Useful Links for the Whole Family

Family Fun

• Discovery Channel School: Dedicated to making teaching and learning an exciting adventure for students, teachers, and parents. They provide innovative teaching materials for teachers, useful and enjoyable resources for students, and a store full of helpful learning products.
• Family Education Centre: Family Education Centre is non-profit, charitable organization striving to enrich the quality of life for families through community-based, parent to parent education, support and training.
• Kid Proof Canada: Safety courses for kids, babysitter training, home alone first aid, etc.

 

Government Links

• Government of Ontario: Find out important information about child care.
• Ontario Children’s Aid Society: Information about different types of child abuse, responsibility to report and how to report suspected child abuse.

 

Infant and Toddler

• Babies and Sign Language: Provides photos illustrating a number of signs you can use right away for common every day needs. Also offers a free baby sign chart. A very useful site!
• Baby Signs: Offers sign language programs and resources to help you teach your baby or infant sign language.
• Born 2 Sign: This site has a sign language dictionary, including a search by category. The link takes you directly to a good article on how and why signing with your baby is helpful.
• Handspeak: Sign language for babies, infants and toddlers. Handspeak provides infomation and resources to help your baby communicate earlier than they can speak by voice.
• Sign 2 Me: More resources including a very good article on the reasons to use American Sign Language (ASL) signs with your baby instead of inventing your own…
• Your Baby Can Read: Some interesting tools to help your baby make connections between words, images, sounds and actions.
• What to Avoid While Pregnant: Knowing what to avoid eating while pregnant as well as the medications and activities you should steer clear of, can give you and your baby the best chance for a healthy delivery.

 

Just for Parents

• STEM activities – Projects created in collaboration with the educational experts at KiwiCo to promote STEM learning and creative confidence!
• Top 26 Resources for Learning Sign Language: Learn the basic alphabets, which allows you to sign words that you may not know. You can also learn signs for specific words, making it easier to sign sentences.
• Canadian Parents Online: An online parenting community that provides parenting information for pregnant moms and parents of newborn babies, toddlers, preschoolers, schoolaged children and teenagers.
• EPA: A great article on how smoking effects the health of children and babies
• Hospital For Sick Children: The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), affiliated with the University of Toronto, is Canada’s most research-intensive hospital and the largest centre dedicated to improving children’s health in the country.
• Quit Smoking Community: A useful site with great information on smoking and its effects.
• Scholar’s Choice: Scholar’s Choice has everything that a parent needs to enhance their child’s educational development (Toy Site).
• Today’s Parent: A popular magazine for parents, inc. 10 Little Things Good Parents Do article.
• Your Social Worker: Gary Direnfeld is a social worker with more than 20 years of experience working with parents, teens and young children. Ontario courts deem Gary an expert on child development, parent-child relations, and marital and family therapy.
• The Night School Program provides the opportunity to complete secondary school credits in a variety of subjects areas.
• The Centre for Skill Development & Training.