If you have child care questions…

Cathy of Child Care Answers

If you have child care questions, we have CHILD CARE ANSWERS.  Child Care Answers is a community outreach program of Day Nursery.  At Day Nursery, we know we can’t accommodate every child who needs early care and education at our seven locations so we offer a free service to assist parents and grandparents find child care.  Our resource and referral staff covers Marion, Hendricks, Hamilton and Johnson counties.  Last week, Cathy Sparks, one of our two referral specialists took a call from a grandfather in Ft. Wayne who wanted to help his son, who lives in the Indy area, find care for his children.  Cathy spent a great deal of time with this man making sure she answered all his questions.  A little while later, after she hung up the phone, the man called Cathy back and said he would like to talk to her supervisor.  If you are in customer service, no matter how well you know you do your job, that kind of request makes your heart skip a beat.  Well it turns out that he called to praise Cathy and the assistance Child Care Answers gave his family.  He was so delighted in the service that he pledged to make a regular contribution to the United Way of Central Indiana which Day Nursery has been a member of for over 90 years!  If you have child care questions, please call our experts at Child Care Answers at 631-4643 or visit the website at www.childcareanswers.com.

Early Readers Club

A Day Nursery Auxiliary volunteer shares a story.

If you have children under 6 (and I am guessing you do since you are reading the Day Nursery blog) today’s blog entry is provided as a public service just for you!

The United Way of Central Indiana’s Success By 6 initiative has a great program called the Early Readers Club(SM), which encourages parents and caregivers to read to their child starting at birth. 

Families who register for the Early Readers Club will receive 12 high-quality children’s books each year until the child’s sixth birthday. The Early Readers Club currently serves children in Hancock, Hendricks, Marion and Morgan counties.

 
You can register for $20 per child (per year). Scholarships are available. Find out more at the Success By Six website http://www.successby6indy.org/ 

 

 

What is a Bellobration?

Yesterday I was lucky to be with a dozen 4-and 5-year olds at the Day Nursery at the State Government Center when they got a chance to experience the colors, the music and the fun of the circus on their playground in their own version of Bellobration.  What’s a Bellobration you ask????  Well, it is a celebration of all things circus, courtesy of Bello, named “America’s Best Clown” by Time Magazine.

Playing with a parachute

 

 

 Bello will be in Indianapolis September 4th thru the 7th with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus which will take place at Conseco Fieldhouse.  The children donned the tall orange Bello hair and participated in an obstacle course and other circus-related games. 

 

 

 

 

Meet our new Center Director

Andrew Jaggers

I am happy to introduce the newest member of our center leadership team.  His name is Andrew Jaggers.  He will be the Center Director at the Day Nursery Ruth A. Lilly Center at 3522 N. Central Avenue.  He will be inheriting a lot of history when he sits down in the Director’s chair this week (after he gets thru about a zillion hours of “new hire” paperwork and computer training!).  Our Lilly Center, which, BTW, is open to the public and currently enrolling new students ages 2-6, has been serving the Watson-McCord Neighborhood for over 30 years.  Andrew holds a BA in Early Childhood from Lincoln (IL) Christian College.   I was lucky to be able to pull him away from his paperwork for a few minutes this week to learn more about him.  Both of Andrew’s parents are teachers so he has education in his blood.  His father is currently an elementary school principal.  He is the middle child of three children  (which I have read makes him a great mediator–a skill that certainly will come in handy negotiating with toddlers!).  He played baseball in college and his hobby is boxing.  We welcome Andrew to our Day Nursery family.

Shady Play and Sunny Play

Alex

Today I was visiting the Day Nursery at the State Government Center to prepare for a special event we are doing tomorrow as a warm-up for the arrival of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus coming to town September 4th.  More about that tomorrow.  During my visit, I snapped this picture of 1-year-old Alex (isn’t he cute??) having some fun outside.  He was sitting in the sun and some of his classmates were sitting in the shade. It reminded me how every moment with a young child is a “teachable” moment.   

Here’s an idea you and your toddler can explore together courtesy of Parent Central at NACCRRA.  The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies has a great website.  Parent Central is dedicated to helping parents access current information on children’s issues as well as the most recent parenting resources. Their website offers information on child development, tips related to raising children, finding quality child care.

Set up two outside play areas on blankets, one in the sun and one in the shade. As the weather gets cooler, you can also set this up inside. Choose a sunny room and a shady room. Invite your toddler to play freely with favorite toys. When he is in the shade, talk about how the shade feels; when he is in the sun, talk about how the sun feels. Your toddler will feel the difference between cool and warm. Talk about how the sunny spot is bright and warm, and how the shady spot is cooler and darker.

• Let’s put these toys in the shade.
• Where is the sun? Can you point up to the sky?
• Let’s put these toys in the sun.

This helps your toddler begin to understand the concept of “same and different.”  Check the blogroll to the right for a link to Parent Central.  I would encourage you to sign up for their emails.

Annual Report

student art Day Nursery Fort Harrison

I’ve been working on Day Nursery’s 2007 Annual Report for several weeks now.  Here we are almost through summer and I am still thinking about last year.  We don’t get last year’s audited financial reports until the beginning of summer so that drives the timing on this important publication.  The nice thing is, the annual report always gives us a reason to stop and reflect on our accomplishments for the year.  We re-read all the parent surveys and the letters we have received.  Again this year we are proud of the number of families we have been able to serve by offering tuition assistance and accepting government CCDF vouchers.  Most of these families would not have been able to send their child to an accredited child care center without this assistance.  In 2007, 181 children attended Day Nursery with the help of our scholarships.  We also provided early childhood education for 402 children who attended using state child care vouchers.  I will be posting the entire report on our website very soon.  If you would like to receive a print copy, drop me a line at info@daynursery.org.

We are Indypendent

Have you seen the bumper stickers around town distributed by the Arts Council of Indianapolis encouraging people to “Be Indypendent: Buy Indy Art”?

Well, I’m always looking to support local people when I spend money on Day Nursery’s behalf so when it came time to find some new artwork for the Day Nursery newsletter and website, I was thrilled to connect with an artist whose work I had admired in an IUPUI publication and who had just launching her career (Read: affordable!)   To make a long story short, let me introduce you to the artwork of Candice Hartsough McDonald.  At Day Nursery, we like to call her “our artist” because we were lucky to be the beneficiary of a month long show of her art this June at the AV Framing Gallery in Fountain Square.  We made alot of new friends in June thanks to Candice’s show and gallery owner, Sarah Adams’ networking skills. Once the show was over, Candice got to work on art created specifically for Day Nursery. I took her on a tour of our Clarian Center so she could see age-appropriate early childhood learning going on first hand.  The illustrations she presented to me a few weeks later were right on the money.  They captured children learning through play. The summer issue of our newsletter will feature two new pieces of Candice’s art created especially for us.  If you want to see more of Candice’s work, check out the link I added today to her website.

Back to the gallery show.  Did I mention it got FOUR STARS? Here’s what Dan Grossman said in NUVO News Weekly about “our” show in his June 11, 2008 review of Candice Hartsough McDonald’s Big HeARTs, Bright Futures: Four stars A bear mowing his yard in front of a red townhouse. A raccoon sipping a can of pop in a tree. These images incongruously leap out of the new work of Candice Hartsough McDonald, who showcased in the AV Framing Gallery June 6. Her “Unruly Tricycle Gang” grabs your attention with the slyly subversive treatment of its subject: a pack of trike-riding bears. One of these bears is throwing a pop can — the trajectory seems bound to hit a fellow bear’s head. This painting, like much of her work, involves mixed media, in this case graphite, watercolor and colored pencil. This exhibit and sale benefit the scholarship fund of the nonprofit Day Nursery Association. Expect a bright future for this gallery and for this prolific local artist.

Picnic Fun

Tarrah, who works at our Guion Road Center won an MP3 player!

Today was the Day Nursery staff and family picnic.  We held it at our Ruth A. Lilly Center which is at 35th and Central Avenue.  One of the best things about this center is its beautiful backyard.  It is the perfect place to have a picnic with lots of mature shade trees and plenty of room to spread out.  Day Nursery provided the hot dogs and hamburgers and the staff pitched in and brought salads and such.  We had games for the little ones and the adults as well. 

It was fun to see our staff competing in the three-legged race and the cake walk.  We ran out of time and didn’t get to do the egg toss.  Now what am I going to do with 100 eggs?  Guess we will have scrambled eggs on the menu next week.  Thanks to all the DN staff that helped set up the picnic.   A special thanks to the spouses and family members who came out early with the picnic committee and helped us set up.  Special thanks to volunteers Billy Lindsey, Kevin Bennett and Sam Davis who never waited to be asked to do something, they just walked in the door and started working and didn’t stop until the job was done.

Day Nursery in the news

Two Day Nursery senior staff members are in the news this week.  First, our fearless leader, Executive Director Carolyn Dederer had her birthday acknowledged in Susan Guyett’s column in yesterday’s Indianapolis Star. Carolyn said she had a lot of nice phone calls from people who saw her name in the paper. Marsha Hearn-Lindsey, our Director of Operations is the other DN media darling this week.  She was called upon for her expert opinion by Indy’s Child magazine.  Their September issue has a Back-to-School guide and Marsha is quoted in the article about Preschool options.  You can read the article on the Indy’s Child website by clicking on the “read the magazine page by page” link in the upper left hand corner of their website.  I have posted a link to their magazine to the right of this column.

Adapting to the times

Hello and welcome to the Day Nursery Association of Indianapolis blog.  We’ve been educating the youngest children of central Indiana for over 110 years and thought it was about time to catch up with technology and offer this blog as a new way of communicating with our parents and supporters.  My name is Susan Davis and I am the Director of Marketing for Day Nursery.  I will be the coordinator for this site.  My first experience with Day Nursery was as a customer.  Two of my children are Day Nursery grads.  While my children were enrolled, I began volunteering for the organization through the Day Nursery Auxiliary.  I have been working for Day Nursery for the past eight years.  I guess I have come full circle.  i will be the coordinator for this blog but it will be written as a team effort. You will be hearing from many of the early childhood education experts in our agency.  With nearly 200 employees–we have a lot of early childhood knowledge draw from.