Co-creating culturally grounded strategies with family child care providers to ease children’s transitions into kindergarten.

Cheryl is passionate about helping children in family child care settings transition smoothly into kindergarten, recognizing that this shift can be overwhelming without proper support. As a former kindergarten teacher and elementary school administrator, she has witnessed how excluded providers often feel from the transition process despite knowing the children best, while families worry and children face new routines without adequate support. This project serves as her response to honor those voices and co-create tools that help children feel confident and connected from day one of kindergarten.

Cheryl is eager to learn which tools and strategies best support emotional readiness and reduce anxiety in children as they transition from family child care into kindergarten. She looks forward to gaining deeper insight into how co-created, culturally grounded approaches—like visual schedules, goodbye rituals, and transition kits—are received by families and providers, and which are most impactful. Cheryl is also curious about how these tools can be adapted across diverse communities and how to effectively build bridges between family child care and elementary school systems. This learning will help shape a scalable, equity-focused model for supporting school transitions in early childhood.