Staying connected with the families during this time is very important to me and to the parents. My first thought was to make craft and learn kits, but I knew that it would require me to be very detailed and I did not want to overwhelm any parents with a lot of information about each day's activity. The goal for the kits are for them to be fun, not frustrated work. Experience Early Learning, our preschool curriculum has a blog that I read regularly, and some time last week they shared a helpful article on How to Make Home Learning Bags, it also included the free printable above. Problem solv ..read more

In the midst of the pandemic it can be rather challenging to keep Hope alive. It is torture not seeing the kids, and it has been mentally exhausting at the same time as parents have left the program and may not able to return due to loss of job income and not knowing what the future may hold. As I received those messages my first thought was what am I doing.... why is it that I seem okay while everything around me and in my life appears to be falling apart?! I see children as our future, it is kind of hard for me not to remain positive in a pandemic when a classroom is in my home. Our work at ..read more

On Monday Studio One decided to close until April 5, 2020. It was a very hard decision to make as childcare plays a big role in the family's daily lives, and in mine. All families at Studio One need childcare to go to work. Everyday that we are closed is a day closer to financial hardships for all involved. Also, the children's everyday schedules have been greatly affected. We really are like family at the studio! We tried following a protocol that included a health assessment to ensure everyone who was in attendance did not have any symptoms of the coronavirus. This protocol was torture as I ..read more

We love games! Especially games that sneak in everyday math skills that keep kids happily playing and learning at the same time. Frog Jump is a math game that was included in our lesson materials from our preschool curriculum,Experience Early Learning. The kids are having major fun playing this game! The game is so simple to play, and even though this is an activity from Lesson 4 from March's monthly theme Pond Life we continue to play the game everyday. Really, all I did was set the game mat in front of them and ask them to figure out how to make the frog jump. The frogs are the game pieces ..read more

Lacing beads and scissor practice are activities that I feel should be offered daily to preschool children. Our recent lesson learning about snakes gave the children the opportunity to combine both activities together. Lesson 2 of our monthly theme" Pond Life" topic was about Snakes. All of the day's lessons ideas about snakes came fromExperience Early Learning's preschool curriculum for March 2020. We played the game I Spy a Black Snake during large group time. During the game we talked about what colors and designs that we might see on snakes. Our color of the month is black so we also use ..read more

As a early childcare educator I do feel that my role is to foster social emotional intelligence and to promote academic learning. Social emotional learning goals are embedded in our lessons, and in our environment on a daily basis. Although, I have shared mostly activities that enrich the children cognitively on this blog, however our priority is to focus on social emotional learning first when working with children. When I learned that Experience Early Learning was also providing a curriculum specifically for toddlers/older toddlers, Experience Toddler I did not know much about the component ..read more

Potty training is a big deal! It should be discussed in detail before attempting to potty train another parent's child, and definitely a face to face meeting should be done before a parent announces while dropping their child off that they are working on potty training and please take their child to the potty starting today. Hopefully, consideration has already been given that the child shows readiness for potty training. This can be observed by the parents and the childcare provider, however these signs do not all have to be agreed upon by all involved. The importance of having a potty train ..read more

This week the children and I took the nursery rhyme Pat-a-Cake to another level. We started exploring the first letter of our names as well as the core concept letters of the month Aa, Gg, Qq as a Community Challenge while inserting the first letter of our names while listening to and singing the nursery rhyme Pat-a-Cake. The lessons for our Community Challenges, and other materials that are used throughout the month like our name tags, and the core concept letter cards of the month that was used in our Pat-a-Cake Community Challenge are provided by Experience Early Learning. Pat-a-Cake is a ..read more

I am really looking forward to restarting back our Take Home Bag Program for 2-5 years old who do not attend school. I tried to do our Take Home Bag Program before, but it was rather difficult to keep the rotation going with materials that would be needed to make the activities an inviting experience for both the parents and the children. Our curriculum has definitely been a game changer for us. Experience Early Learning provides all the materials for each lesson. Only basic supplies are mostly required for the teacher to do each lesson. Since we are humans we don't always complete each lesso ..read more

Nursery Rhymes are so much fun to learn and to teach. I am absolutely amazed aboout how our preschool curriculum, Experience Early Learning provides us with new and exciting ways to engage our kiddos of all ages, and keep this early years teacher refreshed with new ideas to keep nursery rhymes a daily part of our days throughout the year. This past week was all about Number Rhymes. One of the books of the month included in February's preschool curriculum, and Experience Toddler curriculum is an Experience Early Learning exclusive, "Nursery Rhymes". What a treat to have all of the popular nur ..read more