Happy Monday!

Today we had a visitor-Marcy White with ASU Childhood Services came to do a Technical Assistance visit with our program. Marcy will be the observer who comes to do my FCERS (Family Childcare Environmental Rating Scale) assessment. By ABC guidelines, our program needs to attain at least a 5.0 score overall on this scale. The scale measures and scores the environment in which the children learn. She is looking at room arrangement, materials offered, guidance and interactions from the teacher to the students, among other things. Her visit today was not to score our program, but to offer any ideas or alternatives to what we currently have to make our school the BEST it can be! She is a wealth of knowledge, and she gave me lots of great feedback about a few small changes I could implement to enhance our environment. We talked about a new room arrangement, changing the dramatic play area, and adding center tags and populations to the centers to make the children's time playing there more purposeful. I am excited to make these changes, and look forward to how the children react to them!

From the developers of the rating scales:
"Our scales are designed to assess process quality in an early childhood or school age care group. Process quality consists of the various interactions that go on in a classroom between staff and children, staff, parents, and other adults, among the children themselves, and the interactions children have with the many materials and activities in the environment, as well as those features, such as space, schedule and materials that support these interactions. Process quality is assessed primarily through observation and has been found to be more predictive of child outcomes than structural indicators such as staff to child ratio, group size, cost of care, and even type of care, for example child care center or family child care home (Whitebook, Howes & Phillips, 1995).

In order to provide care and education that will permit children to experience a high quality of life while helping them develop their abilities, a quality program must provide for the three basic needs all children have:
■Protection of their health and safety
■Building positive relationships
■Opportunities for stimulation and learning from experience

No one component is more or less important than the others, nor can one substitute for another. It takes all three to create quality care. Each of the three basic components of quality care manifests itself in tangible forms in the program's environment, curriculum, schedule, supervision and interaction, and can be observed. These are the key aspects of process quality that are included in our environmental rating scales.

Our scales define environment in a broad sense and guide the observer to assess the arrangement of space both indoors and outdoors, the materials and activities offered to the children, the supervision and interactions (including language) that occur in the classroom, and the schedule of the day, including routines and activities. The support offered to parents and staff is also included.

All of our scales have been developed in close collaboration with realistic field-based sites. They have good interrater reliability and validity, thus making them suitable for research and program evaluation, as well as program improvement efforts."




No pictures today (I left my camera in the car over the Thanksgiving break...sorry.)

We began our week of Health & Nutrition. During group time we sorted the foods that we have in the dramatic play area into healthy foods or junk foods. The children did a great job, and they definitely know what junk food is! :)

We will continue this unit throughout the remainder of the week, reading books, and doing lots of activities with the food pyramid and food groups.


Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I cannot believe I am beginning to plan the family Christmas party already! We will have it here at my home on December 19th from 5:30-7:00. Please make plans to attend, we will have a "special" visitor and enjoy a grest time with our friends and family as we celebrate Christmas together!