Helping children get ready for school

Helping children get ready for school

Four-year-old Tony points proudly to his colourful wall of drawings.

Crayoned cars, trucks and transformers fill the wall, while on the main table, there’s another creation -- a storybook he made based on Thomas the Tank Engine.

“He loves to draw,” says mom Xue Mei proudly.

Settling into Vancouver is not easy for new immigrants, she says, and when the kids are young and mothers have to stay home, it’s often especially boring and lonely.

Many immigrants can’t afford early childhood support like daycare or kindergarten and lack of English language skills and cultural differences can make it hard for their kids to fit in when they start kindergarten. Xue Mei wants to make sure that Tony is not one of them.

So last fall, when Tony was three, she signed up with the HIPPY program. HIPPY, which stands for Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters, aims to help disadvantaged children and their parents, often immigrant families. HIPPY’s focus is on the parents, believing that the parents are a child’s first and best teacher.

The free educational program started in Israel around 30 years ago, and was brought into Canada by executive director Debbie Bell nearly 10 years ago. Community Innovation Grant funding from United Way of the Lower Mainland in the initial stages helped get it off the ground.

Now HIPPY Canada helps between 80 to 95 families in the Lower Mainland, and about 350 families across the country at any one time.

United Way of the Lower Mainland is committed to helping children by significantly increasing the number of school-ready children in Metro Vancouver through Success By 6 and other early childhood development support.