Fellow Dominicans, as the Honourable Minister for Education, Human Resource Planning, Vocational Training and National Excellence, I am indeed delighted about this, my first address to you in observance of Early Childhood Development Month, November 2020. Our theme chosen for the observance of this year’s celebration is “Embracing Opportunities for Early Childhood Development.”
The Collins dictionary describes an opportunity as a favourable combination of circumstances; a good chance or prospect.
So you may be asking, “What opportunities can there be for early childhood during such a worldwide pandemic?” Maybe it might just be paradoxical. It was the great Albert Einstein who told us that “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
To begin with there is always the opportunity to celebrate our children; no matter the circumstance. We know that our children are gifts from God and a gift from God is a gift indeed. For that we need to always embrace the opportunity to say thank you to the almighty for our little children; the future women and men of tomorrow; the future human resource of our dearly beloved country.
We in the Ministry of Education are grateful for the opportunity to work more closely with you the families in educating our children. If there is one thing that has come to the fore during this present situation, is the realization that we need the total involvement of families in educating our little ones.
I am hoping that as families you would have noticed that active learning which is the approach for nurturing the minds of our children is not only for the classroom but very much for the home environment. What we do at school should always be continued at home and children should be given the opportunity to relive what they do at home. In other words, the school should go home and home should come to school.
This article is copyright © 2020 DOM767
