By Amanda Pevey
Elmore Autauga News
During the entire month of December, many families enjoyed seeing festive parades, musical concerts, Christmas plays and visits with Santa Claus. Another exciting event takes place in December with the annual Elmore County HIPPY program’s Christmas group meeting. HIPPY stands for Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters. Sixty families are participating in the FREE HIPPY program and over 150 people attended this event.
The FREE HIPPY program is provided to families with preschoolers between the ages of two and five in Elmore County by the Elmore County Board of Education.
At the event, the HIPPY Coordinator, Sherry Spigener welcomed all guests and introduced the families to their Home Visitors and the Guest Speaker, Justin Robinson.
The Home Visitors for the 2024-2025 school year are, Reyna Contreras, Dell Howard, Amanda VanHouten, Amber Hoggard, Jennifer McEachern and Allison Judah.
The families did a warmup activity that consisted of adults designing an ugly sweater page and the children did a Christmas dot a dot page.
Justin Robinson with the Elmore County Family Resource Center spoke to the families about the resources available to them within Elmore County.
Dinner was provided to all the attendees that consisted of a holiday meal by the Elmore County Child Nutrition Program. The meal consisted of smoked turkey with all the fixings and dessert.
After dinner, the families were able to visit with Santa Claus and get a picture with him, story-time with Christmas cookies for the children, and crafts for the children as well as the adults. Crafts included a finger snowman canvas for the kids, and a wooden snowman ornament for adults.
The event concluded with a reminder about their next meeting which will be on January 23rd at 10:30 a.m. All sixty children in the HIPPY program received a gift at the end of the event.
“We had a wonderful turnout for our annual Christmas family group meeting,” said HIPPY Supervisor Terri Carrico.
She continued, “It is truly a blessing to partner with the Alabama State Department of Early Childhood Education to bring this program to families who reside in Elmore County. It is important for us to provide opportunities for parents to make sure that their young learners are prepared when they reach elementary school age, and the HIPPY program is a wonderful resource for parents.”
For more information about the Elmore County HIPPY program, please contact the HIPPY Coordinator, Sherry Spigener at (334) 567- 1200 ext. 24009 or email [email protected]. You can also visit their Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/share/14YgcCMvbo/?mibextid=wwXIfr.
