Good Family Daycare?

Part of being a good Family Day Care Provider is ensuring that you have a quality program that you can follow. I must admit, the programming aspect of Family Day Care has always overwhelmed me. When I started out I had no idea of how to “officially” portray my program. I wanted to look professional, yet I wasn’t sure exactly how to break the program down. How do you explain to parents that play develops their child’s cognitive skills and the types of exploration they need to develop their fine motor skills?
I put a lot of night effort into creating a curriculum only to be unable to execute it the day after. I couldn’t justify saying “Come children, my curriculum says that today we are going to paint” when Quinn is standing impatiently at the door waiting for his morning walk since the weather is not too cold for him and Qai has commenced building her thousandth bracelet and Ya Ya is bent on playing with the playdoh. You also have no idea how long a little snail crawling in the grass can put an entire curriculum on hold for. We have to watch the snail, all take turns holding it. Sing songs about it. Draw it. Talk about the shapes and colors on it. Read about it and then finally try to make it! None of this can be done in the space of one day because we have to eat, wash hands, have a nap, wash hands,repeat and then get ready to go home. Of course there are a few other things that the children want to do to. We want to read stories, chat to the delivery man who has dropped off the big colorful box and we want to pretend that we are Mommies and Daddies too!!! By that time, the wonderful curriculum that I created has been put on the back-burner to maybe never be revisited again. But that’s okay, because we learnt about caterpillars becoming butterflies today.
So we start leaning all about caterpillars and butterflies, we sing about them, read about them, draw them, examine them, chat about them and while looking for them one of the children notice that the leaves of trees are not on the floor but bright green blowing in the wind, which leads to the discussion of the season we are in, summer!! And so the cycle continues.
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my curriculum is a Work in Progress. It evolves daily and most importantly revolves around what the children are interested in.