The Child Care Business Owner Institute

Inspirational and Empowering Child Care Business Owners To Build Successful Child Care Businesses

Preparing Your Family Home Child Care Environment For a Summer of Fun!

05 22 12

Summer is almost here and I want to inspire you to create a summer time environment that you, the children and the parents will love!

Most home providers care for a mixed age group of children and this blog post has been created to give you ideas for children between the age of one to twelve years of age.

Are you ready to discover how to create a summer time environment for the children in your care? Here are five fun and enriching ways to give your family home childcare environment a summer time look:

1. Add a Wading Pool in the Reading Area. This is a great way to create a cool space for reading. Be sure to add some pillow, lots of summer time books and stuffed animals for the young toddlers to hold.

2. In the Dramatic Play area add the following items for pretend play: sunglasses, empty sun tan lotion bottles, swim wear, flip-flops, beach bags, sun hats,etc. If your space is limited, use a large basket or storage container for the items.

3. Add a large beach towel on the floor for block building. Encourage the children to build on or around the beach towel. It will be cool to encourage them to build with sunglasses on!

4. Give your parent bulletin board a summer time look by adding orange paper as a background with yellow border. Also, use sun templates as the heading for menus, lesson plans and parent news.

5. Add boats or people to your water table for indoor/outdoor water fun! ***To assure a healthy experience, be sure that the children wash their hands before and after water play. If you do not have a water table; use two dish washing pails.

Want more ideas? Be sure to check out the Summer Camp ePlanning Guide!

I look forward to your thoughts about this blog post.

Have a Fun and Safe Summer!

Shiketa Morgan

Category:

Family Child Care, Summer Program

How to Figure Out If It’s Time to Expand Your Child Care Business

05 17 12

If you get a call from at least one parent every day who’s interested in enrolling their child at your child care facility, it may be time to expand your efforts. Expanding may mean that you’ll need to move to a different facility that’s larger, and it may mean that you’ll need to hire new staff members. Calculate how much it will cost to move to a new place of business and how much it will cost to hire new staff members. Then calculate how much of a profit you’ll be able to make from each new enrollment.

Sometimes expanding may seem like a good idea, but it isn’t always necessarily. You can end up actually losing money if you expand too soon and don’t have the right number of kids enrolled as you expand. If you feel as though growing your business is the best idea for your particular situation, you may need to consider raising your prices. This, unfortunately, could mean that you may lose the business of some parents, and you might not attract as much business. Consider your clientele’s needs and financial limitations before you raise prices in order to expand.

As you can probably tell, there is some risk associated with growth. However, whenever there’s risk involved in business there’s also the opportunity for significant profit. You may need to step up your game in terms of marketing efforts if you do decide to grow. Additionally, you’ll likely have to spend some time recruiting new employees, which can be fairly time-consuming. If you already have a fairly well-established child care facility, the work associated with growth probably won’t be unmanageable.

In these tough economic times, the number of stay-at-home and work-at-home parents is on the rise, which means that interest in child care outside of the home is on the decline. However, there will always be a need for child care businesses. If you think there’s enough interest from parents, expanding could be one of the advantageous things for you. Ultimately, your particular situation will determine what’s best. Just remember not to make any rash decisions, trust your gut, and make sure you calculate the costs associated with expanding versus how much profit you’ll be able to make as a result of your business’s growth.

About Guest Author: Carolyn is a guest blogger about small business marketing who helps people get the right order management software that will work with Shopify, 3dcart, and BigCommerce.

Recommended Resources

10 Steps to Starting up a Child Care Business

21-Day Mastermind eClub