Fern Friends is Licensed, Hooray!

It's been a hot week at Fern Friends! Watering the plants this week is a much bigger job, and when we get permission to water one thing, it's a lot of fun to water everything. Be expecting more water table and watering can play in the coming week, and check your extra clothes. We did some cooking this week for lunches and snack, and I expect more coming up. The garden play has taken off in a big way, too, as checking the bed for sprouts became a daily activity, and some of our friends got to plant their own garden all by themselves without much in the way of help. If we keep working on it and it grows nice and bushy, we'll have more materials to play with outside. :) Our inside castle boxes were a little drab, so we painted them, and as soon as I figure out how to reach it down, the sheet covering the porch roof will get a kid color touch, too. 

This week has brought some changes, and some difficult surprises. Fern Friends has a license with my name on it now, and once again we find ourselves looking at hiring a new person. Molly will be coming in from 9-2:30 during the next week, and we are scheduling interviews in the evenings again. I have hired Jenn to handle the hiring process this time around (with input) and she will be bringing candidates to the parents to meet and grill soon. The ad we wrote this time seems to have attracted different candidates than the previous one, and she is conducting the preinterviews with her usual efficiency. You can reach her at jennfromfernfriends@gmail.com with any questions about this process. She says she already has several promising applicants! 

Sprouts and Crayons

Our sprouts are coming up, and everything else is coming out of the woodwork, as well. Ants and spiders and everything else are buzzing around, making digging near the garden a favorite. From nearly the time they get here till they want to go home, our friends have been outside. I'm giving serious thought to having circle time under the shade outside, as our enchanting summery spring is not to be missed. 

Most of my time outside work right now is taken up with getting ready for our licensing appointment on Wednesday, be sure to collect a high-five from me Wednesday afternoon. After some conversations with my licenser, the area may change a little (I may choose to change the available areas back behind the trees, and we'll be washing hands for lunch in the daycare kitchen sink once I put a step up.) We'll be taking down the sheet under the covered roof to paint plants on it this next week, which should be a lot of fun.

We've taken a couple short trips around the block, and on Friday, across Hayes and Garfield to the park in the afternoon. The sensory table will be a water table again, and I'm expecting a plant stained glass to send home (waxed paper) this coming week. 

I'm going back to work now. I'd love to see any of you coming by around lunch this week, it's going to be gorgeous outside! 

If anyone has a set of Stockmar Wachsfarben crayons they'd like to donate to the crayon box, they'd make a great supplement to the ones I'm getting for more coloring and lettering work. I would like to have more work being sent home, since we're going to be doing more table art work for our inside portion in the coming weeks. I plan on spending more time outside after the first hour or two each day, as my curriculum continues to build. Magnifying glasses, more construction work, and a larger area for the kids to interact with plants and dirt in both constructive and exploratory ways are on my agenda.

Highlights From a Very Busy Week

It's been a very busy week, so I'm going to give you the highlights:

• We've transplanted our pansies, they're over by Gerri's porch
• We planted a bed of peas past the fence, and more into the bed where the pansies were. Great helpers this week, breaking up clods, planting, weeding, watering, I'm proud of all of them.
• We made a handprint rainbow to hang on the wall, thanks to our friends and a bunch of paint - that will be staying there a while!
• We made banana bread again this last week. This time, we made it into muffins. 
• I've brought out some nicer shovels for two kids at a time to use in the big dirt pile near the fence.

Coming this next week: 

More planting, watering, digging, going to make a story at circle time together, more cooking projects, and hopefully some sun! 

Thanks for a great week, let's have another one!

Dress-up and Building Castles

This last week was pretty great, both for the kids and for me. Dress-up and building occupied a lot of the mornings this week, with castles and the new box-blocks and some towers and houses. Watching the kids cooperate to build things that were taller than their heads was pretty awesome. It's also interesting to hear negotiation about personal space and language about being careful being mirrored - we're always careful what we model, but it's really gratifying to hear it processing.

It's always the right time to play with words, and this week was a lot of fun with that, with some conversation about the words in the books we knew, some experimentation with sounds and letters, and circle time is a favorite time for playing "guess the word" on big sheets of paper. Brought that back to our hands-on materials with markers and butcher paper, and a pretty watercolor activity Patty set up on Tuesday where we painted the first letter in our names with contact paper - some of our friends got excited and used so much the letters weren't really visible, but I love the familiarization activities, and they love getting to work with paint. Letters and numbers continue to be a big part of our curriculum for the kids, and for those who are a little too young, it's still a great time to be included. Thursday, we made some lovely stained-glass windows you'll see hanging up as you come in on Monday. More projects to come!

Friday, we took a quick trip around the block, collected pine cones, picked dandelions, and visited the Bear. Often, the themes I introduce on a day take second fiddle to the kids' play, and that's fine. So we sang "What Shall We Do With a Pirate Sailor" and they built ships out of blocks. 

Coming soon: building another planting bed, planting peas this week, starting our herb garden, marigolds, and learning to take care of some house plants. 

See you next week!

Another Great Week

This week has been lovely. Barely even needed to water, but that hasn't stopped the kids. There's still been enough time to work with shaving cream on the porch table, which if you haven't tried at home, you absolutely have to. You can write names in it, sound out letters, you name it. I like to make sure every kid gets a chance to talk about what they're doing, it's pretty amazing the things they write. Counting games in the shaving cream are fun, too. I've had a lot of parents ask about kindergarten prep, and I wanted to talk about our continuing exposure to letters, words, and numbers, along with our play and work, and we've continued to take every opportunity to bring letter sounds, crafts, and counting into the environment. Patty brought in a wonderful new song about worms, ladybugs and bees, which the kids would love to share with you if you ask them. Corn starch and water are another fun activity from this week, and another fun one to do at home. Building has been another big deal of the week, with the kids putting together huge tracks on the back porch, and on our really rainy days, building castles inside out of cardboard boxes big enough for the whole crew to share. Finally, winding down the week, we had a quiet Friday with some muffins that the kids had a hand in helping mix.

I think I've heard from all the parents by now about their feelings on photos of the kids' activities on the web page, and I will be compiling them into a list I consult when putting up photos, making sure to respect your boundaries. 

Let's have another great week! 

Pansies and Pictures

This weekend marked some minor changes to the daycare. We have new artwork hanging on the walls, a lovely painting set worked on by all of our friends, and a new reading nook where Hith (our friendly stuffed boa constrictor) lives. I also purchased some new Hot Wheels cars this weekend, of all types and colors, so that everyone can play together. Our friends liked seeing their artwork hanging on the wall and had fun squeezing into the new reading spot with Hith to look through a book. They were also very excited about the new cars, and had a lot of fun playing with them both inside and outside on the porch.

The pansies we planted two weeks ago have all bloomed. Most are yellow and purple, and they are very pretty. More than looking at them, our friends enjoy watering them, and we do so diligently each and every morning.

Spring has definitely sprung, and with the trees and flowers beginning to bloom, the yard looks lovely. Jenn took some pictures today to show her mom, and I've taken the liberty of posting a few of them here. They're just photos taken with a cellphone, but they show how pretty the yard has been, the last few days.

 The view from the left corner of the yard. The sandbox is covered, but you can still see how pretty the tree looks. 

The play structures. The trees have their leaves back, and the yard is so green! 

Our pansy box. The pansies our friends planted have all bloomed, and they're beautiful. 

The bike path. All of the bushes along the path are in bloom and our friends have been enjoying the flowers. 

The bench under the tree. With the tree in blossom, it looks and smells lovely, and we've been doing a lot of playing around here in the past two weeks. 

The new artwork hanging on the walls. We've left the butterflies up but have moved the posters around and have hung up paintings done by Patti. These paintings have the words to our Wiggle Worm song.

We've put up new artwork in the quiet room, too--a painting done by all of our friends. Why not ask your little one to point out what they painted? They're very proud and would love to tell you. 

If the weather permits, we will be planting sugar snap peas along the back fence this week, either Thursday or Friday. It's a little late in the season to plant peas (Jenn's grandpa always told her to plant them by Saint Patrick's Day to get the best yield), but we don't care about yield--we want to watch them grow. Jenn has also promised that she will order our red wrigglers this week so we can begin our worm farm.

Regardless of when we'll get to plant our peas, our friends seem happy and healthy and are glad that spring has finally arrived.

We Don't Mind the Weather, if the Garden Grows

We have a song about marigolds that says "we don't mind the weather, if the garden grows," and this week has been a good one for that. We had a great week in the garden, preparing a bed, planting pansies and checking them for flowers daily, watering when the weather wasn't doing it for us (and some of the days it did), and checking daily for new flowers. Two have opened, little purple ones, and we'll see what other colors we see in the box this coming week. It's important to be gentle when we touch them, and I get a big smile every time I see two children talking to each other about being careful of the flowers. Exploration is important, too, and curious kids are active kids, so we brought a sensory table with some grass clods (dirt still attached), some dandelions, a tree root, and some other plants into the daycare for circle time on Monday. It's on the porch for friends to explore with their fingers and eyes. Our friends like taking apart the plants there, turning over the pieces that are too big to hold in their hands so they can see every side and all the different parts, but we're very careful not to hurt bugs or worms when find them. We'll be planting snap peas in the next two weeks, and more coming soon!

Other highlights of the week: counting games with dice, tracing names and imagining what words with sound like if they started with different letters, discussion about worms, and some lovely paintings of flowers done by the kids.
 
Hop up, my marigolds, two in a row
Hop up, my marigolds, two in a row
Hop up, my marigolds, two in a row
we don't mind the weather if the garden grows
for if the wind blows, the rain will fall
and the sun comes out, and the flowers grow
if the wind blows, the rain will fall
and the sun comes out and the flowers grow

Playdough and Pansies

Hooray for sunshine - this past week has been a blast! As the weather gets warmer, our solar-powered kids have turned on. This week has had a lot of great outdoor play, and with the sun, the bugs and the flowers have come back into our children's lives. This week has featured a lot of hunting for worms, finding the last of the puddles in the sun, and asking questions about the changes in the different plants in the yard, with more to come as the rainy weather comes and goes. Patti brought some fantastic work for the kids this week, with the kids painting butterflies working at one big table together, and coming back to the project with glitter and glue after the paint dried. You'll get to see those hanging up this next week. We had a great finger paint activity, which I hope to repeat soon. You may see some art coming home soon with rice the kids picked out colors for and spent time working the dye into inside Ziploc bags. And at the beginning of the week, we had a morning making green playdough, and working all the sticky out of it - ask your kids, they can tell you, sometimes it takes a long time to get it done!

I've just returned from around the corner with a flat of pansies to plant with our friends in the planter box behind the porch, and taking care of them is going to become another job I ask kids to help with. More plants are incoming, so keep this warm weather coming! I've picked flowers without more than buds, so watching them bloom and watering them on sunny days should be great fun, and everyone will have a turn digging a hole and placing a pansy, but the garden is there for everyone to enjoy and take care of. I will be heading out to the Thyme Garden this next weekend instead (rats!), but more suggestions for flower/vegetable favorites (edible/nontoxic, please) are much appreciated. Please make sure your child has extra clothing in their cubbies, and check with me to make sure we have their rain pants in the box and ready.

Some parents have volunteered to help out around the daycare (thanks!) and you may see them around helping out, too. Abbie has been a huge help this week, and will be working every day this coming week (maybe the week after, too) along with Patti and I.

Our Operating Philosophy

My philosophy and educational plan center around providing a rich, play-based environment to learn kindness, patience, the ability to be gentle or careful as required, the personal value of work, and skills to communicate and negotiate with each other and the adults at the daycare.

We will spend a lot of time outdoors, weather permitting, and I look to leverage the really lovely grounds with gardening and exploration activities.

Our child-to-staff ratio will never be more than 6 to 1. Staff will have proper training and criminal history background checks as required by state licensing. Staffing will be such that there will be people available to fill in case of illness.

Our schedule of the day will be consistent and rhythmic, including story time, circle time, art projects, and free-form play time. Children will have the ability to choose supervised quiet places or active places throughout the day.

I will provide nutritious breakfast, lunch and snacks daily. I am willing to follow special dietary guidelines if parents will help provide materials or reimburse for extra costs, and will use food where possible that works for everyone.

I will work with parents on their kids potty-training and nap goals towards the end of being consistent with their expectations outside of the daycare. Naptime will be divided into a group that rests on their nap pads with quiet activities, then is asked to put them away and try to sleep for a set amount of time before getting up, and another group in another room that is expected to sleep.

Rates for childcare will be as follows:

• $650 for fulltime care.
• $600 for 4 days a week
• $500 for three days a week

Half days and two days a week may be possible and will be negotiable dependent on staffing.

The daycare is a strictly no-weapons, no fighting, no capturing, no bad guys area. I do not permit the role-play of these kinds of behaviors when I am supervising. I acknowledge that these will be something the kids will need to process, but I feel comfortable insisting it happen in other parts of their day; at the daycare, I ask them to respect each other. This is a difficult lesson in a world that glamorizes violence. I am fine with kids at the daycare taking martial arts classes, but I ask them to cover their fists before coming into the daycare.

We're all on the same team, and your kids come first.