Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Rainy Days

It's been raining A LOT these days! Going outside every day is a MUST!  I've had to cook up some fun stuff to keep everyone sane while we are stuck inside all day.  Here are some things we did last week:

 I saw a 2x4 in the garage and my brain said "Balance Beam"!  They loved it!  We also added one more block to make it higher and more challenging.  They also had fun jumping over and crawling under the beam.

I brought down my children's mattresses for some jumping fun.  They got a great workout!
I brought in our ride on toys.  We have a lot of open space on our first floor, perfect for riding around.  
I also let them run around on rainy days, too.


Some of my other go-to rainy day activities include building an obstacle course, a dance party, ball play (catching, throwing, kicking, basketball, etc).  In the winter, I bring in our mini trampoline.  I also have a great kid's yoga video and a children's aerobic video that the kids love. 
What do you do to get your kids moving on rainy days?



Monday, October 4, 2010

Delicious

As I said in my inaugural post, I find an incredible amount of wonderful ideas for my home daycare online.  I follow many blogs written by preschool teachers, daycare providers, homeschooling and stay at home moms. And many of those blogs link to other great blogs full of ideas!  

There are so many great ideas out there that I started to get overwhelmed.  At first I would print each idea that I liked and would file it into a 3 hole binder.  But I didn't have time to organize by subject, theme, etc.  Then I learned about using Delicious from Deborah J. Stewart of Teach Preschool, who shared a link from Pre-K Pages that included a screen cast on how to use it.  

Delicious is a site where you can save bookmarks and tag them as you save.  You sign up (it's a Yahoo site so if you already use Yahoo, your all set!) and download its tool bar onto your internet browser.  When you come to a web page with an idea you love and want to save for future use, you click the TAG button and Delicious opens up for you.  You then TAG it however you'd like.  

For example, I loved this I Spy Walk activity from Teach Preschool.  So I tagged it with the words walk, ispy, and nature.  In the future, when I am looking for activities to do outside or on a neighborhood walk, I can open up Delicious, type in "walk" and up will come all the activities/webpages that I tagged with "walk".  Genius!  

And your bookmarks are accessible on any computer.  Now, if I need to,  I can easily work on my daycare planning while at my mother-in-law's house during our weekend visits.

Let's All Shout Hooray!

Elle is here today,
Elle is here today.
Elle came to work and play,
Let's all shout 


This is the song we sing every day at the start of Morning Meeting.  The tune is "Farmer in the Dell".  The children love to shout hooray for each other!  I make a point to look each child in the eye and give them a big, warm smile while singing their part.  I want them to know that I care about them and am happy that they are there each day. :)

All About Me

I'm Elle and I am a registered family daycare provider.  Before I had children I was a preschool teacher working for Head Start.  After my son was born I decided to start a home daycare.    I provide care for children of teachers and other school professionals and September marked the start of my 4th year!  My own children are 4 and 2 years old.  The children currently in my care are 2, 3, and 4 years old.  They keep me busy, busy, busy and I love it!


I decided to start this blog in order to share our daily adventures.  I get a lot of inspiration from many wonderful early childhood bloggers and feel compelled to add to the wealth of ideas out there.

FYI: I have very little idea of what I am doing with regards to "blogging" so bear with me as I learn more each day.