The child care center at Folts Homes has recently received two grants to help promote intergenerational activities and health and nutrition.
The first grant was through Herkimer County Healthnet and is a physical activity grant. Megan Holynski, Director of the Child Daycare Center, said with this information about physical activity can be sent home with the children. In conjunction with that grant, the child care center also received a grant through the Mid-York Child Care Coordinating Council to create container gardens to be displayed on the units at the Folts Homes. Both grants are a part of the Healthy Start Partnership program.
The Healthy Start Partnership’s mission is to promote healthy weights in childbearing women and their infants in the eight counties served by Bassett Healthcare. It is a $1 million, four-year project, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The idea of the gardens is to cultivate a lifelong interest in healthy eating and gardening and an active lifestyle and develop a growing sense of curiosity in nature, science and the world around them, according to Holynski.
“This is another way for us to teach them about good nutrition,” Holynski said. “With them growing it themselves their more likely to eat it or try something new.”
The children and a couple residents did the initial planting of the container gardens on Tuesday.
Holynski said the children had fun with the planting.
“We let them dig in and get dirty and they had so much fun with it,” she said. “Now they get to watch it grow.”
The children weren’t the only ones to have fun with the project.
“(The residents) faces lit up when they saw the children,” Neighborhood Manager Pamela Nortz said. “They were so happy to be with the children.”
Nortz was asked to choose two residents to participate in the project and she chose Margaret Vivlamore and Mary Paluzzi.
“They just love doing anything with the children,” Nortz said. “It brings back so much to them because they grew up gardening and planting.”
The child care center often visits residents on the units and interacts with the residents.
“There isn’t one resident who will see a child and won’t smile,” Nortz said.
The newly planted container gardens will be placed on the units and the children will be watering them and checking on them on a daily basis.
“This is good because this will get us up on the units,” Holynski said. “It’s also great for the children to be able to see it from the planting stage and watch it grow and turn into something they can eat.”
The children will be watching the growth through the summer and be able to eat what they grew at the end.