Daycares in Las Colinas TX, Kids R Kids

Sept. 7, 2010 - PRLog -- Searching for child care services and daycare can be a difficult task. Nancy Pieper, successful child care owner (Kids R Kids) since 1999, makes your job easier with great tips.  To contact Nancy, please call (972) 831-0010.

Nancy discusses in great detail how to find the best child care/daycares services in Las Colinas, Irving and Coppell TX through an informative video.  Here's the link:

http://www.viddler.com/explore/ChildCare/videos/9/

Written Transcript:

I’m the owner of Kids R Kids in Las Colinas.  We’ve been here 12 years.  Today I wanted to do a session on what to look for in a child care center.  We get this question all the time from new parents who are out trying to figure out the right place for their family and new baby or people who have just moved to the community and they’re trying to figurer out the right place for them.  I wanted to give you some feedback that maybe will make that search easier.

The first thing that I would say is the environment.  You want to look for a school that is clean, one that when you walk in it feels warm and inviting.  You want to look for does the staff seem happy?  Are there a lot of supplies in the room?  If you were a child and you looked in that classroom, would you want to go in that classroom and spend the day?  You want it to smell good.  If a school doesn’t smell good, then I would say there is a problem.  You want to make sure that it smells good and inviting.  

Then you also want to listen.  You want to hear noise but you want to hear happy noise in the classrooms.  You want to hear the kids having a good time and engaged in activities.  When you tour the school, you want to make sure that you see all different kinds of examples of the kids being engaged, small groups, one-on-ones, large groups, but you do want to see a lot of interaction between the teachers and the children.  Those are just some basic overview things that I would look for.  

The other big thing for me would be the curriculum.  I would say that if a school does not follow the Texas School Ready! Program, that’s not a place that I would put my child.  That program has just been awesome.  It’s a program that helps prepare the children for kindergarten so that they can be successful.  The standards for children just continue to raise on what they want children to be able to do when they enter kindergarten.  

So the role of Texas School Ready!, it’s all a research-based program.  You can look online and get great information from them on all the research that was done and is behind that program.  It really helps.  It’s huge in literacy and getting these children ready to read and giving them the tools to really be able to read and be successful in that kindergarten environment.  It also has some math components and science components and other components that go with it.  As we know, our world revolves around language.  It’s just so important to give them a solid foundation in language.

If you’re looking more for infant/toddler situations, you want it to be a loving environment and a warm environment.  Also, the research is showing today how critical it is that we begin those children early with brain development.  Any research that you look at that involves children, being able to prepare them to continue to grow and develop as they move up into the older classrooms.  It all starts in that infant room.  It’s just critical that we’re constantly reading to those children, that we are talking to them, singing to them, interacting with them.  Their brains are just growing at such a fast pace that it’s just vital that we start it in that infant classroom.  

I would ask for an overview of what those classrooms look like in the day.  What activities are going on?  How do they plan those lesson plans?  How are the schedules set up for those children?  You also want a school that you can walk in any time, no restrictions on when you can be in the building.  You want to be able to come into the school and see your child throughout the day at any time that you choose to do so.

Another large area that I would really recommend that you look into is how your child will be assessed in the program.  You want to find a program that continually assesses your child and looks at their growth and has a plan for their continued growth.  If you’re in a school or attend a school that does not assess, then you may get to kindergarten and realize that there are issues.  Those issues could have been caught very early on if you were in a strong program that was constantly assessing and measure the child to make sure that they’re accomplishing what they need to accomplish to be successful.  There are different assessment tools, all different ways to do it.  What we really want to see is that growth.  

A strong school, in my mind, would be one that sits down with the parents and they go through periodically where your child was, what they’ve been able to accomplish and where they’re going to be taking them, what the next step is for that child.  I think this is critical.  If you don’t know where a child is, how do you know where to take them?  In a strong program, they will then take those results and the curriculum will be based around those results so that the child can continue to get what they need.  Your child may have a different need than the other children in the classroom.  A good, solid program will write those things into your child’s day to give them more practice in what they need, to get them to where they need to be.  

Also, I think a strong program will offer tutoring.  If you have a preschool child and they’re struggling in a particular area -- we’re busy parents.  We’re all on the go and have a lot of things going on.  Sometimes your child may need a little extra one-on-one time.  A strong program will offer one-on-one tutoring for that child so that we help them, again, accomplish the goals that they need to accomplish.

So we talked about curriculum.  We talked about assessments.  Communication is huge.  Again, we’re all busy.  I remember I used to get a stack of papers from my son’s classroom.  By the time I got home, juice had been spilled on them and you couldn’t read them and they went in the trash.  I was always struggling about what’s going on.  You need to find a school that’s going to be able to communicate to you in a way that you will be able to stay in touch with what is going on in the environment.  

One great way is email.  Schools have to get with technology.  We are busy.  Probably every parent out there has email or a way to get to email.  That is a great way to communicate.  We try to communicate the weekly – they get a weekly newsletter by classroom so the parents know what’s going on every week in that classroom.  Also, they get a monthly calendar, a monthly menu.  We send out -- every week they get some kind of information from us.  One week it’s going to be pictures in a classroom of what’s going on in that classroom, what the children are gaining from that activity.  The next week it may be an article based on some element of the learning that needs to be happening.  We’re constantly communicating to those parents.  

We do transition meetings.  So when a child is moved to a new classroom, it allows the parent to sit down with the teacher that the child is moving from and the teacher that the child is moving to.  They can all talk about that child and talk about the things they need to know about the child coming into their classroom.  It gives the parent time, the opportunity to meet the new teachers and understand the objectives of that classroom.  So that would be one way.  

Nancy discusses in great detail how to find the best child care/daycares services in Las Colinas, Irving and Coppell TX through an informative video.  Here's the link to watch the entire video:

http://www.viddler.com/explore/ChildCare/videos/9/

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