Business Plan Authored by: Brittany VanBrocklin Date: February 10th 2014

A.) Introductory statement: Early Learners Child Care helps children grow, build connections, and learn new things. In my program Early Learners Child Care our staff will provide interactions and support childrens growth. We are responsible and respectful. In Early Learners Child Care our staff will provide all the care they have to your childrens needs. Early Learners Child Care will help with the development of emotions because it drives learning, by making this into Early Learners Child Care program toddlers will be nurtured in relationships and it will establish emotional security and support optimal learning, development. By Early Learners Child Care providing this our staff will give the children positive experiences. In Early Learners Child Care the children will have hands on experiences as they explore the classroom. In Early Learners Child Care there will be a lot of music playing in the background for the children because at this young age this helps toddlers learn communication skills, relationship building, and learning to read. The mission of our program is to influence the first years of life in positive ways. For the children to have for a lifetime. Services: Target population- Families residing in Canton, Madrid, or Potsdam. Offer care for toddlers 12 months-36 months. Sessions in each room, toddlers 12 months-24 months and 24 months-36 months. Year round care The holidays we have off are Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Years, week long. Immunizations records, allergies, and get to know your child worksheet are requirements.

Needs Assessment: It is important that Early Learners Child Care implement a need assessments for our toddlers because it helps us find out what child care programming is needed. The resources that we will use is a child needs assessment tool known as the CNA toolkit. This CHE source is a survey that is designed to collect information on the domains related to the needs to children include: Availability of support for a primary caregiver Nutrition Education Childcare (other than by primary caregiver) Family income and resources Psychosocial needs such as consistency in a caregiver, stimulating daily activities, and behavioral, emotional, and developmental problem.

Child Care Trends:

The importance of high quality child care is for families to trust the program, and those children enrolled in the program Early Learners Child Care receive their full educational benefits. The children who are in high quality child care have excellent skills in math, language, and social skills. That is good because those children will require less special education, they progress further in school, and rarely get into trouble. Early Learners Child Care offers a safe, nurturing, as well as stimulating environment for our children. This includes: A low ratio and low turnover because this allows teachers and caregivers of Early Learners Child Care to respond to the individual needs of your children. This also gives the teachers or caregivers the attention that the children need that helps create a strong bond, helping the child feel secure in their environment. In Early Learners Child Care our low ration is 1:3 (one teacher to three children). When there are small group sizes it is much easier to give children the attention that they need. The activities will be much easier to handle and more interaction with the toddlers in the room. The activities that are being designed by our teachers will also be developmentally appropriate for our toddlers age groups. They will be fun and very engaging for the toddlers to participate in. also with a low turnover of teachers the children wont lose a bond that has been created with a teacher because the teacher will be there as long as possible. When the teacher has a higher education it helps staff and even directors understand the needs of the toddlers and the development. This helps with planning developmentally appropriate ways for activities with lots of interaction between everyone. Our staff at Early Learners Child Care participates in training because we believe that we have to keep with the new trends, and regulations. It is good that our staff is always increasing their levels of education, and learning more strategies that can help the Early Learners Child Care program. Our teachers maintain a safe, adequate supervised physical environment for our toddlers. Our teachers also maintain a good communication and relationship with our toddlers parents, as they respect their needs, and what parents want for their children. a.) Licensing and Programming: Early Learners Child Care believes that quality childcare begins with knowledgeable, highly dedicated, and experienced educators. Brittany VanBrocklin serves as the director of Early Learners Child Care, Brittany has her Associates Degree in Early Childhood, and completed student teaching experience in the fall of 2013 and spring of 2014. Britany worked for two summers at the Canton Day Care center in the summer youth program in 2011 and 2012. The teachers in Early Learners Child Care have at minimum, their Associates Degree in Early Childhood and a minimum of 1 year child care setting experience. All teachers are certified in first aid, CPR, and are MAT. All teachers complete a 15 hour professional development and training each year. Teachers participate in the National Association of the Education of Young Children Annual Conference and attend the SUNY Canton Early Childhood Fall Conference. There is also training opportunities to help teachers better their lesson plans and activities in the classroom. Early Learners Child Care is licensed by the NYS office for Children and Family Services. In 2015, our program will begin its self-study process with a NAEYC Accreditation status in 2017.

The Early Learners Child Care staff believe it is important that we prepare young children for their future academics. Our staff therefore uses Early Learning Frameworks that are established in a Head Start program as well as the NYS Core Competencies for Early Childhood Educators. The Early Learners Child Care staff follows professional ethics established by the NAEYC guides.

B.) Organizational Chart: The following illustrates the staff (3): child ratios followed by Early Learners Child Care our ratio is 1:3, 3 children to 1 adult.
Classroom # of children Lead Teacher Assistant Teacher Other: Student Teachers (Volunteers) 1 1

Room 1 Room 2

15 15

1 1

2 2

Marketing Plan: I will market my program through an ad in North Country Now, with information about the program and contact information. Some less expensive strategies and ideas that I will use to successfully market my program will include, making posters of children with the program logo asking certain businesses if they would be willing to display these in their offices. I will create flyers, sharing a little bit about the program, and ask people, parents, and teachers to hand them out or leave them in grocery stores. I will create a website for future parents to look at, post a link on all newsletters, bulletin boards in the classroom, and ask local businesses to post these items in their offices. I will print bookmarks with a little bit about the program, with the logo as well, and leave them at local libraries. The cost of the ad in North County Now would be $12 for the first 10 words, $.25 for each additional word, and the ad would run for 3 weeks. The posters would be a simple cost of arts and crafts that we have at the center; crayons, markers, laminating materials, and the poster board. The flyer would include cost for printing materials; the color ink which is $21.00 and the paper which is $5.00, same goes for the newsletters. Bookmarks would be the price of the ink, and black ink is $16.00. In total this would cost $65.00. Originality: My program differs from other centers because of the care to toddlers. We focus on their developmental domains and early years of life. Our staff receives yearly training every year to further themselves in their knowledge and education. We have volunteers come in and read to our children once a week. One of our teachers speaks Spanish and we integrate this second language into our lesson plans regularly. Much information is found on our website. There are videos of Mrs. Colgan presenting her lesson plans, and how she teaches the children Spanish words. There are pictures of our staff with all their newly trained certificates that they receive each year. We also invite anyone who wants to volunteer to read a book to our children each week on a small interview basis. We have

videos of our toddlers (with parents permission) to show how we accomplish reaching our childrens developmental domains. Our program is here to help our toddlers in the early years of life. We hope that parents will take a look at our website as it contains lots of information and interesting things.