A Fun Year for HIPPY

Hillary Clinton is pictured with HIPPY officials at the

banquet inWashington, D. C. Local HIPPY representatives

attended National HIPPY Conference in the Nations

Capital last month.

Wow! This is such a busy time for us in HIPPY. We have come very near the completion of another great program year. Our year began with a brand new curriculum for our 3 year olds and it proved to a much needed change. The activities were made a little more rigorous but also more exciting. Our 4 year old curriculum will be different this upcoming program year and we are looking forward to rolling it out.

We have accomplished so much this year. We had our site visit from one of our officials in Little Rock, Arkansas in February. It was a great visit. We enjoyed having Ms. Gail Vavasseur-Jones, National Trainer for HIPPY USA, with us for 2 days. She checked to see if we were running our program in compliance with our national office and retrieved any of our creative methods or approaches that we use to share with other sites. We have this sort of visit every 2 years and there is much to do in preparation for the visit. As long as our program is running as it should be then our preparations are nothing extra or new to us.

Xyonda and Kimmora Robinson enjoy the

 HIPPY trip to the Zoo.

We were able to take our families on a field trip to the Montgomery Zoo this past April as many of our lessons would suggest that parents try doing this and one of our assessments always asks if the parents have taken their child to the zoo. It was a joy to see and hear the children’s excitement even on our bus ride. The children and the parents had a great time. We had beautiful weather too.

HIPPY has been able to help with Pre-K registration again this year and last month we were able to host Literacy Day for our Pre-K and Kindergarten classes. The children came to Central Office and were able to enjoy Don Monopoli’s Learning Station. They rocked out to silly fun songs and we took notice at how many parents, along with all of the teachers, were engrossed in the activities. Pre-K stayed the entire day and enjoyed outside activities and ended the day with popcorn and a movie. We were completely worn out by the end of our day but it was awesome seeing all of the little smiling faces.

Last week, Deltonya Warren, Director of Instruction and HIPPY, Brenita Williams, HIPPY Coordinator, and Catherine Chapman, HIPPY Assistant Coordinator was able to attend the National HIPPY Conference in Washington, DC. We were celebrating 25 years of having a national office in the US and Hillary Clinton came to join us in our celebration as she was our guest speaker for the Avima Lombard Awards Banquet and she helped to present the award to this year’s winner Judy Gibson who has worked with HIPPY in Arkansas for 24 years. Our State Director, Joanne Shum, had been nominated for the award as well and has done so much for HIPPY in the state of Alabama. Though we were disappointed that she did not receive the award we also realize there are many worthy to receive this honored award. Mrs. Shum will always have the vote of here programs here in Alabama.

On Wednesday, while we were still in DC we were able to go to the capital and meet with our state’s political leaders. We were privileged to meet with Representative Martha Roby who sat with us and asked what she could do for our program. We felt very welcomed with her.

We had some great training while in DC but our trip had to come to an end and we had to get back to Eufaula, Alabama to finish up our program year. We are planning our graduation celebration now as we only have a couple weeks left. If you have a child age 3-5 years old, would like to give your child an edge in education and life and would like to come have fun with us next year please feel free to come and fill out an application at 333 State Docks Road. Enrollment is first come first serve and we will start back up again in late September. If you have any questions you can call 687-1100 ext 152 Monday through Friday from 8-2:45pm.