As of December, 2016 all Prime Time Early Learning Centers have installed Little Free Libraries for young children’s books outside all our centers. What’s a Little Free Library? Glad you asked! A Little Free Library is a home-made and decorated outdoor book box that serves as a small neighborhood based community lending library. Prime Time’s…
Parents are great at worrying, especially when their kids are at preschool or day care all day. We wonder if our kids are somewhere crying for us over a skinned knee or a bruised chin. Every once in awhile when parents get a call from the school in the middle of the day our hearts…
Every preschool, daycare, or nursery school that has an outdoor play space also has an outdoor classroom. It’s true! When there is a place for the kids to go outside, there is a valuable learning environment waiting to be put to good use. Even the most bare bones playground has the potential to teach science…
Mary Had a Little Lamb, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Row, Row, Row Your Boat….they seem like simple, even mindless little rhymes, but they are so much more. Yes, simple rhyming songs and verses can absolutely boost language skills in even the youngest of children. When sung by caregivers, such as parents and daycare providers, songs…
Living in New York and New Jersey means that families and childcare centers are well experienced with all kinds of weather, from infamously humid East Coast summers, to wet and windy autumns, and cold snowy winters. In many day and child care centers, nursery schools, preschools, and camps, the teaching staff is prepared to take…
Parents everywhere are no doubt exasperated when the 15-18 month old’s fascination with dumping out containers becomes a regular activity for their children. Dumping water, food, toys, the garbage, the cat food, the everything… It gets old quickly, cleaning up all that stuff. The toddlers show little interest in the items they have dumped out,…
Many adults took some foreign language classes in high school or college, but most did not become fluent or even conversational, and many also then forgot most of what they learned without frequent practice. That model of education leaves a lot to be desired in terms of efficacy. If today’s parents want bilingual or multilingual…
Most parents probably don’t remember their very first official science lesson, but it was probably sometime in second or third grade. Surely, there was some sort of textbook reading and perhaps a short demonstration by a teacher on surface tension or gravity. We have come to think of science as a book-learned set of ideas…
The CDA, or Child Development Associate Credential is a credential awarded to childcare and preschool staff that have completed relevant coursework and experiential training based on a core set of professionally prepared competency standards recognized nationally by educators and child development professionals. This means that teachers with a CDA credential are among the teaching professionals…