Thanks to Macky Buck and Michael Rome for their care of and contribution to hundreds of children and families in the Cambridge community

Macky Buck and Michael Rome Family Child Care Program 20 Gold Star Rd Cambridge, Massachusetts It is a truly play based program. We are seriously interested in all children, both typically developing and those with special needs, having the opportunity to play their way through understanding of self and others. We believe and have observed that children who play within in the context of attentive teachers with all the toys, art supplies, books, puzzles, shovels, bikes and balls that they need will come across and master what is needed to be ready for kindergarten. By writing daily about children we were able to know where they are, where they are going and where they may be stuck. This becomes the backbone of the truly individual educational plan that each pre-schooler is engaged upon, and which teachers guide when needed. We have always had long outdoor time. We have visited the O’Neil branch of the CPL, and Cindy DelRusso has been a great librarian for all these decades, supporting the children in their first forays into the larger world beyond daycare. This program has had longevity of teachers and place and families and children and neighborhood. This longevity has led to a deeper understanding, and an ongoing learning about how to teach, and how to teach better each day. In fact, this getting better at the job is a big part of what we will miss. Kids have started with us as young as 6 months, but often at 1 or 2 and stayed till kindergarten, followed by younger siblings, we have had the opportunity to develop long lasting and deeply meaningful relationships with many, many people. These relationships have been sustaining for ourselves as well as for our family. As far as other work. We both have done lots of workshops, and provider trainings over the years. I was part of the group of providers who developed the standards for the National Association for Family Child Care Accreditation. I trained a group of Cambridge and Somerville providers to become accredited. When the state briefly looked at developing State Standards for FCC, I was part of that group. I have long stood up for the rights of children to play as well as to be free from the demands of overly academic programs. We find it important to help parents and other teachers to observe what kids know and how they show what they know. I have spoken in many forums about how the social and emotional skills are based upon what is learned in the earliest years of life, and if kids are not surrounded by good teachers at this age, it becomes increasingly difficult to pick this up later, as the demands of academics begin to take precedence. -Macky Buck