Ask An ECE

Here is a fun theme to fill in the winter blah's between Christmas and Valentine's Day, after you've finished up the Winter themes. Have the children bring in pictures of themselves, their parents and siblings. There's a number of activities you can do with them.

Remember! Not all families are just Mommy, Daddy & child - adjust this according to what's appropriate for your children.

Thanks to my daughter's daycare provider for this idea.

Today we have 6 different crafts that you can do for Valentine's day. These are pretty easy for all ages, although the Rose Hearts should be saved for the older children.

Collage hearts

Reuse old wrapping paper to create these crafty hearts to use in a multitude of activities.

A winter/snowperson theme is perfect for dreary January with no major holidays to celebrate and lots of snow days to look forward to. We have had lots of success at my centre with some of these creative (and snow based) tactile activities with our preschoolers and toddlers.

As promised in Halloween Crafts Part 1, we now present the Gross Haunted House crafts. This is 5 simple crafts that really work well together, and are great fun for the kids. The theme here is "body parts", as you will see. You can use these to create an awesome haunted house afternoon, and is a nice candy-free Halloween day.

It's October, and that means Halloween is coming. This is a great time of year in daycare, since the programming pretty much takes care of itself. That means you need some craft ideas for the season. I have several that I use, and I'm going to start here with one of the most popular. This is a nice, short craft, and works for toddlers as well as the older kids.

Don't forget to check out our other Halloween crafts when they're posted in the next few days.

Styrofoam Ghosts

Required Materials

I'm really excited about this week's programming for the daycare. We have decided to do a theme based on food and link it with a different country each day of the week. We are lucky enough to have a full-time cook at the child care, so we have altered this week's menu to highlight foods from Ireland, Mexico, Italy, China and Sweden.

I find science one of the hardest subjects to program for when it comes to childcare. More so now with toddlers, preschoolers and school-age all sharing a room at one time or another. My daughter's daycare provider sent me a link to Science Kit and Boreal Laboratories website and told me about some of their items that might be suitable for daycare.