The Moorpark College Child Development Center offered hands-on activities and fun for children and parents as part of their annual Discovery Day on Saturday, March 17.
“The activities that we set up are really a reflection of our philosophy at the center,” said Johanna Pimentel, the CDC site supervisor and coordinator of Discovery Day. “With everything that we do, we try to involve as many senses of the children as we can to make this a really good learning experience.”
Discovery Day was a three-hour event that took place in the large back patio of the Child Development Center of Moorpark College. It was open to everyone and drew in hundreds of guests. Not only was the usual play area for the CDC with a swing set and playground with slides open, but there were other activities including a bubble blowing station, face painting, and a Gene West wooden toy play area, which were all set up in an easy to access open space.
“Everything is open, children do not have to go to one and then to the next, they get to choose wherever they want to go,” Pimentel said. “One of the really special things is for Gene West to attend. He’s a wooden toymaker, and his toys are just out of this world.”
With all of these activities to entertain the children, the sound of kids’ laughter echoed throughout the sunlit patio, which was accompanied by the enormous smiles plastered on their little painted faces. Along with the ecstatic children were their parents, including the 39-year-old assistant professor and full-time faculty member of the Los Angeles Pierce Child Development Center and mother of a 1-year-old boy and 3-year-old girl, Alma Cortes.
“It’s a lot of fun, they’re getting a lot out of it,” Cortes said. “I think it’s a really great opportunity for the community to see the college.”
With an event of this magnitude, it takes many people to help put it together. Many of the people that helped construct this event are the student workers of the Child Development Center. They devoted hours of their time to make sure that this event was a success.
“There’s a lot of participants this year, we have a lot of volunteers and a lot of parents, coming in,” said Nasha Adorbehi, a 22-year-old CDC student worker.
Many of the volunteers mentioned that setting up Discovery Day takes about a week, but it’s a smooth process due to everyone treating each other as family. This family atmosphere also stretched to everyone who worked alongside the student workers.
“When we’re setting up, it’s a group effort,” said Shelby Marone, a 22-year-old CDC student worker. “We all pitch in the effort. We’ll take four hour cleaning blocks.”
Pimentel put out as much advertising as possible throughout the community to attract the staggering crowd of hundreds of people to this event.
“We did some extensive outreach with Facebook, all of our families have been passing it around and we get all of our in house print from our own Moorpark College Publishing office; they got a high number of fliers out,” Pimentel said.
