Our Daily MORNING MEETING

With the help of our curriculum from Funshine Express, we have a wonderful "morning meeting" to start off our school/play day. Before I get started, I would like to welcome our newest Tiny Treasure, Blake!

Sweet "baby Blake", as all of our girls call him, started here with us September 24th. Everybody is in love with him already!

Now back to our morning meeting! All of our friends have made it to school by 9am. As the children arrive there are usually cartoons on, and they get free play at stations or get to color. We eat breakfast at 8:30. Then we clean up, take a potty break and brush our teeth. Then around 9am we sit down for our Morning Meeting. 

We first do our "Attendance Chart":

I love the display that Funshine Express sent us for the attendance chart. Each child has a little mouse with their name on it. We sing our "welcome song" to each student and they get to put their mouse in the woodlands field to "play with their friends". As each child puts their mouse in the woodlands, they tell us something they did the day before at their home. 

After attendance we move onto the calendar. One child is picked as the calendar helper. They come up and we count how many days have been in the month so far and they add the current date onto the calendar:

We sing the "Days Of The Week" song and the "Months Of The Year" song. After the calendar we move onto the weather! One of the older children get to be the meteorologist and they also get to pick an assistant (one of the toddlers). They go together and inspect the current weather outside:

They discuss how the sky looks and the older child moves the weather chart arrow to the right weather and add the weather card to the day. The younger child has their own weather chart (bottom chart) where they add our friends to the appropriate weather. Funshine Express did an amazing job on the weather chart organization. I love that I have 2 separate charts accommodating both age groups. Here is a close up of the charts:

Then we move onto the current color, shape, number, and letter. We also have an assigned helper for this too. We have a pointer that the child gets to use to point to each item when we talk about it. Below is the wall display for this part:

At this point, we have a smooth transition into a "practice sheet" or another provided activity that "piggy backs" on our monthly studies.

 Funshine Express has really made our entire day run smoothly. I am beyond satisfied with the quality of the displays and how the kids have gotten into a great routine every day. They are just as excited about the curriculum as I am. And the parents are loving how much the children are learning. 

If you are interested in enriching your (or any) child's life by adding Funshine Express to your daily activities, be sure enter BBT15 at checkout to get $20 off of your order! This is for NEW CUSTOMERS only! 

First Week of Funshine Express

We started using our new curriculum Funshine Express during the first week of September. I have used other curriculums in the past and none of them were "bad", but I have to say, Funshine Express is definitely my favorite. It works perfectly for my small setting child care program and the age groups that I care for. I especially like how versatile ALL the kits are. Fireflies is geared towards the older children I have that are 3 to 5 years old. Buttercups is for the younger children aging from infant to toddler. I have children in both age groups and what I like is that Funshine Express seamlessly ties both curriculums together. So my older toddlers who aren't quite ready for the full Fireflies curriculum are still able to complete the activities with more open-ended results while being challenged yet leaving the children feeling successful in their work. From our first week of "school" in September the children's favorite activities were the "Mirror puppet" activity and the "Aa" practice sheet (both shown below). I can't wait to continue enriching the children's lives through Funshine Express and track each child's results.

New Beginnings With Funshine Express

There is a sense of new beginnings here at Tiny Treasures Preschool! And that, of course, is the introduction of Funshine Express Curriculum! I am so excited to start using this curriculum. It is COMPLETE and easy to set up and use. The kids helped me clear our learning wall of EVERYTHING! The day before we received it in the mail, we as a class watched the video Funshine Express has on their website about what comes in each box. So when the kids saw the box come in they couldn't wait to help me sort through it all. After the kids went home I was able to explore the items in depth and boy did I get excited! I just couldn't wait to put it all to use. I laid everything out and read through a week's worth of the curriculum guide to understand what everything was for.

Once I reviewed the teacher's guide and the items that came in the teacher's kit, I was ready to put it all up on our learning wall! Here is a before and after of our wall in the preschool room:

Before:

After:

We just couldn't wait to use it all! Here are some close-ups of the wall set up.

Now we can't wait to share our favorite parts of the curriculum soon! Stay tuned in!

Remember to always imagine, play, create, & learn,

Miss. Sharla

The Start of Something New

The Start of Something New

As my first blog post, I want to introduce myself and what I do!

A little about me! My name is Sharla Hodges (or commonly known as “Miss. Sharla”). I was born and raised in Sacramento, California. In 2004 I married my high school sweetheart and joined him in South Carolina where he was stationed in the Air Force. Shortly after we received the exciting news that we were expecting our first child, Braedon, born August 2005. I went back to work afterwards then became pregnant a short time later. Our daughter, Lillian, was born November 2006. I decided to stay home after we had her and I absolutely loved staying home with them. I began to watch friends' children as well and the rest is history. I have been providing licensed home child care since 2007. The Air Force moved us to Moody AFB, Georgia in 2010 and we have been here since then. I still run an in-home child care program and care for children of all ages. My program has since become Nationally Accredited and I am now 3-star quality rated in the state of Georgia (which is the highest rating you can receive).

As our new school year has kicked off here at preschool, I can’t wait to share with you our adventures with you all. We are using an AMAZING curriculum from Funshine Express and I just can’t say enough good things about it. We currently have friends ranging in age from 6 weeks to 4 years old and this curriculum has EVERYTHING for EVERYONE. I will write a separate post about the excitement of opening our Funshine Express box and putting it all to use!

Remember to always imagine, play, create, & learn,

Miss. Sharla