Category Archives: After school care

A Few Distinct Benefits that Accompany Great After School Care Programs

after school careYou might think that there’s no way your child could benefit from a simple after school care program, but you’d be wrong. Turns out, there are more benefits that your child can reap from structured after school care activities than you may have been led to believe.

Whether you’re searching for the perfect program or you’ve just begun to even consider the options available to you, here are some of the potential benefits that await your child in an after school program.

Improved Social Skills
A good after school program will promote key character traits such as respect, cooperation, and communication. With those skill sets constantly being emphasized, there’s a good chance your child will exhibit enhanced social skills not only among their peers but at home as well.

Increased Academic Support
If you’re looking for specifics in your after school program search, it’s important that you look at the services offered in young child care facilities. Academic support is often one of the best things that any after school program can offer your child.

Guaranteed Supervision
Any after school program will ensure that children are always engaged in active learning and that they have the appropriate adult supervision while doing so. These programs are a surefire way to ensure that your child is both safe and social after school lets out.

Enhanced Learning Opportunities
After school programs often offer the same type of classes that are taught in schools, but they boast the added benefit of reduced stress. There are no tests in these classes and students are often allowed to work with their peers, further building social skills.

Healthier Meals
Working late can be a source of anxiety for parents, but after school programs can help ease some of that and even provide meals for children, ensuring that they’re maintaining a healthy and balanced diet.

The nature of an after school program depends on what you want your child to get out of it. Today, almost 11.3 million children take care of themselves after school. Wouldn’t you rather your child reap all of these benefits?

Giving Your Child the Daycare Advantage

Pre k tallahassee

Day cares and after school programs are changing rapidly. Research on early childhood learning shows that this is the age at which children are literally developmentally hard wired to learn. Their brains are growing rapidly, acquiring new knowledge and filing it away. This is the right age to introduce them to new languages, mathematics and music, as well as social skills.

After school programs are more than babysitting
For a long time, child care centers were seen as a kind of babysitting arrangement, where kids went after school until their parents could pick them up after work. In a society where less than a third of all children have mothers who are full time home makers, they quickly became a necessity.
However, early childhood and developmental research has produced a better understanding of how children learn. The answer is, that they do it very well. In fact, the early childhood years, up to the age of seven, may be the best learning period in an individual’s life.

Young children learn rapidly
Researchers have found that toddlers’ brains are built to learn. In more scientific terms, they discovered that in babies and very young children, 700 new neural connections are formed every second. Their brains are developing fast, and they are primed to learn. In fact the period from birth to three years is when brain development is at its fastest in the entire life span.
For educators and parents, this means that it’s the best possible time to introduce children to complex ideas like languages, music and mathematics. Not to mention the social skills they will need all their lives. Parents can help their kids get an early start by reading to them.

The day care advantage
Unfortunately, only about half of all babies and toddlers have parents who will or can take the time to read to them. For parents who are too busy or rushed to help their children benefit from the best learning years of their lives, and for children who are eager to learn everything in the world around them, voluntary preschool is the best solution.

Day care learning takes advantage of the natural propensity of young children to learn, and introduces them to the basic math and language skills that will give them a solid foundation for future academic learning. Long term studies have shown that toddler education gives individuals a lifelong advantage.