anti-Bias Education: Recommended Books

Anti-bias curriculum is an approach to early childhood education that sets forth values-based principles and methodology in support of respecting and embracing differences and acting against bias and unfairness. Anti-bias teaching requires critical thinking and problem solving by both children and adults. Here is a list of books that can help!

Affirmation and Celebration: New Report Offers Recommendations for Supporting Multilingual Preschool-Age Children during the Pandemic

Affirming and celebrating all language practices supports children’s identity, and social and emotional well-being, as well as fosters their learning and development. That’s the top message from a new report that focuses on ways that parents, family members and other adults can help multilingual preschool-age children cope with the stress and trauma of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic. Nurturing Your Preschool-Age Multilingual Child Amid COVID-19: The Important Role of Languages describes the language development of multilingual children and how to nurture them through daily conversations and other interactions.

Multilingual mental health resources for newcomers

As part of the Promising Practices in Accessing Virtual Mental Health: Supporting Refugees during COVID-19 project, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Ontario Ministry of Health, service providers working with newcomers and refugees share these multilingual mental health resources.

Let’s Celebrate Family Literacy Day 2022!

Family Literacy Day takes place every January 27th to raise awareness about the importance of reading and engaging in other literacy-related activities as a family. Since 1999, thousands of schools, libraries, literacy organizations and other community groups have taken part in the initiative. ABC Life Literacy Canada creates free learning and resources to get everyone involved! Taking time every day to read or do a learning activity with children is crucial to a child’s development, improving a child’s literacy skills dramatically, and can help a parent improve their skills as well.

Conversations About Culture: Video and Lesson Plan

This video and lesson plan introduces the concept of cultural humility as a guiding principle for effective cross-cultural communication and collaboration. It includes a variety of helpful information, self-assessment tools, and reflective exercises for educators, students, and faculty engaged in cross-cultural research and partnerships.  It was produced in association with the UB Centre for Social Research.

Making Caring Common

Making Caring Common has a variety of resources for families, parents, and caregivers. They offer activities, tips, resource lists, and discussion guides to help you and your team foster kindness and caring with the children in your program.

Newcomer Tips for a Fire-Safe Winter

Mississauga Fire is proud to serve a vibrant and growing community that is home to many new Canadians. To ensure that family homes are safe this winter, they've put together a helpful list of winter fire safety tips and translated them into multiple languages. It's full of great information and resource links that you can share with the families you work with as they establish roots in your community!

Dealing With Uncertainty in the Face of Omicron

We don’t know how bad Omicron will turn out to be. But the appearance of the new COVID variant has already introduced more uncertainty at a time when our patience has been worn thin by nearly two years of pandemic disruptions. Child Mind Institute has some tips for how to stay positive and manage stress.

Children’s Book: Building a Home – Available Online in 7 Languages!

The New Canadians Centre in Peterborough has published this new children’s picture book that shares the experiences of immigrant children when they arrive in Canada. Building a Home is available online in 7 languages. Written and illustrated by Peterborough artist Casandra Lee (herself a recent immigrant), Building A Home was inspired by the stories of six local newcomer children.