For parents who are feeling nervous about the upcoming school year because of their child’s behavior issues or the impact school has on their wellbeing, the Traveling Teacher Catrice Dennis has some encouragement and options.

Drive through Federal Way enough and you might catch a glimpse of the Teaching With Love and Care program’s colorful bus as they carry learners to enrichment activities like gymnastics, carpentry or time learning to grow food on a farm.

Teaching With Love and Care is a not a school or a daycare, instead it is an alternative educational enrichment program that focuses on young learners. Their students have often not entered schooling in a traditional way yet or have entered it but found that homeschooling seemed a better fit. Some of their students do part time homeschool or attend enrichment activities for a short period of time or just in the summer and then return to a more traditional classroom.

The enrichment program is led by Catrice Dennis who teaches students life and learning skills to help them “develop good human beings and through this they will naturally progress mentally, socially, emotionally, spiritually and academically” according to their website.

The program began in 2018 and serves learners from all over the South King County, North Pierce County and the Seattle area. Group sizes are typically quite small of about 10 students or so, but they are part of a larger community and they hope to someday open a wellness center to expand their offerings.

While each day and enrichment activity is different, a typical day starts with affirmation and wellbeing exercises then a visit to a location that offers an activity where they can learn and play in an active hands-on way.

Their focus is on helping learners have a positive and joyful relationship with learning and with themselves and their community. One need that this responds to is what the American Psychological Association described in 2023 as a crisis in kids’ mental health that has only been exacerbated by the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Out of all the time I’ve been working with children, it’s getting younger and younger that they don’t feel good about themselves,” Dennis said. She said that when they enter the program and are invited to do affirmations, it is actually “extremely hard for them at six, at five, at eight, to think of something good about themselves.”

As just one example, Dennis spoke about one student who at 4 years old already “thought she was terrible at learning.”

“I’m just like, something happened wherever she came from, you know? …So we have to really focus on building her foundation and her confidence, and restructuring that relationship with learning,” Dennis said.

After working on her beliefs about herself and her confidence, Dennis said “she was reading by the end of our time together.”

The American Psychological Association also describes how trauma and stress can get in the way of the brain’s ability to learn and process information, especially for young people.

To parents with kids who are struggling with mental health and behavioral issues, Dennis and Davis encouraged them to trust themselves and know that there are more options for what learning can look like than they might know, like homeschooling or alternative programs like theirs.

“Sometimes when you’re in traditional schooling or childcare systems, you start to feel shame and guilt and overwhelm for your child’s behaviors,” Asiyah Davis said in an interview. She is Licensed Mental Health Counselor who just completed a Master’s in Psychology and is also Catrice Dennis’ daughter and has worked with Teaching With Love and Care for the past year.

At Teaching With Love and Care, Davis said they navigate those behaviors through love. In speaking with parents, Davis said that instead of coming from a space of judgement, it looks like saying “we’ve noticed these patterns, this is what we’re doing. Do you need support in how to navigate this? Or, what do you do to deal with this?”

Dennis explained that parents get worried about their child missing benchmarks or getting behind academically, but said it is “harder to recover” from having emotional and mental health challenges that aren’t addressed.

When a child enters their programming, their first step is to “partner to create individualized learning plans and have parents and their child involved in what their child is going to learn, and how to come up with a plan to help execute the goals and execute the plan that we’ve created for their child,” Dennis explained.

Parents are also invited to attend enrichment programming with their children, which Dennis said has naturally developed into an intergenerational learning experience.

“You hear often … it takes a village, but it really does, and when that village is thriving … It has a healthy impact on everyone, the parent themselves, the children, other people’s children and even the instructors,” Dennis said.

Through this enrichment, students not only build emotional and social skills, they also see how more typical subjects connect to themselves and the real world.

“We love carpentry class,” Dennis said, as an example of this. “We’re able to incorporate some math skills, critical thinking skills, because in carpentry, they actually are learning how to build.”

The goal is to help them see learning as something they do all the time and by “shifting that lens” and putting the information “in a different package”, Dennis said they see their learners start “taking responsibility and ownership over their own learning.”

“We’re able to provide just a different approach to it, where it inspires children to want to learn. Like I have kids asking me, are we going to do math today?” Dennis said.

“For everything we do, joy is at the center of it,” Dennis said.

If parents are interested in learning more about the programs offered by Teaching With Love and Care or wants to learn more about alternative learning pathways that support mental health, visit teachingwithloveandcare.com or call or email at (206) 649-2727 and hello@teachingwithloveandcare.com.

Asiyah Davis is a Licensed Mental Health Professional and Catrice Dennis’s daughter. She began working at Teaching With Love and Care a year ago.

Asiyah Davis and Catrice Dennis hold enrichment activities in many locations throughout Federal Way and beyond, including nature walks at Hylebos Wetlands where this photo was taken.

The mobile classroom used by Teaching With Love and Care for their enrichment activities for young learners. Photos by Keelin Everly-Lang / the Mirror