In-House Newsletter
August 2017
Education Specialist
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Rainbow Rep.
“Making one person smile can change the world. Maybe not the whole world, but their world. Start small. Start now.”
Staff Connection Ideas- “A smile can hide so many feelings. Fear, sadness, heartbreak… But it also shows one other thing, strength.” The second week in August is National Smile Week. Encourage staff members to “send a smile” to one another. Create a bulletin board that says, “Give someone a SMILE today!” Cover the board in yellow sticky notes that have smiley faces on them. Hand out smiley faces anytime! When someone is already happy, when someone is having a rough day, when you see them interacting with a child, anything! Re-fill the board with smiley face sticky notes as they get taken off so you are never short smiles.
Family Connection Ideas- Thursday, August 10th is National S’more’s day. For this day, have a bin at pick-up time with little s’more sandwich bags. In each bag, put graham crackers, a marshmallow, and a piece of chocolate. Make sure you have enough for each family, and child.
Each month we will continue to provide ideas as well as general tips for connecting with staff and families. We would also love to hear your ideas and see your hard work! Please send ideas and pictures of completed activities to education@rainbowccc.com.
Health, Safety, and Licensing Coordinator
Supervision
Providing adequate supervision is of paramount importance. Serious issues can arise when children are not properly supervised; the children can, get lost, cause mischief, or become seriously injured in a matter of seconds. Supervision techniques are important for many different reasons; it protects you, your children and the integrity of your center. Adequate supervision will help keep kids safe, identify potential risks, and help with parent retention. When a parent feels comfortable that we are supervising their child, they stay with us longer and help make the center more successful.
Providing adequate supervision is essentially an easy process when following Rainbow Guidelines.
1. Children should always be within sight and sound of a teacher.
· Position yourself to see the entire area, including the bathroom.
· Listen for different sounds, distress, happiness, or sadness.
2. Understand different children’s needs, some may be wanderers and it is important to identify the flight risk.
3. Check the room before leaving any area, even in the cribs.
4. Conduct a proper name-to-face check every hour and before/after transitions, this includes...
· Calling out a child’s name, hearing them reply AND visually seeing them. (This aligns with our sight and sound policy.)
· Lining them up at the door for ALL transitions while doing name-to-face.
· Ensuring via name-to-face that you have an accurate count on your children. Name-to-face sheets are numbered for convenience.
· If applicable, have one teacher stand at the front of the line and one stand at the back.
5. Remain at the table during meal times with the children to ensure child safety.
6. During nap time, enough light procedures must be followed to adequately maintain sight and sound of the child(ren).
· Make sure no child’s head is covered by a blanket.
· Blankets must not be placed in cribs and bibs must be removed prior to napping in all cases.
· Infants must be placed on their back to sleep and checked regularly, every 15 minutes.
7. Never leave the room out of ratio.
If we follow these simple guidelines, we will never have a supervision problem thus protecting all our children and the integrity of our centers.