Happy Healthy Childhoods

This is the first of 10 Ways to Make a Major Difference in Your Child’s Life which can be downloaded from our free eBook library.

We all want our child to grow up strong and healthy. Instilling health consciousness from the beginning is essential.

Sometimes getting a child to eat nutritiously is a challenge. (Refer to Parenting Tips for Toddlers for reminders about how to handle that.)

However, if you start with a good child nutrition program and remain consistent, it is much easier than trying to break bad habits later in life.

Here are some tips for good nutrition in children:

Follow this simple rule – the less packaging, the healthier the food. Whole foods (fresh vegetables, fruits, fish, chicken, etc.) are healthier than processed, packaged foods.

When shopping, read labels

Focus on sugar, salt (sodium) and fat content. Read the ingredients. If you can’t pronounce them do you really want your child eating them?

Visit your local farmers market often

Locally grown produce is a great alternative to high priced produce that has been shipped in.

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This is the first of 10 Ways to Make a Major Difference in Your Child’s Life which can be downloaded from our free eBook library.

If you’ve been searching for helpful parenting tips for toddlers and you found this page, no doubt you’re probably dealing with some level of frustration as you try to be the best mommy, daddy, or guardian that you can possibly be.

In a day and age where many caretakers of children simply cannot deal with the challenges that their toddlers bring and wind up walking out on their responsibilities, we commend you for hanging in there and for taking action to improve your skills!

We want you to know that we’re here to help you and with six early learning centers in Southwest Florida, we have plenty of experience in dealing with toddlers.

Nearly every parent has thought or said, “I wish parenting came with an instruction manual!” Well, we can’t provide you with a manual but, we can at least provide you with some guidelines and tips that will help you be the best parent you can be.

First and foremost, you must remember that you are your child’s first and best teacher! Your child is ALWAYS watching and listening.

He or she is constantly learning the good…and the not so good…from you. Try to always keep this in mind when ever your child is around.

Ensure that you are setting an example of words and actions that you would want your child to imitate.

Give yourself a time-out

Sometimes grown-ups need a time-out. However, time-out is not always a punishment. It’s an opportunity to remove yourself from a situation so that you can assure you are thinking clearly and calmly.

When you find yourself getting angrier or more frustrated with your child (and yes it will happen) – take a break! Do something that uses a different part of your brain. You can:

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At our child care center in Fort Myers, we’re always busy trying to come up with new ideas for preschool activities and I hope you find this one helpful.

Recently, our class decided to make our kitchen into a cockpit while learning about transportation.

Our little bumblebees (a group of our students) were so busy! With the help of their teachers, they took apart old computers and electronics and all sorts of old “junk” to transform the kitchen into an airplane cockpit.

Preschool learning activities

This turned out to be one of the best preschool learning activities that we’ve come up with because the kids use cognitive, math, social, language, and literacy skills when pretending and exploring the cockpit. TSG at its best!

We also challenged our kids to complete a reading train around our room (not to be confused with the circus train that we made a little while ago).

The kids would need to read at home and then have mom or dad help them write the title and author of a book onto a train printout we provided.

Then, they would decorate it together as a family for it to be hung on our wall in the classroom.

We had:

• 35 books from kids using books that they had received from their literacy buddies
• Kids borrowing books from our classroom
• 2 families that had no books at home so we donated books so they could start a home library
• Some families getting library cards for the first time!

The children got so excited that we made a tally chart to use math and measuring skills to calculate how many books we each brought.

We told the kids if we made it around the whole room we would have a reading ice cream party…and you know what?

THEY DID IT! 170 BOOKS! 170 TRAIN CARS!

Check out our pictures below. Hope you enjoy them and perhaps it will inspire you to come up with your own learning activities for your preschoolers!

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Helping preschoolers learn new things about the world around them is a rewarding experience when you make it fun and simple. In fact, the less complicated your “preschool experiment” is, the better.

Our students at Joseph H Messina Children’s Center in Fort Myers, FL decided to build ramps. Initially they just wanted to have fun rolling assorted objects down the ramp. But what was intended to be a fun play-time activity, turned into being a learning experience for each of the participants.

Let the experiments begin!

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Tammy Aronson, the director at Joseph H Messina Children’s Center in Fort Myers recently told me about two of her teachers named Sabrina and Kimberly who decided to build a circus train in their classroom.

After some of their students had seen the circus, they were absolutely thrilled about it! So in order to capitalize on their children’s enthusiasm and to turn it into a learning experience, Sabrina and Kimberly seized the moment.

If you’re looking for preschool craft ideas, this is a great one!

I’ll let Sabrina tell the story.

I think it was back in November of 2012 that the circus arrived here in Fort Myers. A few of our children were fortunate enough to be able to go see it. The children couldn’t stop talking about what they saw at the circus when they got to class the next day.

Jazmin, one of the children that  got to go, even brought some pictures in that her family took at the circus. When Jazmin showed the class the pictures and explained what was happening in them, the class wouldn’t stop talking about it.

This interest sparked our circus project. We then made a project web where we discuss how we could take this topic and have it represented in each learning center in the class room.

We also listed different questions that we wanted to answer throughout the project. One of those questions had to do with the traveling aspect of the circus.

After reading about circus trains we decided to make one of our own. If you’re thinking about creating a circus train in your own pre-school classroom, hopefully this will help.

Here are the steps we took to create our circus train:

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If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, then you know that we primarily talk about fun things to do in Southwest Florida with your children.

But one of the other services that we provide is ensuring that your child is fed well. 

Take a local mom named Kesha for example. When she delivers her six year old daughter to her neighborhood family child care home each weekday, she knows that her daughter, Alexa will be well fed.

There will be breakfast waiting for her followed later that day by lunch and an afternoon snack. And it will all be wholesome, nutritious food that meets USDA guidelines.

That’s because Alexa’s family child care home participates in the Child Care Food Program, a federally-funded initiative that reimburses eligible child care centers and family child care homes for their food costs.

Child Care of Southwest Florida administers the program, which now includes 78 child care centers and 160 family child care homes in 14 counties from Polk County to Collier County on Florida’s west coast and from Port St. Lucie to Indian River County on Florida’s east coast.

About 6,200 children are fed every day because of the program, which enables child care centers and family child care homes to buy a broader variety and higher quality food than they could afford without the reimbursement.

What are the eligibility requirements?

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Back in November of 2012, we told you a little bit about a Cape Coral mom named Julie Kurszewski and how she was facing 16 surgeries due to juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis and had no one to care for 18-month-old daughter Layla.

You may recall that she was able to start on her many surgeries, knowing that her daughter would be cared for during her recovery because of a scholarship offered by Child Care of Southwest Florida at the Joseph H. Messina Children’s Center.

But there’s a little bit more to the story that you may not know.

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So you’ve decided that you want to enroll your son or daughter in a child care program. Great! You decide to search online for day care centers in your area and you notice that your search engine returns a wide range of child care services from a ‘one person home operation’ to a full fledged preschool.

The search engine will show terms like preschool, day care, and early learning center….all local companies vying for your business. But how do you choose between preschools, day cares, and early learning centers?

While preschools and early learning centers may mean the same thing, a day care certainly does not. A day care is defined as: daytime care for the needs of people who cannot be fully independent, such as children or the elderly.

In contrast an early learning center or preschool is generally recognized as an educational institution where your child goes to learn before entering kindergarten or first grade. Education is the key difference between a day care and a preschool.

So why do we bother taking the time to show the distinction between the two? After all, they’re both places where you send your kids while you work, study, etc. right?

The simple answer is no. As you can see from the photos below, we have 3 preschools in Fort Myers that offer so much more than just a place for your child to go for the day.

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It’s that time of year once again here at Child Care of Southwest Florida (CCSWFL). But before we begin talking about the 18th Annual Circles of Care conference, we’d first like to wish you a Happy New Year!

We hope you had a tremendously successful 2012, fun-filled holidays, and hopefully you’re enjoying 2013 so far.

You know, one of our main goals at CCSWFL is to improve the lives of children in the communities we serve. To accomplish this goal, we spend a lot of time, effort, planning, and coordinating 3 major events, Circles of Care℠ being one of them.

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Over the past couple of months we have provided tips on how to have fun in the Florida sun. Whether you have lived here your entire life or just moved to the area, we hope you have learned about the great places to take your family. In case you haven’t read this information, you can download it as a FREE eBook. Or simply click “read more” where we’ll give you a summation of our posts on the fun places to spend quality time with your family.

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