If you live in Northville, Michigan and you’re a parent, you’re probably looking to find the best day care near Northville. You definitely have no shortage of options in this area, and knowing how to choose the best option for you is going to make a big difference.
Now, we won’t be able to tell you what the best daycare in Northville is. The title of “best” is highly subjective, so we won’t have any way to tell you what the best option for you is. That being said, we can look over how you can tell if a daycare is going to be good for your child.
There are a lot of different types of daycare, so knowing what to look for in a broad sense can ensure that you’re choosing a quality daycare program. There is a world of difference between a good daycare and a bad one, and telling the difference can be tricky if you don’t know what to look for.
Today we’re going to be looking for the things that the top child psychologists look for when they’re deciding if a specific program is worth its salt. There are a few big categories to look at, and we’re going to break them down in a way that anyone reading this article could understand.
An Environment That is Made for Children
Do you remember being in school? Throughout every different part of schooling, classrooms look different. Odds are, while they had similarities, your high school classroom and college classroom looked different from each other.
This difference is even more pronounced when you compare the differences between a kindergarten classroom and a college classroom. What might be the reasoning behind this? Why would we treat younger children differently than older children?
Well, the main reason is that it’s good for development. Kids are kids, and teenagers are teenagers. Teenagers are much later in their development than kindergarten-aged children, and that’s why these classrooms take on such different appearances from one another.
It’s especially important that a good daycare is built with children in mind. Just imagine how bored your child would be in a college classroom, and how likely they would be to accidentally hurt themself if they were casually running around in a college classroom.
A classroom built for children should have:
- Child-sized furniture.
- This includes desks, cubbies, interior walls, etc.
- Rounded edges.
- Sharp edges are more likely to cause damage if a child runs into them face first, which means that rounded edges are important for this.
- A variety of colors.
- Children love colorful things. That’s a big part of the reason why children like cartoons so much. A colorful children’s classroom means a better chance of them actually learning what they’re there to learn.
- A variety of toys.
- As a parent, you already know how important toys are to children. Having toys in the classroom will help children have fun while they’re learning.
A daycare classroom should look like a place that a child would enjoy existing in for hours and hours, day after day. If the classroom isn’t somewhere that would be both interesting and safe for a child to both learn and play, it’s probably not a good program to enroll your child into.
You have to consider how well your child would be able to focus in any given setting before enrolling them. If your child wouldn’t be able to learn in a specific environment, it might not be the best place to send them nearly every day. That would be a waste of your money and your child’s time.
Good Teachers Make Great Classes
If you remember going to school, there’s a good chance that you can remember good teachers as well as bad ones. Teachers that care can make a good class great, and teachers that don’t can make every minute spent in their classroom feel like hours had just passed by.
Just think back to your high school days. Which teacher did you prefer, the one that treated all of their students like adults and talked to you with respect, or the teacher that got angry with the class and threatened to send notes home to get your parents to discipline you, rather than actually looking at why you’re failing their class?
Most people would prefer the former, and those teachers are usually a lot kinder and easier to work with. Well, your child probably has the same preference. Just because they’re very young doesn’t mean that they aren’t little humans that like to be treated with respect.
People that are good at working with children are well aware of this, and most good teachers learn how to properly speak to children to ensure that the children are feeling respected, even if they’re in the process of correcting a child’s behavior.
Most daycares will allow you to sit in on a class that’s already in progress so you can see how the teacher interacts with the class. Typically, you can tell if the teacher is good if they:
- Get down on the child’s level.
- This can include sitting down or crouching. There are a lot of power dynamics in body language, and when a teacher is taller than the student it can make the student feel as if the teacher is lording over them.
- Good eye contact.
- You probably know the difference between someone making eye contact with you and not when they’re speaking with you. Children are tiny humans so they feel the same.
- The ability to get the class under control while remaining calm.
- If the teacher can’t keep calm with a potential student’s parents in the room, think about how they act when you aren’t watching the classroom.
- The ability to explain exactly why the children are doing what they’re doing.
- Preschools can look pretty chaotic at times. Children like doing weird things, and teachers know that. A good teacher will be able to explain why the kids are doing whatever they’re doing, no matter how odd the activity might seem.
You can’t always tell what a good daycare teacher will look like. Maybe they look like Ms. Frizzle, maybe they look like Neil Patrick Harris, or maybe they look like Mr. T with cool hair, big muscles, and the whole nine yards.
That’s why it’s important to sit in on a class to see what the teacher is like. There’s no way to know without actually seeing how they work with the children. Looks can be misleading, so you can’t really base your assumptions based on how the teacher looks.
Educational Enrichment for a Better Future
We briefly touched on this in the last section, but it’s important enough to warrant expanding upon. Educational enrichment is enrichment that helps to educate your child. You’re probably aware of some types of educational enrichment, and you might even have some in your own home.
The most popular educational toys are things like:
- Alphabet blocks.
- Abacuses
- See and say toys
There are a lot of other examples that could be included on the list we just looked at, but those are probably the three most commonly used ones in households. Well, daycare teachers are aware of how children learn, and a good daycare program will include a lot of kinds of educational enrichment.
That can vary a lot in a daycare program because there are a lot of kids to work with. That opens the door for a whole lot of possibilities that you couldn’t do at home because you simply don’t have enough children to do them with.
Group activities work on a lot of things for the children enrolled in the daycare program. For example, groups activities can help your child learn the basics of a subject while also helping them learn to work as a team with the other students and build up their social skills.
All of those things are useful for a growing child to practice before they get into school, and having a lot of children that can work together means that there are a lot of activities that can be done without having to worry too much about the number of people that can participate.
If a daycare center doesn’t have any sort of educational enrichment, you can’t expect for it to be able to do a very good job at teaching your children the things that they’ll need for their upcoming academic career.
Getting the Best for Your Child
Knowing how to properly prepare your child for the future that they have ahead of them can have a giant impact on the life that they’ll live as an adult. If you do it right, you can be sure that your child will grow into a healthy and successful adult when the time comes.
The right daycare program can make a huge difference in the way that they approach the rest of their academic career as well as the life they have as an adult that follows. Making sure that you know what to look for is going to make a huge difference when it comes time to pick where you’ll send your child.