Collaborative Project Inspires a “Magical Breakfast”

Written by Dr. Jerry Stein

Learning Dreams and Magic Breakfast are excited to collaborate on a project to improve parent and child learning in a London primary school.

Magic Breakfast is a nonprofit organization based in the U.K. that delivers free, healthy breakfast foods to primary schools with more than 50 percent free school meals. They provide meals to 6,000 children each morning, which subsequently improves child attendance, punctuality, concentration and behavior in school.

Together with Learning Dreams, Magic Breakfast hopes to reach out to parents who are bringing their children to school every morning.

Using brainstorming materials that help parents identify what they want to learn, Laura Billings has been connecting with parents who want to foster their creative ambitions while caring for their children.

Billings, who is the Magic Breakfast liaison at Furness Primary in London, discovered Learning Dreams while reading Hand Made – a book that features the work of creative new grassroots movements. Her co-partner, Michelle Mensah, is a Literacy Teacher and Parent Support Leader at Furness Primary.

Billings and Mensah recently spoke at a coffee social during a Magic Breakfast morning, and put up a display about Learning Dreams for the parents. She had a great response. Parents were excited to embark on new projects, saying they wished to learn about baking and sewing as well as childcare, sign language and dance. Currently, there are four families enrolled in the program.

Billings said she is planning on expanding her ideas of how U.K. breakfast clubs can play a new role in parent and child learning.

The Learning Dreams partnership with Magic Breakfast marks a new model of operations for Learning Dreams. In the past, Learning Dreams functioned as a stand-alone program that worked with families to support their learning. We are proud of our first model and still use it, most clearly in our St. Paul, Minnesota program.
But more recent programs such as Big Brothers Big Sisters and now Magic Breakfast have added a Learning Dreams component to how they operate.

Magic Breakfast is still Magic Breakfast – they are dedicated to serving breakfast to kids and some parents at school to help them get a good start for the school day. But organization members also feel they can enrich their program with families by adding a Learning Dreams component to how they work.  

For example, while parents are at school in the morning, why not also talk to them about their own dreams? It makes sense to us at Learning Dreams, and we are very excited to see how this newer model of our program works.

The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts is supporting this partnership.