Making a Great Day for Preschoolers

This unit is about how to plan a great day for preschoolers. The more you know about what children need, the more successful your planning will be. This unit will teach you about the needs of young children and how to plan a great day to meet those needs.

Great days start with a great beginning. For many families, the mornings are rushed, harried, and hurried. Parents are trying to get everyone where they need to be on time and grab everything that everyone needs for the day. Greet everyone warmly and help children feel that the day ahead will be a good one. The feeling you convey can help set the tone for a successful day.

Many programs find that serving food to children when they arrive can help get kids off to a great start. It's hard for anyone to eat when mornings are rushed, and many of the children coming to our programs are feeling tired and don't eat well in the morning. Research shows that children have much more successful days and learn more when they have eaten breakfast. Consider joining the child care food program in your state. Many states have reimbursements available to child care providers who follow their program.

Once children are well fed and ready to learn, it's time to plan a set of great activities for the children. The two most important things to know about great days for young children are the following:

• Great days are balanced days – a little something for physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development every day.
• Young children learn in a hands-on way. They learn by doing things for themselves, and they learn best when they can use their creativity and problem-solving skills in challenging and interesting activities. Most young children don't learn well by sitting still and listening to adults talk.

A balanced day has a wide variety of activities that help children develop physically, socially, emotionally, and cognitively.

Play time

The best activities for the beginning of the day are open-ended free play. An open-ended activity is one where the child can make choices for herself. Arrange your child care space with low shelves and give the children time to pick activities for themselves during the free play period. This system works best if you rotate toys and put different things out for the children to discover. Toys seem new if you put them in different locations. A train set on the floor is played with differently than a train set on a table.

Children need at least forty-five minutes to an hour of dramatic play each day. Some caregivers encourage dramatic play by putting out some play props. You might put a bandage on one of your stuffed animals and then leave out more stuffed animals and plenty of bandages. Build on the children's interests. If you saw a construction site yesterday on a walk outdoors and the children were interested, pull out the toy trucks and blocks and encourage construction play that day. This type of play with other children is called socio-dramatic play. It can build children's social skills, or their ability to get along with others.

Art time

Art is a time for children to make choices about how to use the materials you provide. A craft is making something that involves following the directions that an adult has given you and making an identical final product. While craft is valuable for teaching elementary-age children to follow directions, it is not suitable for young children. They are not developmentally ready to follow the steps needed to create a craft and benefit far more from choosing for themselves what to do with art materials. Art projects give children a chance to exercise their thinking skills and build emotional development through a sense of creativity and satisfaction.

The best art projects involve the senses, and making the finished product is less important than the experience of making it. Often just giving kids supplies for a collage is enough to get them gluing and arranging and enjoying different textures. 

Circle time

Circle time is a great time for stories and songs. Children need to be read a wide variety of stories with quality pictures and interesting words. Observe the children to see if they are following. Children will respond with facial and body gestures to show you they are listening. Reading to children helps them understand the world and increases their vocabulary. Children also learn communication skills by sharing a familiar story or one they have made up. Have children dictate a story and you write it down; children can tell a story; it's also fun to act out the children's stories.

The key to a great circle time is to make it active. When you tell a story give the children movements, noises, and sound effects to make. If you tell or read the story about the Gingerbread Man the children can chant, "Run, run as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man!" They can slap their legs to make the sound of running. Songs that are active are great, too. If a song doesn't have movements, like "Eensy Weensy Spider," you can make up movements. The more ways the kids use their bodies, the more they will remember the songs and stories. Don't worry about teaching the children during this time; songs and stories are just right. Pick stories that follow the children's interests. If the children are interested in an ant hill that they have seen outside, use your local librarian to help you find stories about ants.

Circle time is a great time for movement and music activities. Movement and music activities build children's muscles and are just plain fun. Sing songs with hand motions. Put on music and dance. Encourage children to listen carefully if the music provides directions or movements for the children to follow.

Snack and lunch are times for children to develop self-help skills, and quality child care programs serve quality food. Snacks are important for young children. With small tummies, they must eat more frequently to get all the nutrients they need, but the key is good quality food. We also want children to develop healthy eating habits, and to do this we must serve good food choices. Consider offering a self-serve snack. This allows the children who are hungry to eat, and those who are not can spend the time playing instead. You can write the instructions in picture form and have the older children help the younger children "read" the instructions and help them create their snack. It can be as simple as taking one cracker and one piece of cheese. This frees you up, and the children gain important self help-skills and a feeling of independence–another valuable form of emotional development.

Make the caregiving routines a valuable part of your day. Sit down with the children while you eat, and talk with them. Model using your manners, and the children will learn from you. Make mealtime pleasant and relaxed. Many families eat in front of the television, and children don't experience pleasant conversation at mealtime. Chat about interesting things with the children. Research has found that the language at mealtimes is some of the highest-level language that occurs all day, so mealtime conversations are important for children's cognitive development.

Rather than teaching a letter a day, give kids time every day for writing and drawing. It can be fun for the children to keep a journal and draw pictures and write about important things that have happened to them. It makes a wonderful keepsake for parents and gives children practice writing. You can help children individually to learn their letters and writing skills, since most kids are at different stages.

Even toddlers will begin to differentiate between what they consider to be drawing and writing. You can suggest that they draw a picture of something they are interested in and write about it. Giving them regular practice builds muscles.

Young children learn numbers best when they use them. Give children real-life problems, such as figuring out how many shakers to pass out to the group for a circle time activity. Counting experiences help children understand the real meaning of numbers. Kids also love to measure things. You can give them the job of measuring the block building they make. They can use string to measure and compare. Mark the string and then compare from one day to the next.

Preschoolers need an hour of physical activity each day. Don't assume that if you take them outside that they will be active enough. You may need to do things to encourage children to use their bodies, since many children will be sedentary outdoors. Bring out balls and encourage children to kick them and run after them. Get them jumping, running, skipping, galloping, and anything else you can dream up. Make it fun for the children to use their large muscles and to get their hearts and lungs working hard, and children will build strong bodies while in your care.

Review some highlights of the day with the children near the end of the day. Write them on a dry erase board for parents to see. Since young children find the question "What did you do today?" a hard question to answer, reading this board will give parents something to ask their children about, and it is a great way to share how much learning is going on in your program. Make sure you take time to share a little story of their child with each parent every day. It can be as simple as "He really loved sticking things with glue." Parents love hearing stories about their children. Your role at day's end is to help parent and child connect again.