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KAIMH Connections
Resources for Early Childhood Mental Health Advocates
Updates | January 2025
Highlights in this newsletter include updates for our annual KAIMH conference, information about the emerging updated Competency Guidelines for IMH-Endorsement®, financial support for new endorsees, mindfulness activities, micro-learning videos, and upcoming professional development events and scholarship opportunities!
Financial Support for New Endorsees
Thanks to funding from the Preschool Development Grant, KAIMH is able to offer scholarships to cover application and processing fees for new Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Endorsement applicants. If you have been considering applying for your IMH-E® credential, or know someone interested, now is the time! To apply for this support, please click here!
The LEGO Foundation
Learning Through Play Free Resources
The Lego Foundation has a program called, Learning Through Play, which offers a wide variety of easy to access activities that can be played indoors or out – using everyday things at home. This is a great resource for families and early education professionals looking for new ideas for children ages 0-12 to support wellbeing, ease transitions and promote playfulness. Click below to check it out!
Join us May 1-2, 2025 in Salina Kansas for our Annual KAIMH Conference. This year we will be celebrating 30 years of service with a birthday celebration and evening mixer. To start off the fun, keynote speaker, Tabatha Rosproy, 2020 National Teacher of the Year, will present, From Tiny Seeds Grow Mighty Trees.
Working with children and families is one of the most worthwhile endeavors one can choose, but it’s also a field that experiences frequent burnout. Join us for a morning and afternoon session where we explore how to cultivate tiny seeds of joy in our lives that will sustain us through challenges and reinvigorate our passion. Tabatha will use her background in improvisational comedy and knowledge of play-based practices to help us take an active role living lives of joy! Come ready to laugh and learn and play together!
Tabatha is a career early childhood educator with 12+ years of experience working in Head Start, center-based early education, home-based services for birth through three years old and as a public school pre-k teacher. She is known for helping create a unique preschool program housed in a retirement community and nursing home, where students interact with community residents who serve as volunteer “grandmas” and “grandpas.” While fostering relationships and implementing Conscious Discipline in this inter-generational setting, Tabatha became the first early childhood educator to be honored as a National Teacher of the Year.
Tabatha used her platform as the 2020 National Teacher of the Year to promote the importance of early childhood education and to advocate for social and emotional learning (SEL) for all students. She continues this effort as a talented, energetic and highly motivational Conscious Discipline Certified Instructor.
In addition to her work as a Certified Instructor, Tabatha is an early childhood coach for the second-largest school district in Kansas. She incorporates her vision for innovative approaches, her varied experiences teaching young children, her passion for social emotional learning, in her work with educators, parents and children.
For more conference details, including breakout sessions, registration, hotels and more, check out the conference page on our website.
Micro Learning Videos from WIAIMH
The Wisconsin Alliance for Infant Mental Health has a compilation of learning videos that explain a host of early childhood mental health concepts that are perfect for sharing. Topics include the parallel process, goodness of fit, attachment and attunement, behavior as communication, regulate and recover, reflection and more! Check out this great resource below!
Mindfulness at Work
The Deveraux Center for Resilient Children offers a variety of free resources and on-demand webinars, including supports for mental health consultants, families, early childhood professionals and more. Check out this Mindfulness at Work resource that includes six activities to help with stress reduction. Click on the picture below to download!
. Here's a sneak peek at what they learned: • Infant and early childhood mental health (IECMH) professionals identified essential competency areas, including infant basic needs, early relationship formation, critical self-reflection, and more. • Families shared the traits they value most in providers supporting their little ones, such as compassion, empathy, and understanding families with young children and disabilities.
This information and more will shape the focus of the new Competency Guidelines, designed to summarize the core knowledge and skills needed to effectively support infants, young children, and their families. Click the button below to learn more about their findings.
Kansas Connecting Communities has training scholarships available for a variety of topics suitable for clinicians and trainers. Whether you have taken advantage of this funding in the past or are new to the network, they highly encourage you to apply. Funding can be used to access a variety of live and on-demand trainings, including Postpartum Support International's Perinatal Mood Disorders 2 Day Components of Care training taking place on January 29th and 30th (normally $425). You can view the full list of eligible trainings here. The application takes just a few minutes and funding notifications generally happen within 1 week of submission.
January-February Professional Development
Check out these upcoming professional development opportunities that support your Infant Mental Health Endorsement® from the Early Childhood Investigations Webinars, Kansas Child Care Training Opportunities, Kansas LEND, Kansas Children's Service League, and Child Care Aware network.
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