Daily Connect

Childcare Center Relationships: 7 Best Ways to Build Family Relationships

Building close childcare center relationships with the families of children who attend your childcare center is one of the biggest investments you can make in improving your childcare business.

Closer childcare center relationships create better experiences for children – helping improve their overall experience, as well as their progress towards developmental milestones, building of social skills, and overall happiness.

But healthy relationships with families are also a huge positive for your business. Happy parents can’t wait to tell everyone about your amazing childcare center, and will recommend you to their colleagues, friends, and families, bringing you new customers.

On the face of it, building healthy relationships with families might seem easy. But there’s some steps you can take to go to the next level and stand apart from other childcare centers in your area. Here’s the seven best ways for childcare centers to stand apart:

#1 High-Quality Customer Service

Your teachers and care providers are the face of your business, and it’s important they demonstrate high-quality customer service skills in order to build lasting relationships with families. Even before technological advances started providing smoother solutions, teachers knew they needed to:

Be engaging
Communicate clearly
Always share the good
Gently share the challenges
Check in consistently with parents

These days, providing high-quality customer service is more important than ever. Parents expect a seamless, professional experience. Using technological solutions helps build closer relationships with parents by giving them more visibility of their child’s day. Using technology to communicate also frees your staff to spend more time with the children, so everyone’s a winner.

#2 Share Children’s Accomplishments

When parents get more information on a regular basis, their ability to support their child increases. Let’s take an example of something children do all the time at childcare: art projects!

Teachers can share artwork with parents by sending it home, but often, the child’s art gets displayed on the walls, is a temporary creation, or is the work of a team of several child geniuses! Instead of sending children home with their masterpiece, consider having teachers take a picture of the artwork and share it with parents. If you like, go one step further, and create a digital portfolio that collates everything in an online gallery

Once the child heads home for the day, families are able to have exciting, stimulating conversations with their child about their masterpiece – even if they don’t have the artwork in front of them. This creates a stronger, healthier bond, and also makes families feel more involved in their child’s experiences at your childcare center.

#3 Reduce Parent Anxiety

Parents love getting consistent updates from their child’s teacher about what their child is up too. Children are the center of every parent’s universe, and many parents have anxiety about leaving their child at a daycare center. Whether it’s getting used to being apart from their first-born child for the first time, or worrying about behavioural issues, that anxiety is only natural.

Short, simple updates go a long way to reducing this anxiety.

Whether it’s sharing the child’s work, photos of them playing, or an update on what they had for lunch, quick, frequent updates can dramatically increase a parent’s level of trust in you as a childcare provider. Parents will wonder less about what’s going on with their child when they know what they’re up to at key times during the day.

#4 Create a Secure Environment

Every childcare provider has to pay attention when it comes to child pickup and drop off. This has always been an important issue, but it’s become more so in the past year as childcare providers do everything they can to ensure a COVID-safe environment.

Families are trusting you with the most important thing in their world––their child––so it’s vital you do everything you can to create a safe, clean environment that minimizes risks.

One way of doing this is by introducing a touchless sign-in that lets parents check their child in using a QR code or a unique PIN. This ensures that only approved people are able to collect the child from your center.

You might also consider taking extra measures including a COVID-19 screening survey that parents must take before checking their child in to your center.

#5 Bridge the Gap Between Home and School

Previously, parent-teacher communication occurred mostly around events like parent-teacher conferences, field trips, or even just a quick chat while picking up lost and found items.

But by making an effort to build closer relationships, parents, teachers, and even children can have a much better experience.

Children can see positive support happening on a daily basis between the two most important areas of their life: home and childcare. And together, parents and teachers can find ways to help the child grow and blossom by identifying development areas.

Frequent communication is the best way to bridge this gap and create positive childcare center relationships. Communication between parents and teachers on a regular basis goes a long way to building lasting, long-term relationships. There are a variety of online communication platforms custom-built for childcare centers. Our advice: look for services with a secure messaging system and customizable shared activity log that teachers can use to easily share quick updates on daily activities.

#6 Made Paperwork a Breeze

Nobody likes doing paperwork. Whether it’s filling out daily sheets, tracking attendance, or sending out newsletters, we know you’d rather be spending quality time with the children instead of being stuck in the office.

You’re not alone. Parents aren’t big fans of paperwork either – often, it’ll just end up at the bottom of a pile of mail, or land in the trash.

Simplify the process for everyone and start sharing important documents and information with parents digitally.

You’ll make life easier for parents, ensure your important updates get read, and dramatically reduce your spending on paper and ink, potentially saving you hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year.

#7 Use Daily Connect

The most successful childcare businesses use technology to support child development and parent-teacher relationships, which in turn bolsters their reputation as a quality childcare business.

You want technology that’s easy to use, inexpensive, and takes care of the hard work for you, so you can spend more time with children and parents and focus on growing your business. Daily Connect is a simple yet powerful software platform that enables childcare centers to effectively communicate with parents.

There are a range of features to support closer relationships with families, and an easy-to-use app that can be used by parents and teachers alike. Daily Connect is customizable to the needs of your childcare center, and prices start from just $8.99/mo.

If you want to learn more about using technology to build better relationships with the families at your childcare center, schedule your free demo of Daily Connect today

Childcare 2021 Trends: What to Look Out For

These days there’s a lot to consider when running a childcare facility. Many of the trends in the childcare industry have changed dramatically in the past year; some have accelerated, and other completely novel patterns have emerged. As you look for childcare 2021 trends, there’s a lot to think about.

Overall though, it’s good news – the forecast for the future of the childcare industry is bright. Here’s the latest trends, and what they mean to those who serve and care for our future generations.

#1 Early childhood degrees are on the rise

More and more childcare centers are requiring their lead teachers to have bachelor’s degrees in Early Childhood Education (ECE). The research shows this number has been on the rise for years, and shows no signs of slowing.

While many centers accept teachers with an Associate’s Degree, or basic ECE units, the best childcare centers are increasingly looking for staff with a four year ECE degree. Existing teachers are adapting, with the rise of online education programs for ECE degrees making it possible for teachers to continue their education while they’re already in the classroom.

More educated teachers provide better quality teaching and assessment, aided by a clearer understanding of best practices. As parents assess childcare centers, they’re increasingly looking for innovative, forward-thinking providers, with an emphasis on education quality. Make sure you stand out from the competition with a robust focus on learning and parent communication.

#2 Increasing awareness of the importance of quality Early Childhood Education

Childcare, as much fun as it is, is a business at the end of the day. As more universities launch ECE programs, the government continues to increase funding, and Head Start programs are multiplying throughout the country.

Recent stimulus packages have included billions of dollars in funds for early childcare programs. The most recent–the American Rescue Plan– includes a significant increase in childcare tax credits, making it easier than ever for parents to afford childcare.

Additional funds are being directed to childcare centers who need COVID assistance. Many states have early childcare initiatives with extra funding for centers who can demonstrate their successes through quality assessment.

All this points to an increased need for childcare centers to have their business set up for success. Many parents might be in the market for childcare services for the first time, and it’s important childcare centers understand how to differentiate themselves from their competition. Primary ways to stand out include a higher quality of care, better parent communication, and offering a safe environment.

#3 Best practices in ECE assessment

As awareness of the importance of ECE continues, so does the attention focused on assessment tools that measure the development of individual children as well as the productivity of the center itself. Most states have developed standards for ECE centers, and the NAEYC also have their own set of developmental milestones.

When teachers keep abreast of the latest trends in assessment, they’re able to provide parents with a better understanding of how their child is progressing. This is much easier for teachers when they have digital tools to record observations and assessments, and can prepare lessons and activities to help their students hit developmental milestones.

#4 Resurgence of Play

Classic early childhood theorists have expounded the benefits of play for years, and now, ECE professionals are finally catching up. In 2021, more and more childcare centers are focusing on getting children outside and playing, driven by both COVID-19 and recent childhood obesity trends.

Children are spending more time outside while in childcare, and there’s an increased focus on organized physical activities like yoga, running, and even sports that involve throwing and kicking balls.

While many parents focus primarily on education, it’s important to remind them of the importance of play. Physical activity makes for healthier children, and aids development of large motor skills. Make sure to track physical activities and share important developmental milestones with parents to build that all important human connection with families.

#5 Increasing use of technology

Many early childhood facilities are introducing technology in their lesson plans. Allowing children to utilize a tablet or a computer stimulates different parts of the brain, and allows for the development of necessary skills to function in today’s society.

Likewise, new technologies are emerging that can boost the productivity of centers and improve the teacher – family connection that is so crucial to the success of each young child.

Positive relationships with parents and families can sometimes be the hardest component to running a center – probably never more than the past year. One of the biggest trends for 2021 is the increasing use of technologies that enable better interactions between childcare centers and parents.

As both parents and teachers become more technologically-savvy, it’s becoming almost expected that childcare centers make use of technology to foster better relationships with their parents.

How to make the most of these trends for your childcare business

If you want your childcare business to continue to prosper in 2021 and beyond, it’s important to take note of these trends and consider how your childcare business is positioned in relation to them.

Business has changed a lot in the past year, and while some things will go back to the way they were, others have changed forever.

Software like Daily Connect that can help you move with the trends of 2021. Embracing technological solutions can improve your productivity, and offer a better way to communicate and engage with families throughout the day.

It’s not just families – teachers will benefit too. They can update information real time for doting parents: eating habits, bathroom trips, socialization, and more can all be shared from teacher to parent in seconds. There’ll be no more writing out notes for every child at the end of the day.

Easily accessible assessment tools are incredibly important for parents to see how their child is developing in relation to developmental milestones. Through technology, parents can view a portfolio of their child’s work, photos of their activities, and track their development against benchmarks – giving them the peace of mind they desire.

***

Embracing the trends of 2021 will help your childcare center stand out from the competition. Not only that; you’ll provide a better experience for parents, children, and teachers alike, building a strong childcare business well-positioned for future success.

We recommend you consider Daily Connect as a low-cost digital platform that will help you create unforgettable childcare experiences for children and parents alike.

Thousands of childcare centers across the world use Daily Connect every day to communicate with parents, track compliance, and provide a higher quality of childcare. It’s easy to use, completely customizable to your practice, and is loved by parents, with thousands of 5 star reviews.

Start your free trial today, or schedule a demo with our team to learn more.

New features recently added to Daily Connect

Here is a quick summary of the features added recently to Daily Connect:

Observations and Assessments: with support of customization of up to 6 assessment levels, support of customized learning framework, common learning framework and state standards, enhanced privacy support, and advanced assessment/observation reports.
Learning Frameworks and State Standards: we now support more than 30 common learning frameworks (for instance the ‘Head Start Early Learning Outcome Framework’) and State Standards (for instance the ‘Minnesota’s Early Learning Standards’). Those can be used for Observations and Lesson plans.
Children Portfolios: childcare teachers can now create a portfolio for each child and add Activities, photos, observations, and milestone entries to the portfolio. The portfolio can be presented and shared with parents during a parent-teacher conference.
Parent Survey: Questions can be automatically asked to parents at drop-off. It is especially useful for health screening procedures at sign-in. Survey responses are recorded with the sign-in information and easily accessible for reporting.
Touchless sign-in: With this option, parents can sign-in their child by showing a QRCode from their phone to the sign-in station. This option limits the spread of germs and help to speed-up check-in.
Collect Parent Signature for Incident reports, Health or Medicine entries: To help with regulatory compliance and make sure everybody has been notified about the event.
Temperature Reports to help with health and safety guidelines by organizing all the temperature readings recorded for all children.

New: Children Portfolios

While childcare staff send each day photos and information about children activities to parents. They can now also add activities, diary, photos, observations and milestone entries to a child portfolio.

The collection of entries saved in the portfolio is only visible to the childcare staff, but it can be shared with parents at any time. The portfolio can be viewed as a slideshow via the application. This can be a useful support during the parent-teacher conference: teachers can use the portfolio to highlight important moments and development progress.

The portfolio can also be exported as a pdf document, and share with parents via the application, email, or printed.

Daily Connect Portfolio is available to Premium+ and Professional+ subscriptions.

New: Observations and Assessments

We’re very excited to announce several major enhancements to our Assessment feature, which is now much more flexible, customizable, and useful.

Our previous Assessment category has been replaced with a new category named Observation. An observation is where you’ll assess the progress of the child toward mastering a skill.

Customized Assessment Levels

The number of levels for the assessments can be customized from 2 up to 6 levels. Each level named can be customized. Here are a few examples of assessments that you can set:

Meet / Not Meet,
Expected / Emerging / Exceeding,
Not Assessed / Not Observed / Developing / Not Mastered / Proficient / Advanced.
Responding / Exploring / Building / Integrating

Multiple children selection, multiple skills selection

Same as for all Daily Connect categories, an observation entry can be recorded for several children. This saves a lot of time to childcare staff. A different assessment can still be set for each child within the same observation. For instance, if 4 children are doing the same activity, but only 2 of them have mastered the underlying skill, you can easily and quickly indicate those different assessments.

Multiple skills can also be selected from the learning framework for the same observation.

Set a different assessment for each child on the same observation

Privacy

Observations can be hidden to parents, and only visible to the childcare staff. An observation can also contain notes visible to everybody (parents and staff), and notes only visible to staff.

Learning Frameworks and State Standards

The new observation framework can be used with any customized Learning Framework defined in the application. Custom topics and areas defined with a previous Daily Connect versions are also automatically available on the new framework.

Daily Connect now also implements several common Learning Frameworks and US State Standards that can be used for observations.

Domains from Minnesota Early Learning Standards

Observation Reports

Our observation report allows to easily view the progress for each child and also quickly set final assessments in case no recent observation has been recorded for the skill.

The color-coding allows to quickly view how proficient the child is in each skill, and which skills have not been assessed yet. Childcare staff can use it to understand which new activities and lessons need to be developed to improve the appropriate skills.

Saving Observations is available to everybody, but observation reports is only available to Premium+ and Professional+ subscriptions.

Learning Frameworks and State Standards

Daily Connect support several learning frameworks for the Observation and the Lesson features.

You can see below the list of supported Learning Frameworks and State Standards. For each framework, we support 0-5 years of age ranges (Infant, Toddler, and Preschool).

We’re adding new state standards and learning framework regularly. Please email us at support@dailyconnect.com if your state is not in the list or if you need a different learning framework.

Arizona Early Learning Standards
Arkansas Child Development and Early Learning Standards
California Learning & Development Foundations
Colorado Early Learning & Development Guidelines
Connecticut Early Learning and Development Standards
Florida Early Learning and Developmental Standards
Georgia Early Learning and Development Standards
Iowa Early Learning Standards
Idaho Early Learning eGuidelines
Illinois Early Learning Guidelines
Indiana Early Learning Foundations Guidance
Kentucky’s Early Childhood Standards
Louisiana’s Early Learning & Development Standards
Maine Early Childhood Learning Guidelines
Massachusetts Early Learning Guidelines
Maryland Early Learning Standards
Minnesota’s Early Learning Standards (ECIP)
Michigan Early Childhood Standards of Quality
Missouri Early Learning Goals
North Carolina Foundations for Early Learning and Development
North Dakota Early Learning Standards
Nebraska’s Learning and Development Standards
New Jersey Preschool Teaching and Learning Standards
New York State Early Learning Guidelines
Ohio’s Early Learning & Development Standards
Oklahoma Early Learning Guidelines
Oregon Early Learning Standards
Pennsylvania Learning Standards for Early Childhood
Rhode Island Early Learning & Development Standards
Tennessee Early Learning Developmental Standards
Texas Early Learning Guidelines
Vermont Early Learning Standards
Virginia’s Milestones of Child Development
Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards

Alberta’s Early Learning and Care Framework (Flight)
Australia Early Years Learning Framework
Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework
UK Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)
UK Early Years Foundation Stage (2021) – Birth to 5 Matters
Scotland Shanarri Wellbeing Indicators
Scotland Curriculum for Excellence – Early Level

You can select a learning framework for your classrooms in the Settings > Customize Labels > Observation page of the application.

You can also define your own custom framework with the application, and use custom framework defined with a previous version of the app.

State Standards and Learning Frameworks are available to Premium+ and Professional+ subscriptions.

New: Temperature Reports

Here is another tool to help with health and safety guidelines, and ensure compliance with new regulations related to Covid-19.

Our new temperature report organizes all the temperature readings recorded for all children. The report can be organized by day or by week, by classroom, or for the whole center.

You can access this report on the web application in the Settings > Temperature Report page. The report is available for temperature entries saved with a recent version of the mobile application (7.9 or after) or saved via our web application. The temperature report is only available to Premium+ and Professional+ subscription plans.

Collecting Parent Signatures on Daily Connect

You can now collect parent’s signature for Incident Report entries, Health, and Medicine entries. This will help with regulatory compliance and also make sure everybody has been notified about the event. The signature is saved with the entry, it can be viewed on the mobile or web application.

For instance, teachers can save an incident report for a child profile, then parents can sign the report on their own device by tapping on the entry in the list, then on the Signature button. Parents cannot modify anything about the entry, they can only add their signature. The signature can only be saved via the Daily Connect mobile application.

You can also print the report, with the signature, from your device for archive.

New: Parent Survey at sign-in

We’re releasing today a new Parent Survey feature that is especially useful to help with Covid-19’s special procedures.

Childcare directors can now create a survey that parents will have to fill at each sign-in on the Daily Connect Sign-in kiosk. This works with the touchless sign-in on the parent’s device, or with the 4-digits pin code sign-in on the Sign-in kiosk device.

When signing-in with the touchless sign-in option, parents tap on the ‘sign-in’ button on their Daily Connect application and answer the survey questions. The app then generates a QRCode to show to the sign-in kiosk.

With the 4-digits pin code, parents first enter their personal 4-digit on the sign-in kiosk, then answer the questions before validating the sign-in. Optionally, the parent’s signature can also be collected.

Answers to the questions are saved with the sign-in entry, so teachers have immediate access to parents’ answers.

A report with the response to each question for each day is also easily accessible by directors on the web application.

Responses are saved with the sign-in entries

Parent survey is available at no extra cost to Premium+ and Professional+ subscriptions. It can be activated by administrators in the Settings > Parent Survey page.

Contact support@dailyconnect.com if you have any questions.

Touchless sign-in with Daily Connect

Parents can now sign-in their children without any contact with Daily Connect. For this, they just have to tap on the Sign In/Out button on their Daily Connect application and show their personal QR Code to the sign-in device. The device will then automatically scan the code to do the sign-in. The operation takes around 3 seconds.

Going touchless makes sign-in safer, and allows childcare centers to quickly adapt to enforce health and safety regulations. This option creates a frictionless check-in experience while giving parents peace of mind. This enables organizations to differentiate with a forward-thinking, modern approach to the parents’ experience.

The sign-in kiosk is currently used by parents to sign-in their children by entering a personal 4-digit pin code. This new touchless capability can be used in addition to the pin code entry, or as a replacement.

The sign-in device is usually placed at the building entrance, with the sole purpose of doing sign-in and sign-out. It can be any iOS or Android device (phone or tablet) with a front-facing camera, and with the Daily Connect application installed. The sign-in page in the Daily Connect application is secured, no personal child’s information is accessible by parents. Touchless sign-in can also be done on staff devices.

Touchless sign-in is available at no extra cost to Premium+ and Professional+ subscriptions. It is only available on iOS and Android devices. It is not available on desktop computers. It can be activated by administrators in the Settings > Sign-In Kiosk page.

Once activated, the kiosk device will automatically show the video feedback to scan the parent’s code. On parents’ devices, the QR code will automatically show when tapping on the Sign In/Out button (the Daily Connect application must be updated on each device to the latest available version). Staff can also clock-in and clock-out themselves with this method.

Contact support@dailyconnect.com if you have any questions.