Another Home Daycare Question!

I see your in cortland. so not far from me. Go out to fox valley mall area and go to the chalkboard (its on 59 and 75th street) they have a whole line of stuff to help you with this. My favorite when I was doing home daycare was a great book that had 52 weeks of themes. each week's theme would have art projects, science projects songs to do little stories to incorporate into your theme. colors, numbers etc. I think it was about $15 but it was the best 15 bucks I had ever spent. good luck

I don't really have a particular time of day that I follow. I work on the principle that everything a child does should have some kind of learning component. Everything they do should be at the least constructive. The boys in front of me now are coloring and that of course strengthens their hands. If they watch tv, I stick with learning shows. When they are on the computer I stick with learning games. When they are playing I try and make it high energy to work those bodies.

I take my daycare kids with me when running errands and explain to them how we do things like taking care of fish when I've had them and seahorses when I had those. I do composting and keep worms and the kids look at the worms and their eggs and I'll show them how things are breaking down in there.

I love reading and I do require quite a bit of looking at books. Most of my kids will learn to read with little effort on my part. Between the learning programs on the computer and the time I require them to look at books each day and the shows like Between the Lions and Sesame Street, they just get it.

When they want to do something creative we work that in too. I'll be honest. I'm not a real fan of the messy projects. So we don't do that as often. If possible I like to do something that will be easy to clean up. One day I stopped at dollar general and picked up a paper table cloth, some food coloring and a couple cans of shaving cream. We went to the park and they built mounds, added color, mixed the colors, and when it was all done we just threw it in the trash.

I love to have the kids learn songs. So I play videos with songs or just the songs during nap times and sometimes I make them lay down and listen to audible stories. The most important thing we can do for any Kindergarten teacher is to teach the kids to be willing to take new direction and be flexible. We all know some kids don't flow well from one activity to the other and they seem to NEED everything to be highly structured. But even in a school setting life changes. Stuff happens. Sometimes storms make recess happen in the gym or the school plans something special or the teacher isn't in the best mood or some of the children are being disruptive. I like to fly by the seat of my pants and my kids learn to go with it and adapt.

I like www.time4learning.com for formal preschool.
www.starfall.com is great to begin with and now they have www.more.starfall.com

We used abcmouse.com for awhile. But the kids got bored with it pretty fast.

We also love www.cosmeo.com for documentaries.

If you are going to do things yourself, and are just starting out with themes and such, this is a GREAT way to start. Get this book http://www.amazon.com/Day-Plans-Mailbox-Books-Staff/dp/15..., start using your local library to reserve online the books it uses each week ( I have slowly bought many of them). I have filing boxes (the ones with handles on top, for hanging files), and I put each theme in there. I add other items that go with the themes when I see them on the bazillion other blogs and such I see (if you are on facebook, find Teach Preschool and "like" it, then ideas will pop into your newsfeed every day from other blogs she links. Great ideas and some will make you go "duh..I CAN do that!".

Now I have several of these file boxes, many ideas in each theme, a few printables for each (I am nto a worksheet heavy person), songs and ideas, samples of crafts, etc, etc. It works for me and I LOVE this book!

I used the Mailbox Curriculum. I got it from the local business supply store. I had tons of themes to choose from and had a hard time choosing just 4 for each month.

I taught a class in this at the last Opening MInds Conference, I can email you what I handed out in the class if you would like. Because your group is small, you really only need about 30 minutes a day dedicated to teaching. With 15 kids they each need a minute or two to answer a question, so that is 15 minutes per question, with your group you only need 3 minutes, so that is why you can accomplish more in less time and still do more hands on stuff.
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