![]() Ready to Try These Fun Lessons at Home? If you’ve been reading about our sparkly “I” creations and hands-on arctic animal adventures, you might be wondering how to do activities like these yourself—especially if you don’t have a background in early education. That’s where PreKWithMe.com steps in. They offer monthly subscription kits packed with engaging, easy-to-use lessons and manipulatives for exploring letters, numbers, shapes, and more. These kits are designed for real parents and education partners who want to guide their child’s early learning experience but aren’t quite sure where to start. No need to spend hours searching for ideas or cutting out complicated craft templates. You and your child or students can jump right into learning and playing together. Think of it as having a friendly teacher behind the scenes—planning the lessons, gathering the suggestions, and giving you the know-how to make learning fun. Whether it’s discovering the letter I, counting from 1–12, or matching shapes like trapezoids (yes, your preschooler can learn trapezoids!), these subscription kits ensure you’re covering all the important steps to build a solid preschool foundation. Best of all, each kit is curated with playful, hands-on lesson plans and educational puzzles that help children stay engaged while developing essential skills. Check out PreKWithMe.com to see how these monthly kits can bring the joy of preschool learning right to your kitchen table or preschool center. You’ve got this—and we’re here to help!
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Unlocking the Power of Hands-On Learning: Monthly Subscription Boxes for Early Childhood Education
Early childhood is a time filled with endless curiosity, boundless energy, and a thirst for exploration. As childcare providers, preschool teachers, and homeschool parents, it’s both exciting and challenging to keep young learners engaged in meaningful, developmentally appropriate activities. Curated, hands-on learning resources can simplify our planning while ensuring children receive high-quality educational experiences. One practical way to achieve this balance is through monthly subscription learning boxes—an innovative approach that makes planning and teaching a breeze. Below, we’ll explore how monthly subscription boxes can support early childhood education goals, spark creativity, and streamline lesson planning and preparation. You might find that such a resource, like the monthly boxes from PreK with Me, addresses many of the common hurdles we face in both classroom and home settings. 1. Engaging Multiple Learning Styles It’s no secret that young children learn best through hands-on, multi-sensory experiences. The subscription boxes from www.prekwithme.com are designed for preschool-age children and typically include activities that engage tactile, visual, and auditory learners. When you give a child the opportunity to feel different textures, manipulate objects, and hear playful instructions or stories, their interest naturally piques, and they become more invested in the learning process. Why it matters: Multisensory engagement solidifies new concepts and helps children retain information. The materials in these boxes are intentionally curated to create playful learning opportunities that build foundational skills in early literacy, math, science, and more. 2. Saving Time with Ready-to-Use Materials For many educators and parents, one of the biggest obstacles to implementing new, hands-on activities is the prep work involved. Cutting out shapes, gathering art supplies, and ensuring every child has enough materials can become a juggling act. Solution: Monthly subscription boxes like the ones from PreK with Me arrive with most (if not all) of the necessary materials already sorted and labeled. This helps you:
3. Building Foundational Skills Across Subjects Early childhood curricula should emphasize a wide range of skills, from fine motor development to early numeracy, language acquisition, and social-emotional growth. Subscription learning boxes typically incorporate these domains in a holistic manner. For instance, a single box could include:
4. Nurturing Independence and Confidence When children are given age-appropriate, self-contained projects, they’re empowered to explore more independently. Subscription boxes often include child-friendly instructions or visuals, allowing little ones to test out new concepts with minimal prompting. Benefits:
5. Flexibility for Different Educational Settings Monthly boxes aren’t just for the home. They can seamlessly fit into various educational environments:
6. Built-In Progression and Routine One of the hidden benefits of subscribing to a monthly box service is the built-in routine. Children thrive on consistency, and knowing that each month (or week) they’ll have a new set of activities creates a sense of anticipation and excitement. Over time, you can observe a natural progression of skills—boxes gradually build upon previous themes, offering new challenges just as children are ready for them. 7. Encouraging Family Engagement For those in childcare or preschool settings, the materials can be sent home or integrated into family-oriented assignments. In homeschool environments, these activities organically involve parents or older siblings in playful, hands-on learning. Having a clear structure and thoughtfully chosen resources can motivate families to continue the educational journey outside the formal setting. Bringing It All Together In the ever-evolving landscape of early childhood education, finding high-quality, developmentally appropriate resources is both essential and time-consuming. Monthly subscription boxes are a simple, effective solution to help children learn and grow through engaging, hands-on activities that appeal to their natural curiosity. Whether you’re an educator looking to enhance your curriculum or a parent aiming to foster a love of learning at home, subscription boxes like those from PreK with Me can provide a valuable and versatile toolkit. Their monthly themes, ready-to-use activities, and balanced approach to skill development make this type of resource a good fit for a wide range of learning environments. By embracing the convenience and educational rigor of these curated boxes, you’ll be able to spend less time planning and more time guiding your young learners as they discover, create, and grow. ![]()
Childcare providers are some of the most amazing, hardworking and did I say, "AMAZING" group of entrepreneur's I have ever had the privilege to call friends. I am one of you. I understand how many hours we spend (60+) on our feet caring for, feeding, teaching, and loving the families in our care.
Finding the time to fit social media marketing into our packed schedules seems overwhelming. We are often, as a group, resistant to adding anything to our day that doesn't get a HUGE return due to a simple lack of time. It's real, not just lip-service to say that we lack time. Many professions claim that, but I have yet to know ONE person trade place with me for a day that didn't walk away and say, "I don't know HOW you do that EVERY DAY!" Love...passion...calling...it's my heart and soul. That's how. In my efforts to help other providers I often research information asked of me by fellow providers via our Childcare Marketing and Mastermind's group. Please join us if you are a coach, marketer, fellow childcare owner/provider/teacher and want to provide your help for FREE. This is a group of like-minded professionals sharing free information for the good of one another. Should you disagree with an opinion, simply state what you have found that works and remember that the ladies and fella's in this group have built their businesses from nothing with blood, sweat, heart and soul. We are a highly positive group of professionals supporting one another, JOIN US!!! Click the big red button below and join our group NOW!!!
This question was posed on our group this week, "What is the best time, day to advertise my business on Facebook?"
Great question!!! Here is some awesome information that I found on SocialTimes.com Your mileage may, of course, vary, but this infographic from Quick Sprout contains a lot of useful best time to post social media data."
Courtesy of: Quick Sprout
![]() You did it! You FINALLY received your license to operate your center or family childcare home. You are ready to LAUNCH full speed ahead. You are ACTIVELY marketing, taking advantage of EVERY trick, tip, and tidbit. The calls start to trickle in, followed by the questions and you find that you struggle to turn those calls into ACTUAL appointments to tour your facility. What happened? You failed to prepare. It's a shocking realization isn't it? We can chalk it up to "shoppers," or "tire-kickers" but I will be honest with you because I want you to succeed. It will be o.k., this is fixable. Here are the top 20 questions as provided by www.earlychildhoodcolorado.org (as referenced via The Milk Memos) that prospective clients need to ask prospective Child Care Providers. These are legitimate questions that you need to have answered professionally, succinctly, and readily available to the impromptu phone interview, church lady, mom's group acquaintance, or neighbor. As the Boy Scouts say, "Be prepared!" n Having the answers to these questions prepared, memorized, and ready to provide to whomever may come your way will go a LONG way toward taking a quick interview to the next step of a tour, and then securing the confidence of signing up your newest client.
One question I would personally add to this list would be one I hear more and more often, "What curriculum do you use?" Families are increasingly concerned about the quality of the Early Childhood Education their child will be receiving while in care. They want their child to have the best start to his/her Kindergarten experience as possible and very often, childcare providers that provide preschool services are being chosen over those that do not. There, of course, are many options for teaching preschool. Some providers hire in preschool teachers to their programs several days each week. Others create their own curriculum utilizing various resources with the ages of their children and abilities in mind. Many, however, recognizing that their work week is quite busy opt to purchase an "out of the box" curriculum. Should you choose this route, my advice is to see the following reviews when I was searching for a solution to add time back to my schedule after years of "diy" preschool. I chose to go with Mother Goose Time for its emphasis on Kindergarten readiness in Literacy, Math, Science, Social/Emotional, Music and Movement, Language and Creative Arts. You can read those reviews here, here, and here! As always, I wish you well and I hope you get to play today! - L
The following marketing advice comes from Connie Jones Orman, a respected childcare provider in Kansas, my friend, and great marketer, as it originally appeared on our Childcare Marketing Masterminds closed group on Facebook. If you would like to join our group, and are in the profession of childcare, please join us!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/childcaremarketing/ Using Pinterest to market your childcare business isn't as hard as you think!
Pinterest is set up like pin boards. Each pin is a picture from a blog post or website that the person would like to retain for future reference. The boards are like file folders. When setting up a Pinterest account, never scrimp on folders. Dumping everything into one and then trying to sort it out later into more manageable labels is very frustrating and time consuming. Start out with a good idea of what categories you will want to reference.
The best advice I can give is to have a great first picture in every blog post and on every webpage you have. The picture is what gets pinned and is what grabs the attention of others. Pinterest is like a pyramid scheme, in that if you pin something, then all your followers will see it. If you pin it into a folder that you have tagged with a category, such as EDUCATION, then it will be displayed on that board for anyone to see who is searching within that specific category. It can help focus your pins to a target audience. Your pin can then be found and pinned by others, for all of their followers to see and possibly pin. And on and on. If you are lucky enough, you'll get pinned by one of the masters, like Teach Preschool, Red Ted Art, etc. and get in front of all their followers. I recently posted my "Our 25 Activities of Circle Time" to a child care group, and it went pretty viral, for a modest blog. What to pin: Pinning is all about making information available to others, that others want to see, if you aren't just creating boards for yourself. If only your clients or family would be interested in your blog post, then don't waste yours or other people's time by pinning something most will find irrelevant. However, most of us have found things that do and don't work for us, that others would find valuable through pinning that blog post. Right now I have something I'm interested in, but don't have any idea about it, so I've invited someone in the know to do a guest post that I think will be a great one to pin, that will generate a lot of traffic to my blog. If there are many pins regarding the craft you are blogging, then don't pin it. However, if you take a well-known craft and make it your own, provide better directions, provide a printable, discuss the educational aspects of it, etc. then it's often more pinnable and helpful than a unique craft that others aren't that interested in doing. Key Words As with a blog post, key words in a pin will increase your SEO presence. Think about the many ways people may search for your pin and try to include as many key words as possible in the description, without making a tag word line, which is annoying on Pinterest. Keep the description to a few relevant lines. If you have a following, often having a recognizable pin layout can increase traffic, as they instantly recognize the pin as from your blog. Pinterest has easy tools to include in your HTML blog coding to automatically make your pictures easy to pin for anyone searching outside of Pinterest. If you aren't familiar with HTML changes, this takes about 2 minutes to add, and is very worth it to find some kid to plop it into your blog code. People are drawn to different pictures. When creating a blog post, pin YOUR favorite or title picture, but have others within the post that are also relevant to the post. I've been surprised by the pictures other's have chosen to pin from my posts. All pinned pictures within a post will link to that post. Remember that pins are forever. So, even if a pinned post doesn't get much traffic immediately, I've found that even a year or two later it will suddenly become relevant and traffic will increase for an old post. In addition to pinning your own blog posts, which will gain some traffic, the most traffic will be generated by having a good Pinterest presence. If people think that you are going to be sending them valuable web links through your Pinterest boards, then they will follow you and suggest you to others. Followers see everything you post, or if they follow only certain boards, then what you post to those. Pinterest etiquette: don't pin multiple pictures for the same post at the same time, or to the same board. If you want to keep your post in front of your followers, pin it again in another week. The same people will initially see it, and if you post a ton of the same link, they will most likely stop following you for hijacking their feed. If you aim your Pinterest boards towards your target blog or web audience and pin accordingly, then you can really broaden your audience. I keep a separate Pinterest board now for my non-child care related pins. Questions? Hope this makes sense. Please feel free to ask questions. I was one of those people with dozens of binders full of magazine clippings before Pinterest came along, so it melded wonderfully with what I was already doing in gathering ideas and resources. For others, they have needed a push to see the value of it, but most do. The majority of my blog traffic now comes from Pinterest. This is easy to track on your blog statistics page. www.pinterest.com/littlestarlearn/ Here is an example of a great pin using my favorite curriculum, Mother Goose Time!!
Thank you, Connie, for a great tutorial on Pinterest!!
As always, I wish you well and I hope you get to play today! - L You want to promote your business. You know you need to be utilizing your Social Media to do it, but you don't want to look like you're mud slinging, right?!. How often should you post? This infographic from https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-often-post-social-media is an easy to follow "non-spammy" guide to social media posting frequency.
Ever felt like this??? Naaahhhhh.....me either!!! There are days filled with amazing moments, skills developed and celebrated, lessons packed with wonder; miraculous incredible, worthy moments that take my breath away and confirm that I was meant to be doing what I do. And then there are the moments when everyone had a late night and I swear ice tea and M&M's on their way to me. You know those times. If you are being honest with yourself and everyone else....just...like...me. One day....I quit. I just quit. I quit on the inside and on the outside. I quit. But thankfully, not in the way you might think. You see...after several days of feeling like this picture on the inside, I realized that I was trying to do to much ALL BY MYSELF. I recognized I was headed for burnout. As you can see if you have visited my site very often or read any of my blogs, I love my job. I love my business. I love the children that I spend my days with. I love their families!!! I couldn't allow burnout to be the end result of all my hard work. I had to take a step back and reassess what was working and what wasn't. These are the 3 things I learned in my search to reignite my passion, regain my energy, and remind myself of how important it was to be an Early Childhood Educator in the lives of the little ones in my care. Lesson #1 -I Quit Believing That What I |
For Providers!It's my hope that the pages of this blog will inspire you, relax you, encourage you, reignite you, and help you remember why you entered this profession - the children. Archives
January 2025
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