Many daycare business owners spend countless hours calculating daycare tuition and fees and dealing with bounced checks and other collection headaches. How can you eliminate this tedious child care job? The best way for child care centers to increase successful payment collection is by investing in childcare software.

Daycare for software businesses usually include fee collection programs that will dramatically reduce the time and effort you  would normally spend collecting and processing payments through electronic funds transfer (EFT).

There are three ways that quality child care software may process payments:

• Recurring ACH (Automatic Clearing House) transactions: These are bank to bank transactions. Payments are automatically deducted from the client’s checking or savings account and deposited then into your daycare’s business account.
• Recurring credit card transactions:  Here, the client’s credit or debit card is automatically charged on a recurring basis.
• Point of Sale Transactions (POS): POS transactions allow you to process payments through a credit or debit card swipe on-site.

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Christmas or Christmas Day is a yearly holiday, celebrated on December 25, which commemorates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Celebrate Christmas in your daycare center by reading age appropriate stories that focus on the symbols of Christmas and by implementing Christmas-themed activities.

Consider the following reading lists and resources for free Christmas worksheets, coloring pages, and handwriting practice sheets for your child care center:

Reading List

Christmas Board and Picture Books Baby-Age 3

Christmas in a Manger: A Pat and Peek Book by Nola Buck and Felicia Bond [HarperFestival, 1995]

The Christmas Baby by Marione Bauer  and Richard Cowdrey [Simon & Schuster Children’s, 2009]

I Spy Little Christmas by Jean Marzollo and Walter Wick [Cartwheel, 1999]

Fisher Price: Baby’s First Christmas: Learning about Colors by Lauren Gaede and Lyn Fletcher [HarperFestival, 2008]

Merry Christmas, Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter [Warne, 2003] (more…)

How do you reward the children in your care? If you’re rewarding them with food, consider this: “An article published in the December 2005 issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine concluded that policies in schools that allow students to snack frequently; to consume high-calorie, low nutrient-dense foods and beverages; and to have food as incentives and rewards were associated with higher body mass indices in middle-school students”.

While this study doesn’t apply to preschool aged children, as a daycare provider it is still important to know the hazards of using food as a reward and how using non-food rewards.

Hazards of food rewards

When you reward or bribe a child with food, these same children may continue to reward themselves with food later in life. When children are rewarded with treats, they unfortunately associate these treats with happiness or being good. Studies show that associating food with with good behavior or bad behavior has long-lasting effects on children’s food preferences and their eating styles. It also may contribute to overweight and obesity. (more…)

Daycare food programs provide cash reimbursements for nourishing meals and snacks served to children ages 12 years and younger in licensed family day care homes. The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) improves the quality of daycare by making it more affordable for many low-income families. The CACFP child care component is a state and federally funded program that gives financial aid to licensed child day care centers and day care homes.

Types of Daycare Businesses Eligible for Daycare Food Programs

Who may participate in CACFP?

• Eligible public or private nonprofit child care centers
• Infant centers
• Care centers that provide care outside of school hours
• Head Start programs
• Other institutions which are licensed or approved to provide day care services may participate in CACFP.

What if your child care business is for-profit? If your child care business is for-profit, the business must receive title XX funds for at least 25 percent of the children enrolled or licensed capacity (whichever is less).  Your for-profit child care center may also be eligible if at least 25 percent of the children in care are eligible for free and reduced price meals. (more…)

Preschoolers and young children in child care centers can successfully learn to write the letter T as well as recognize objects beginning with the letter T through simple, fun activities. This activity ties in well with a Thanksgiving lesson plan.

Learning Objectives

• The students will identify the letter T
• The students make and recognize the T sound
• The students will learn to trace and write upper and lower case Ts
• The students will identify objects that begin with the letter T
• The students will learn that T is for Thanksgiving
• The students will participate in Thanksgiving dramatic play
• The students will participate in Hot Turkey

Handwriting and Phonetics

Create a letter T poster board which shows both the upper and lower case T. On this poster board, glue pictures of objects cut from magazines or draw objects that begin with the letter T. Display this poster board up for the duration of the Letter T unit. (more…)

Home daycare providers can cut costs by finding daycare forms online. Contracts, policies, authorization forms, permission slips, daily reports, and other forms are critical to daycare business administration. Rather than creating forms from scratch, owners of child day care centers can print out important forms and customize them.

Consider the following resources for free and for cost daycare and preschool forms:

Free Daycare Forms

Supporting Providers:  Free forms, pintables, articles, and much more for your daycare business. Forms include business forms, registration forms, contracts, policies, reports, logs, health and medical forms, and authorization forms.

Step By Step Childcare: Step by Step Childcare provides free accident reports, accounting reports, sample brochures and flyers, business cards, contracts, daily reports, and daily schedules.

The Daycare Lady:   A wealth of free daycare business forms in Microsoft Word or PDF format, organized alphabetically. (more…)

Creating a thanksgiving turkey place card is a fun fine motor activity which allows preschoolers to practice bilateral and visual motor coordination and hand strength.

When developing curriculum, daycare providers must include age-appropriate activities for young children that develop fine motor skills. This Thanksgiving Turkey Place card craft is an activity that will support a Thanksgiving unit as well as promote visual motor coordination, bilateral coordination, and hand strength.

Fine motor skills are actions that involve the small movement of hands, wrists, feet, fingers, toes, tongue, and lips. In contrast with gross motor skills which involve larger muscles of the arms, legs and feet, fine motor skills focus on small muscle movements in coordination with the eye. Some important fine motor concepts and skills that preschool age children learn to master are bilateral coordination, visual motor coordination, grasp, hand use, manipulation skills, pincer grasp, wrist rotation, pre-writing grasp, hand strength, and tactile awareness.

Children learn fine motor skills through practice. Activities which involve writing, drawing, cutting, stringing, and buttoning are great examples of activities that promote the development of fine motor skills.

This Thanksgiving Turkey Place Card lesson plan includes the preparation instructions, procedure, and materials list for this activity. It also provides age-appropriate learning objectives and a sample of the simple supporting verbal cues necessary to encourage participation and support learning. (more…)