Tag: day cares

Building your young child’s knowledge about the world is serious business when they are tiny. They are like precious little blank slates, willing and ready to absorb anything that you impart to them, and it’s a big responsibility to impart the right things at the right time. On the one hand, you can’t cram them full of things they’re not ready to understand. If you try, you’ll quickly find that they either shut down, get bored, or start getting wild and wiggly. On the other hand, you don’t want to just leave it to chance that they will learn the things that they need to know. So how do you maximize the speed that you can build their knowledge and get it to stick?

The answer is in designing experiences for your preschooler so that they will learn by exploring and discovering things for themselves. If you make the learning process into an adventure, the knowledge will stick and become part of their bank of experiences from which they will draw in building future knowledge.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say that you read a banana bread recipe to your preschooler.

Can you even imagine them listening all the way through to the end? You’ll probably even bore yourself.

However, this is how too many academic environments handle the impartation of knowledge. “I’ll tell you these things, you listen, and then I’ll expect you to be able to act on that information.”

A child won’t be able to make banana bread from that kind of instruction.

However, what if you take a different approach?

You let the child pull up a stool to the counter. You pull out all the ingredients you’ll be using and line them up in a row in the order that you’ll add them to the recipe. You talk about their names and let the child look at them all.

Then you allow the child to help by scooping, dumping, and mixing the ingredients, at your direction.

This process of exploration and discovery will show your little one many things.

• If I stir too fast, the flour will go everywhere! Oops!
• Cracking eggs and making them land in the right place is tricky business. And raw egg is slippery.
• When I touch the batter, my hands will get sticky and I’ll be tempted to wipe them on my shirt. I should wipe them on a rag or paper towel instead.
• I can do this! I was helpful!

Here at Darlene’s Wee Care 4 Kids, we make it a priority to give your child the opportunity to learn by exploration and discovery. We want their educational experience at our daycare to be enriching, fun, and beneficial. Enroll your child today!

How big of a role does your child’s daycare play in stimulating their exploration and discovery of the world? Is your child in an environment that takes advantage of the fact that their brains are active and curious? This critical season of life is a time of great potential for your preschooler, and the environment where they spend their days can either help them thrive and excel, or deny them that boost and cause them to stagnate. Here are three of the qualities that our daycare program in Upper Darby believes that every preschooler should have the chance to develop.

1. Confidence

Some children have a natural swagger and an unshakeable confidence in approaching the world, and others have more of a tendency to timidity. When your child becomes an adult, the ability to exude confidence will be a beneficial factor in everything from getting a job to negotiating with people to extending hope to those around them. If children begin to develop solid confidence in their preschool years, it will already be second nature to them to be confident by the time they become adults.

Confidence is not built by being told, “You can do this.” Rather, it’s built by letting a child make an attempt at something a little harder than they’ve done before, and then letting them enjoy a successful outcome. When this happens over and over again in the early years, your child will have a great start on the path to confidence.

2. Creativity

We live in a world with growing problems, which means that we need a generation to rise up who possesses the creativity necessary to confront and solve those problems. Creativity is not just a spark of genius or something that you either have it or you don’t. Creativity can be fostered and cultivated, especially in the early years, by giving children the raw materials with which they can be creative, and then praising them for things they create. Every child should experience the the joy of creativity, and we do our best to promote that in our day care program.

3. Critical Thinking Skills

It is an advanced skill to think carefully about a puzzling problem and then see the way to solve it. Young children are developing critical thinking skills all the time in ways that we don’t notice, from discovering how to turn doorknobs to realizing how to use a stool to reach things that are higher up. However, this critical thinking ability can tend to atrophy unless children are given continual stimulation with new problems to figure out that are just at their level. If the problems are too hard, they can make a child feel dumb and want to quit, while if they’re too easy, they don’t stimulate the kind of critical thinking and problem solving that the child needs.

The great news is that here at Darlene’s Wee Care 4 Kids, we use a curriculum called the Creative Curriculum that is built to enable children to develop precisely these skills. We believe you’ll agree and see the difference when you enroll your child. Get started today!

For most new parents, it is excruciatingly difficult to be separated from your child, and in today’s world, it seems like there’s a never-ending string of milestones or “firsts” when you have to make that separation. When your baby is a newborn, it’s hard to tear your eyes off their chubby little face for even a second to go to the bathroom or take a shower. But as they get older, you start to have to leave them alone for longer and longer amounts of time. You have the first day you have to go to work, the first day you leave your child with a babysitter, the first day you drop them off at daycare, their first day of school, and so many more.

At our daycare in Upper Darby, we are there for so many of those moments, as tearful parents drop their children off and can barely tear themselves away. However, we’d like to encourage you as a parent that if this is the case for you, that’s actually a healthy thing. What you should be concerned about is if you don’t have a close bond with your child. In this article, we’d like to look at what a healthy attachment is and how you can foster that with your child.

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What is Healthy Attachment?

Attachment in early infancy is an important skill for children to have, and there is a very small window of opportunity where children are able to form healthy attachments. If they miss this window, it’s frequently the case that they are unable to form healthy attachments later in life. You as the parent play a big role in fostering your child’s ability to form these healthy attachments, as you are the first person they attach to.

A healthy attachment is a secure bond between parent and child, causing the child to feel safe, loved, protected, and not abandoned. When it breaks your heart to leave your child alone, that’s probably a good thing. Your child is at a crucial stage of brain development where they are forming their perception of how the world works, and your presence, nurture, and love are a big part of that.

Does Leaving my Child Break That Attachment?

The first time you leave your child, it will be incredibly difficult for you and for them, but you will come back. When you repeatedly show your child that even though you sometimes have to go away, you always come back, they will remain secure and realize they don’t need to worry as much when you’re gone. Of course, it is important to choose a daycare provider who will provide that safe, nurturing, loving environment for your child while you’re away. The time you do spend with your child will work to reinforce that strong bond that you’ve had with them since birth.

Darlene’s Wee Care for Kids is a healthy, safe, clean, and loving environment for your child to come to when you have to be at work or away. We love children! If you haven’t enrolled yet, don’t wait any longer. Contact us to start the enrollment process today.