Services Provided

• Individualized care for your child between the hours of 7:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Monday thru Friday.
• Age appropriate toys and equipment for your child to use in a variety of ways.
• Hands on activities to learn a variety of things and explore the world around us.
• Quiet times, active times, organized play, free choice play, alone time, and group time.
• Resources to help parenting.
• Participate in 5-2-1-0 Goes to Childcare Program.
• Follow a year-round sun safety policy to protect children from the harmful sunrays.
• Communication about your child’s day.
• Practicing life skills such as: serving themselves when eating, picking up after themselves, helping others, taking turns.
• Cubby space for your child’s belongings, which they are responsible for.

Curriculum

As of 10/27/11, Sue’s Place teamed up with the 5-2-1-0 Goes to Child Care Program, a program that is a part of a larger project called Let’s Go! Let’s Go! which we are a Gold Level program. This program promotes healthy life style choices for children, youth and families. The program emphasizes the importance of:

• 5 or more fruits and veggies daily
• 2 hours or less of recreational screen time
• 1 hour or more of physical activity
• 0 sugary drinks, more water and low fat milk over the age of two years.

Sue’s Place requires that we serve food from our program and that healthy choices are always available. It is also required that we use non food items as rewards, this is accomplished by using a prize bucket filled with children’s small toys and stickers. We do not serve juice in our program and the children have access to water throughout the day. We accomplish this by each child having their own water bottles and they are freshened when refilling their bottles. Sue’s Place limits the time of television exposure to children. Television viewing may happen at the last 30 minutes of our program, during our cleaning at shutdown. Children under the age of two are not exposed to television viewing at this time. Sue’s Place has a strong emphasis on outdoor and physical activity and it is required that we go outside daily in the morning and in the afternoon. If the weather does not allow for outdoor time, we provide opportunities for physical activity to happen indoors.

Sue’s place also participates with Sun Blocks Skin Cancer Prevention and highly recommends the use of sun protection year round for all children, and teachers. Through the association of the above organizations, Sue’s Place qualifies for grant money, which has helped tremendously to improve the daily operations of our center. This opportunity we have been very grateful for.

Curriculum is all that contributes to a child’s day here at Sue’s Place. There is no “perfect” curriculum that can described neatly and specifically because developmentally appropriate curriculum responds to and arises from the needs and interests of the children who are in the classroom community. We meet the child where s/he is, and create an atmosphere that will encourage him or her to stretch from his or her comfort zone to acquire new skills, interests, and interpretations of the world.

The curriculum is dependent on teachers who know and understand each individual child’s strengths and interests, and works to develop a child’s less developed areas through the strengths and interests. Providing the materials and creating the activities that encourage acquisition of skills. Through activities initiated by children and teachers, we work to provide as many opportunities for children to practice and gain control over body, mind & spirit. The environment and classroom routines are organized to promote independence and to give visual cues to children about how to interact with each other and materials.

The program is supportive to teacher’s efforts to organize the environment, document growth and to manage children’s development in the fine & gross motor, communication and language, cognitive and social –emotional areas. Through observation and getting to know individual children, we work to develop their interests into longer-term projects or studies that may become the focus of circle time, science or art, cooking or snacks, or the dramatic play area, All aspects of a child’s development are interrelated, and no one area develops in isolation or the others.

Children who spend four or five days with us will find more opportunities to practice skills than a child who is here for less time. This not to say that four days is better than two, it just means that different things to different children in terms of their development within a group context. It is likely that children who are here for less time will focus on the social aspects of being here for longer period of time than a child who is spending four or five days in our group setting.

Each child will access what our program has to offer in a different way, at a different rate as it relates to their particular stage of development as well as the amount of time each week that they are able to participate. Gross motor and social/emotional areas are typically the first to develop – with language, self-help and cognitive skills coming in next. How can we expect a child to retell stories or make predictions about how it ends (cognitive skills) if they are still getting accustomed to the routines of circle time! As the saying goes, “All things in good time.” It is often the adults who need to adjust expectations to accommodate individual needs and skills of children.

We dance and sing every day, developing listening skills (hearing and recreating pitches), clapping rhythms, as well as introduce and develop topics that interest or are relevant to the children. We read, retell and create stories, share information from home, introduce number and pre-math concepts – before, after, associating number concepts with number symbols, phonemic awareness – playing with the sounds of language and associating sounds with the letter symbols, and much more that depends on the children.