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

Posts tagged ‘daycare’

Quality Care is Safe Care

 quality service

When parents enroll their children in your program, they trust that you will keep their children safe. This is why it is vital that your childcare program is a safe place!

Let us take a look at 3 Core Areas of Keeping Children Safe In Your Care:

Child Supervision

It is vital that you develop good child supervision skills. In fact, if you care for infants, never leave them alone.

In recent news, a childcare provider left a infant alone in a room and when she returned to check on the infant, she found the baby choking on his formula. Tragically, the baby died. So, be sure to never leave infant/toddlers unattended, this will assure that they have constant direct supervision.

At mealtime, plan to sit at the table with the children, to monitor meal time practices. Also, in the event a child chokes, you are in close proximity of the children. If you work with toddlers and preschoolers, frequently scan your play areas to assure that you always know where the children are. When children know that you are looking at them, they may be reluctant to behave inappropriately.

Do you transport children in a van? If so, be sure to conduct head counts before and after entering the van. This will prevent a child from being left unattended on the van, which could lead to the death of a child.

Playground Safety

To be sure that children in your program are having a fun and safe outdoor experience, you must be sure that the playground is free of harmful items by conducting a daily playground safety check.

Moreover, while supervising children on the playground, practice moving around to interact with all of the children and stay in close proximity of the children to prevent  injuries. It is also a good idea to create a set of simple safety rules for your playground and discuss the rules with the children before going outdoors.

Do you have bikes or cars on your playground? If so, designate an area for bikes and riding toys only. Also, recommend that parents send their children wearing tennis shoes for outdoor play.

Indoor Environment

It is vital that you conduct an indoor safety check before children enter your program every day. Here is a list of things to check for daily:

  • Covered electrical outlets
  • Remove damaged toys and equipment
  • Dangerous materials, medication, toxic plants and cleaning supplies must be out of the reach of children
  • Toys less than 1 ½ inches in diameter must be inaccessible to toddlers
  • Crawl the space to look for dangerous items that infants/toddlers may put in their mouth
  • Remove cribs away form blind cords to prevent strangulation
  • Install safety gates where needed

More Safety Tips

Are you CPR & First Aid Certified? If not,  I inspire you to get CPR & First Aid Certified (through your local Red Cross), to assure that you are trained to handle life threatening situations.
Furthermore, be sure that proper ratios are maintained in your program. When ratios are maintained, children are adequately supervised. * See your local state licensing ratio guidelines

Time to Reflect

What did you learn about keeping children safe in your care? What improvements do you plan to make?

Resource
For more supervision tips, check out my Child Supervision eCourse:
How to Effectively Supervise Young Children e-Course
Until next time….Be Inspired!
Shiketa

Category:

Quality Care

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Raise The Standard For Your Child Care Business in 2016

I was recently watching a video by motivational speaker and Success Coach, Anthony Robbins. Mr. Robbins was talking about 10 top ways to Success.

Mr. Robbins top secret was this Principle: Raise the Standard!  In fact, Mr. Robbins said this: “If you want to change your life, you have got to raise your standards!”

So with that tip in mind, I have a question to ask you? When was the last time you raised the standards in your Child Care Business?

The standards I decided to Raise

In January 2016, I decided to increase my pay scale by $1.00 for my Lead Teachers. Then I also required that all of my Lead Teachers become members of NAEYC.

I believe that, higher wages attracts the best teachers and becoming members of Naeyc will expose my teachers to cutting edge information and empower them to implement quality practices in my classrooms!

Please allow me to give you a few more examples:

  1. Consider taking the quality of your program to another level by adding new early childhood books to your resource library.
  2. Require that you or your teachers challenge the children more in 2016.
  3. Change the quality of the forms that you send home to parents. (sending home poor copies is a bad reflection of your brand)
  4. Raise the educational requirements of your staff and increase the starting salary of your staff.

I think you get the point! Raise your standards, change your Business! Furthermore, if you do something different, you will get different results.

I want to hear from you. Has this blog post inspired you to raise your standards? If so what standards will you raise this year?

To your success,

Shiketa Morgan

Are you ready to raise the standard in the area of Business Management or Leadership? If so, check out my 21-day mastermind ecourse: Going to Another Level in the Business of Child Care. click here

Category:

Business Management, Lesson Planning

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