Sentinel Lakewood
December 6, 2012
A Colorado Community Media Publication
ourlakewoodnews.com
Jefferson County, Colorado • Volume 89, Issue 18
Goddard School passes toy test Recommends 10 toys for season By Clarke Reader
creader@ourcoloradonews.com All kinds of toys area competing for children’s attention during the holidays, and to help parents make their choices, The Goddard School in Lakewood has released its top 10 list of preschool-approved toys for 2012. The Lakewood school, 12850 W. Alameda Parkway, was one of 20 Goddard Schools nationwide to test and vote on the best toys for the season. The Goddard School is a nationwide group of preschools for children 6 weeks to 6 years old. It focuses on exploratory learning that builds children’s emotional, social, cognitive and physical skills. “Every year different schools are chosen to have the students see which toys are the best,” said Shannon O’Hara, owner of the Lakewood school. “Parents and teachers were also allowed to vote, and then Goddard collected all in the information to chose the top 10.” The 10 toys selected range from the Gymini Move ‘N Play activity gym for ages 3 months and older to the Poppin Hoppies game for ages 5 years and older. All the toys have educational or developmental benefits, according to O’Hara. Different classes with children of different ages were given age-appropriate
Shannon O’Hara, owner of The Goddard School, left, watches as her daughter Katelyn plays with an assortment of toys the school recently tested. Photos by Andy Carpenean toys to play with and see which ones they enjoyed the most. For the classes with younger children, teachers made observations on which were the most popular, and for older children, teachers used voting for the best toys as a way to teach about charts. “It was wonderful, and we turned the whole thing into a learning experience,” said teacher JoAnn Crabill. “My students are 4 to 5 years old, and we played with toys that helped to build fine motor coordination and cognitive games.” The school started testing the toys Oct. 22, and for that week it was like early Christmas at the school, O’Hara said. Once the results from all participating schools had been collected, the top
Left, Shannon O’Hara, owner of The Goddard School, holds a chart used for the block party toy testing.
THE GODDARD SCHOOL’S TOP 10 TOYS FOR 2012 (Listed by “Suggested Age Range”)
1 GYMINI MOVE ‘N PLAY - 3 months and older 2 MY FIRST TOOL KIT - 6 months and older 3 DR. DOCTOR - 18 months to 5 years 4 ON THE FARM - 18 months and older 5 JUNGLE JINGLES - 2 to 6 years choices were posted on the Goddard website. “It was great to see the kids interacting with the toys before we buy them,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to know which toys the kids were developing an interest in.” O’Hara said the hands-on approach the children had in playing and learning
6 BUBBER SMART SHAPES KIT - 3 years and older 7 CITIBLOCKS NEON WOODEN BUILDING BLOCKS - 3 years and older
8 KALEIDO GEARS - 3 years and older 9 CANDY CONSTRUCTION- 4 years and older 10 POPPIN HOPPIES - 5 years and older
with the toys fits perfectly with the philosophy of the Goddard School “Not everyone learns the same way, so for us education is to provide opportunities to learn different things in different ways,” she said. For information on the top 10 toys selected, go online to www.goddardschool. com/toys.
Jefferson County Open Space celebrates 40th anniversary Four decades after the program was established, work remains By Glenn Wallace
gwallace@ourcoloradonews.com Not many 40-year-olds can boast ownership of 53,000 acres of land, but Jefferson County Open Space can. A group of county residents banded together and formed PLAN Jeffco four decades ago. In 1972 voters approved a county ballot measure asking for a one-half percent sales tax for “planning for, developing necessary access to, acquiring, maintaining, administering and preserving open space real property or interests in real property, and developing paths and trails thereon for the use and benefit of the public.” Since then, that sales tax revenue has helped establish 28 parks with 210 miles of trails across the county. “We’re very known because we’re really the first foothills and mountain experience you can have going west,” Hoby said. An accurate count of annual visitors to Jeffco Open Space land is tough to obtain because there are no gates, no admission charges and multiple entry points to most open-space properties. A rough estimate provided a low-end figure of 2.1 million visits each year.
The North Table Loop as seen through a fence line at North Table Mountain Park, part of Jefferson County open space. Photo by Andy Carpenean “But we have consultants saying to us that we could have up to 6 million visitor days a year,” Hoby said. As popular as Jeffco Open Space may be today, both publicly and politically, it was not always that way. “It was a small and very, very enthusiastic core of people who started this,” Margot Zallen, one of the founding members of PLAN Jeffco, said. The 1972 ballot measure passed with a simple majority, but that was far from the end of PLAN Jeffco’s fight, Zallen said. She
described a series of county-backed efforts in the 1970s and ’80s as “tussles” over whether the county was actually going to hold up its end of the bargain, and properly run and fund the voter-approved open-space plan. “There’s been a lot more cooperation from everyone now. We haven’t had a political fight in years,” she said. “We’ve had a very respectful relationship with developers and private land owners,” Hoby said, thanks to policies such as only seeking to buy land that is for sale, and seeking to pay a fair-market price.
The next 40 years of Open Space will look a lot like the first 40, according to both Hoby and Zallen. Some $160 million in acquisition bonds taken out in 1998 still need to be repaid, while trails, parking lots and bathrooms at existing sites need to be built and maintained. Hoby said the department is especially focused on “Heritage Conservation Areas,” including the banks and canyons of Coal Creek, Clear Creek, Bear Creek and Deer Creek. PLAN Jeffco recently took part in a joint Jeffco and Clear Creek County grant application, which resulted in the counties receiving $4.6 million to help build a multiuse trail through Clear Creek Canyon. Zellen and Hoby said the possibilities for acquisition and park development in Jefferson County could easily fill up the next 40 years. “If the county is willing to continue on that path, pun intended, than there’s a lot of opportunity,” Hoby said. For more information about PLAN Jeffco, go online to Planjeffco.org. For more information about Jeffco Open Space parks or to volunteer, go to Jeffco.us/ openspace.
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