An Evening for Children’s Advocacy
Monday, January 30, 2012
Make a Doll: Show Your Support for
Quality Child Care
It’s
Easy!
1. Print the Doll Template on Card Stock and Cut out one for each child.
2. Have Your Children Decorate Them.
3. Bring Them To Annapolis or send it in the mail to your Legislator!
In recent years, when the child care community has gone to Annapolis to advocate for quality child care, we have worn colorful paper dolls imprinted with our message to our elected officials. Wearing the brightly colored paper dolls has made the members of our group easy to identify, and policy makers can’t help noticing how many people come to the State Capital to ask them to support the child care profession and the children in child care. Some of the dolls have been pre-printed and distributed by the event sponsors, but many provider advocates have printed their own paper dolls and had them decorated by the children in their child care programs. These providers came to Annapolis with dolls they could wear and extra dolls they could leave with their elected officials.
For the 2012 event, Maryland Family Network will again be providing imprinted paper dolls, but we would like to offer providers the opportunity to involve your child care children by having them design paper dolls for you to wear or share with your elected officials.
You can print the template for the paper doll and ask the children to decorate it for you to take to Annapolis. Some children may want to put a face and clothing on their doll, others may prefer to create a more abstract piece of artwork. If you want to make it more than an arts and crafts project, you could add a social studies lesson about how the state government will decide how much money to spend on child care, or you could use the paper doll as a “Flat Stanley” project and ask legislators to have their pictures taken with dolls made by their youngest constituents.
There is no right or wrong way to complete this project, except that we recommend using a heavy weight paper, like card stock, for durability. Color and size are up to you. (In the past our dolls have been about 10 ½” tall.) For those who would like to use additional materials to “dress” the doll, we ask that you add a label of some sort on top of the clothing with a message about the importance of high quality child care for all children, birth through school age.
The Evening for Children’s Advocacy in Annapolis is sponsored by Maryland Family Network, the Maryland State Family Child Care Association, the Maryland State Child Care Association, the Maryland Association for the Education of Young Children, the Maryland School Age Child Care Alliance and the Maryland Head Start Association.
