Cooking and sharing recipes gives us the opportunity to interact with each other in a fun way while working on creating healthy eating habits. Tasty Tuesday provides the perfect space to learn recipes, discover new ingredients, and expand the list of our favorite foods!
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WOYC Music Monday: Relaxing Playlist
Are you ready to celebrate the Week of the Young Child (WOYC)? This year, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) celebrates WOYC from April 1-7. As an early learning provider, you play an important role in supporting families and shaping the lives of young children! We’re sharing activities for each themed day to help you commemorate the exciting week with the children and families you serve. Check out NAEYC’s WOYC Overview to learn more about the event and how you can advocate for early learning in your area.
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Dyslexia Awareness: Resources and Activities for ECE
By Andrea Ehlis-Chang
October is Dyslexia Awareness Month. A neurological condition, dyslexia is associated with pronounced difficulty in reading. If you are looking to better understand this condition, a good start is to observe how dyslexia can look at the emergent reading level of preschoolers.
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10 Outdoor Pretend Play Ideas for Summer
by Katie Brazerol
Pretend play is fundamental to children’s development. During pretend play, children practice and try out new skills. Pretend play gives children an outlet to explore and process feelings. Taking pretend play outside can inspire children in new ways. The outdoor environment lends itself to new curiosities and different challenges. Outdoor pretend play may also enable you to incorporate props that may be hard to manage inside and leave children’s constructions set up in ways you cannot always accommodate. Head outside and celebrate summer by offering one or more of the following pretend play ideas: Continue reading
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Learning Through Infant Care Routines: Outdoor Play
Infants have daily needs that need to be met for them to learn, develop positive attachment to primary caregivers, and know they will be loved and taken care of. Most of these needs revolve around basic care routines. The FunShine Express Buttercups Babies kits were designed to incorporate activity ideas into these care routines to create meaningful interactions each day.
Outdoor Playtime
The outdoors is filled with many sounds, sights, and fascinating objects. Outdoor playtime has many benefits for infants and toddlers:
- Help them develop a sense of wonder and awareness
- Increase their creativity
- Important for overall health
- Great for sensory play
- Positively impact all learning domains
- Provide a strong foundation for children’s rapid brain development
Finding moments of time to go outdoors with infants can be difficult. It is helpful if there are multiple care providers. One provider can take one or two infants outside to play while the other provider(s) stay inside to meet other care routines while still maintaining ratio requirements. Many of the play activities that you do indoors with babies, you can also do outdoors.
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