By Lulu Jaeckel
The first five years of a child’s life can be a lost opportunity for learning because most community services, like kindergarten, don’t start until age five, said Como resident Julia Kallmes, the director and co-founder of Kaleidoscope Learning.
Kallmes and Jennie Lynch of Richfield, the president and co-founder of Kaleidoscope Learning, want to fill this void.
“Every time a child plays with a toy here, it might look simple, but there’s a lot of learning and brain development and connections being made,” said Kallmes, who has a master’s degree in elementary education and teaching.
Toys and gross-motor play materials fill the shelves of Kaleidoscope Learning, an early childhood education space located inside Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church in St. Paul (1669 Arcade St.).
Kaleidoscope Learning offers families with children, ages 0-6, the opportunity to play with Montessori-inspired toys during open play, according to Kaleidoscope’s website. They also have a toy library with over 700 toys including gross motor items and Montessori materials.
Families who have monthly or yearly memberships can rent out up to eight toys from the toy library, Lynch said. Families can benefit from this because they don’t have to purchase the toys and can exchange them for new ones as their children grow.
“Children go through developmental stages very quickly at this age,” Lynch said. “What might satisfy a child three months ago probably won’t satisfy them now.”
The inspiration behind Kaleidoscope Learning was to create a community of support for parents and caregivers raising young children who experience parental burnout, Kallmes said.
U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said in an Aug. 28, 2024 advisory that families urgently need support to help the community thrive. Thirty-three percent of parents report high levels of stress com, pared to 20% of other adults.
“The thing about having young children is that it is a joyful experience, but it’s also a really demanding and stressful one and sometimes those joys can be delayed,” Kallmes said. “The most important thing to me is that word ‘community’ as people coming together, having a third space that isn’t their home or workplace and that is also welcoming to young children.”
Kaleidoscope Learning opened its doors in 2022 focusing on the toy library. To provide more support for caregivers of young children, who generally cannot take children to outside spaces like playgrounds in the winter months, they began offering free open play hours, Lynch said.
The weekly open play events include a musical storytime on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10-10:20 a.m. and Fine Motor Fridays from 9:30 a.m. to noon, Lynch said. She noticed a growth in families that participated in these weekly events.
“Sometimes when you go to school for the first time, it’s like landing on a different planet,” Kallmes said. “I think that our open play hours are school adjacent but in a really gentle way because you’re with your adult.”
Open play is available to children ages 0-6 Monday-Friday from 8:30 a.m. to noon and Saturdays from 9:30 a.m. to noon.
“We try to be responsive in what people need and a big ask was weekend hours,” Kallmes said, so they added the Saturday time.
All of the weekly events are free of cost. The price of monthly memberships ranges from $10-$20.
“We don’t want cost to be a barrier to anybody,” Kallmes said. “My hope would be that we enrich the ecosystem of support and pull people in so that parents have access to resources.”
Multi-age learning allows the older children to be role models while the younger children follow, according to the American Montessori Society.
It strengthens the community and allows children to collaborate and socialize.
“It can be really rewarding for, say, a four-year-old to model sharing or taking turns for a two-year-old who’s in the space,” Kallmes said. “It’s actually one of our strengths to have a mix of ages in the room.”
Lynch and Kallmes said they hope to cultivate relationships with families raising young children who need support.
“We’re just one piece of the puzzle in the larger ecosystem of family support,” Lynch said. “So oftentimes when we look at other organizations and childcare centers, we think of it as a symbiotic ecosystem.”
Lulu Jaeckel is a University of Minnesota student majoring in journalism.
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