Preschool/Home Tour

hi everyone my name is Katie and welcome to my home and I am an early childhood provider and I have a family childcare business and so I am going to be showing you around my house and my business and telling you a little bit more about myself so come on in okay so as I was saying my name is Katie and I have been in the early childhood field for just under 20 years I worked in all different kinds of environments in half-day preschools religious-based programs full-day child care programs chains that you find everywhere around the country to privately owned businesses programs that cared for no more than 30 kids to programs that care for over 200 I have been a assistant director at different childcare facilities a teacher I started out right you know at the bottom as an assistant teacher and just found how much I loved working with kids and especially kids and the preschool age group so about nine years ago or just under nine years ago I opened my family based early childhood program my focus mostly on preschool age so typically I take ages two to five years of age and I just tried to mix the best of what I found in center-based programs and the best of what I found to be in home-based programs and tried to intermingle those and make a program that was just right for me and I found that a lot of families really enjoy that mix some of the things that I like best about a family based program is just the connections that you're able to make with the families I found that in centers a lot of times it seemed little more distant and I didn't really like that because when you're working with young children family and school relationships are just essential they always are so anyway and I'll get into more about those kinds of differences maybe in another video and but for today I want to focus on my home tour and preschool tour so as parents walk in this door as you can see over here I have the cubbies and so each child has basically three little hooks one here here and then one on the outside I actually added these outside hooks because I didn't feel like the kids had quite enough room and so they put their shoes down here in the bottom box they always bring a backpack if they have any jackets or things like that they they hang them right in here and then in the top I have a folder that they take home I'll have to show you guys that in another video but they have a take home folder that they keep all of their their things in and so that goes in the top box so two kids are in each cubby they're right behind here if you want to peek in this little space is my tiny little office area I keep all of my curriculum supplies over here in this side plastic container and I keep my planner here and my computer and things like that so as you can see you can see the classroom and what all the kids are doing right from my desk I don't sit here all too often but it is a really nice way to have a space that is safe away from where the children are playing but that I can still see them when I'm getting work done - so the entrance to this area and just comes from the hallway there's no entrance to the office area from the classroom so if you come over this way this is kind of like the parent Welcome station so after all of their backpacks and stuff are put away I keep my lesson plan on up here and kind of what we're doing our theme of the month this clipboard here is used for our sign-in sheets or not sign-in sheets sign-up sheets like for field trips or if we have parties and things like that and I'm still trying to decide if I want to do a like turkey Thanksgiving soup signup if I have it in me to do that during the busy holiday season I'm not sure but if I do it'll be there but typically almost every month we either have a holiday party or field trip or something like that that the parents are used to kind of checking that and then this is my tuition box where parents can put their checks or form a payment in there so that they always have that um this is a gate that we put up so far it works pretty well the I wanted a gate that the little kids could not get through but the older ones could get through because as you can see the bathroom area is back here so the children do have to come out of the gate to go into the bathroom to wash hands or use the restroom or whatever so this gate has worked out really well for that so if you come for the gate area here we have right when you walk in a little Reading area so I like to go to the library and our city has a really cool program where you can request as many books as you want from all the different branches and they will ship them to your closest branch so at the be or really the end of each month I look at what theme is coming up and I just request maybe about 20 or 25 something that theme I do have books down in the basement in a storage area but a lot of them they're paperback they don't hold up quite as well so the library books are made a little sturdier and so I found that I have had a lot of luck doing that and then it really saves money too so that I can constantly switch off the books and then at the same time not have to store them as well so I do that and then this area here is blocks and building area it's not a super large classroom but we still have room for a few different learning areas so the boxing building basically has things like magna tiles and Duplo blocks and cars dinosaurs people things like that things that they can build with and use for lots of different purposes and then over here in this area is our dramatic play area so we have a little table area and a little kitchen things this is definitely a work-in-progress area I have a lot of ideas to make a dramatic play area more engaging and switch things out but I'm just not at that place yet to get all of that organized but I'm really looking forward to what this area is really going to add to the curriculum and also add to the children's learning over here you can see our circle time area also under here is where I usually keep art supplies but as you can see the only thing under here right now is our box of miscellaneous papers because I have a somewhat young group I've got a few older ones and I've got some that are young than I typically take a bunch of them so I cannot keep the markers in the crowns and things like that and scissors down here like I normally would so I definitely believe that that is a very important thing to have for the kids to be able to use throughout the day but right now it just can't happen so over here I have I installed kind of like a higher shelf where I have all of that stuff normally this would be down down underneath there so that the kids could get it whenever so that will be coming as this younger group kind of gets a little bit older so this is my circle time area I'm not going to go into all the things I do for circle time because I I'd like to do a separate video on that because there's all kinds of really cool things that that I'd like to share in regards to that but the kids sit over here in the box and building area along this wall and then they can easily see this and we don't always sit of course working with young children it's always preferable that they're moving and standing so weak they sit for a little bit they stay on they walk to the window they get up they turn around they look at different things so that we keep it interactive and if I run out of room for them to sit right here depending on how many kids I just kind of move this shelf a little bit so that it just kind of opens up this space so that they can see and then these are our two table areas we eat lunch here they do art projects here and they do table activities here over here is our math and manipulative area so at the top we have puzzles I have puzzles that are more appropriate for the preschool age and then a few toddler puzzles for the younger ones that I have right now so that they can participate in puzzles and not have a hundred pieces scattered from you know eight different puzzles all Flor so they know the younger ones know that they can use these toddler puzzles and then these are all of our math boxes eventually I'm going to go through some of these and switch some of these things out but as of right now these are materials that they can use using a work mat which I don't know my work mats in here but we'll talk about that as far as just creating a workspace for some of these smaller items or they can do them at the table this is an area that with a younger group like I have now they are not allowed to get these things out anytime they want it has to be something that's a little bit more structured and that I am closely overseeing because of the wide age difference I think that having all different ages is a lot of fun but it also adds a lot of challenges so sometimes you adapt things from the way you would normally do it because of safety basically and keeping your materials also looking nice so and then as you can kind of see from this angle is you know the office area again that that you can see from them classroom all right so we're going back through the week and I'm gonna let my dog out this is the living room area the kids do come in here sometimes and once in a while we watch a little video I'm not a hundred percent TV free but it's it's pretty rare that the kids watch watch something but usually if they do it's when I'm making lunch or something like that so this is a little corner TV cabinet that that we have for videos occasionally things and then in here is the dining room I do use this area for the older preschoolers or the kindergarten readiness kiddos which are the four and five year olds so what I do because I have several just turn two-year-olds in our class right now I am NOT able to get out all the materials that I do with the older kids over in the preschool room at those tables typically that would be where I would do it but because they just can't quite keep their hands off of all those little pieces and I take this off the table and then I set up all of their materials here and it works great because over here I have another corner cabinet where I keep all of the supplies for all of that kind of thing so like I have their little alphabet arcs their little letters that they used to do word building and things like that all of the hands-on materials that they use are stored in here as well and below that are my daughter my oldest daughter homeschools and so her a lot of her materials are kept in here that we can easily get out and do during that time or she can do on her own she's in sixth grade so she can do a lot of her schoolwork on her own and then on this side I just have some business supplies oh here was that folder that I was talking about earlier I don't have this child anymore so it doesn't matter but um they have a folder like this that they bring every day so inside is to keep that home so whenever they do their papers each day I stick those in there and in the middle I have a calendar and schedule and then this is return to scope there's any papers that need to be signed and brought back and then these go in their backpacks each day and they take their backpacks home and come back in the morning so that's a great way so that parents what I found is a lot of times and I understand because it's so many things going on in life the papers get brought out to the car and then that's where they stay on the floor of the car sometimes still that happens but at least they know hey if there was an important paper or a newsletter it went home in the folder where did I put it so um so I am I love having all of this easily accessible and a nice workspace over there too this is the kitchen area so this is where I prepare meals and snacks breakfast lunch and afternoon snack it are the meals that I serve and here is my serving cart so because the kids are not right by the kitchen I have just supplies like trash bags and white B's and things like that and this is what we use for our food trash the trash can that's in the customers for paper and stuff like that so they just put their plates I do use disposable plates and stuff it right at this point or I always have I always contemplate maybe going to washing dishes and not be wasteful that no I'm not there right now so yeah we do disposable stuff and this is the lid and then I can just bag that up and throw it out easily so what I do is I push this usually over there I line up the plates and then I can put all the plates on here and just drag the cart either over into the classroom or outside if it is nice we go outside any and to little picnic tables maybe sometime I'll show you guys the outside area but we eat out there as often as possible because they love it right after they're done they go run and play and it's easy cleanup so um in here is mostly just food and stuff but right here it's not organized but this is where most of mine art supplies and things are kept paint and glue paint brushes and all that so it's like a never-ending cycle of trying to keep that clean but that's where I keep us to that so I think that that pretty much covers everything and I'm excited to be able to share some aspects of my business and get into different different things that may be useful or helpful to others and share my experiences so thank you for watching today and I look forward to seeing you again bye

Channel: Kat@Home

Views: 10,652

Rating: 4.8208957 out of 5

Keywords: home daycare, home-based preschool, daycare tour, preschool room tour, daycare setup

Id: 8loOz0lp5Bk

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 05 2016