Wee Watch Educational Curriculum

For infants, having a secure relationship with a single caregiver builds a foundation of trust. Wee Watch Providers will give your infant the personal attention needed to develop a warm and affectionate relationship while still nurturing a safe environment to explore and learn

Your Provider will work with your child using our Wee Beginners Kit.  The kit contains a number of items, like stacking cups, foam letter and large format crayons, that in combination with programming given to your Provider will encourage their early development.  The goal of this program is to engage your youngest learners in stimulating, purposeful and targeted play exercises.  They will begin to develop awareness of letters, sounds, counting and the world around them through a variety of experiential activities. They will also develop fine motor skills using a variety of medium.  By the end of this stage, children will be ready for the more structured programming of the Wee Learn workbook series.

Children learn about their world by exploring their environment. Your Provider’s home is an environment where your child will thrive, providing ample indoor and outdoor activities and will learn through repetition and imitating others. Your child’s language skills will progress through songs and stories and encouragement.

For this age group, we have a series of Play & Learn educational booklets that will be given to each child quarterly. These books will give your child the opportunity to develop their literacy, numeracy, fine motor, science, and social studies skills. For example, children will learn letters and numbers, trace their names, explore prewriting skills, learn about animals and sounds and their family!

We focus on providing your child with challenging learning experiences through our programming in the daycare home. Your Provider will encourage your child to practice self-help skills using a varied program of individual and self-chosen play, combined with planned activities. Our Play and Learn educational series continues and your child will begin to master number and colour recognition, awareness of time and days of the week and learning about their community. These skills will help them toward school readiness.

With your child entering Kindergarten, your Provider will offer a program that will compliment and enhance their skills. Our Play and Learn booklets will give your child the opportunity to build on the numeracy, literacy, fine motor, and social studies skills they are focusing on in school. They will practice pencil control, identify common emotions, practice cutting as well as focus on writing words and sounding them out.

With a young school-aged child, your Provider will offer a program that is responsive to your child’s questions and allows them opportunities to interact with peers and encourages friendships. Our Play and Learn educational series, continues to complement the school curriculum. Providers will give your child opportunities to take a leadership role with younger children in care to help reinforce their own skills and build their confidence. Children will complete simple addition, begin associating letters and sounds and read simple sentences. It is an exciting learning stage for these children!

At this age, your child is attending elementary school and progressing in three fundamental areas: reading, writing, and math. Your child will have an opportunity to reinforce their skills and display their knowledge in their childcare setting. Play & Learn booklets are great for after school and will keep your child busy with fun language and math worksheets and learning games. Our Wee Mentors are encouraged to assist younger children with their mastery of skills, often reading to children and helping them with fine motor skills – they are role models the little ones look up to!

Canada is known for its diversity, with citizens representing many different cultures and ethnicities and we are proud to say our Wee Watch homes mirror this diversity. At Wee Watch, we believe that each child is unique, inclusion encompasses children and families from diverse backgrounds, regardless of their race, ethnicity, origin, gender, or colour.

Wee Watch has selected twelve countries to educate and engage the children in our homes each month with activities, games and cooking based on the unique experience of each country. The activities will help support the development of literacy, language, fine and gross motor skills as well as social and cognitive development. As you and the children take this journey, you will explore local foods and popular culinary dishes each country has to offer.

All year long we are going to get out and explore the great outdoors! Why? Not only because it’s fun, but also because there are sooooo many great benefits to taking children outdoors to learn!

Learning outdoors allows us the space to be more active and helps increases a child’s physical, emotional, mental, and social health. Most children learn better by using their senses, and outdoor environments provide wonderful hands-on experiences in nature.

With all those benefits, we thought we would help Providers get kids outside and back to nature, one adventure at a time! Our program supports our Providers with ideas for outdoor activities for every season! We all love to get outside in the spring and summer but with a little imagination and the right clothing, playing, and learning outdoors in the fall and winter can be just as fun!

We will also support Providers by highlighting the areas of child development that are developed with each activity. Playing in nature gives children confidence and independence and lays the groundwork for each area of child development.

Wee Watch will be celebrating and promoting literacy all year through our Together Wee Can Program for 2022, “Together Wee Can Read, Learn, & Grow!”. Literacy skills is one of the most important foundational elements our Providers contribute to the development of the children in their care.

Through this program, we have selected a wonderful book to focus on each month. We have developed special activities that correspond with the chosen book. It’s a great way to develop each child’s love of literacy and learning!

Literacy is the foundation for reading, writing, communicating, and socializing. Reading books, helps early learners to recognize words, sounds, patterns, build vocabulary and understand the written word. It stimulates their minds and expands their understanding of the world. Reading to the children in your home as a group also supports a sense of belonging as they enjoy the book and participate.

We are excited to engage Providers and children in our 12^th annual Together Wee Can Program!  This year more than ever, the importance of connection and community has become apparent as we all experienced a very challenging and uncertain 2020.  In 2021, we look forward and want to focus as a Wee Watch Community on coming together to support learning and development of children within our homes and beyond!  This year we are pleased to present – Together Wee Can Come Together 2021!

Home childcare Providers play an important role in the development of the children in their care.  Families choose home childcare because of the unique opportunities that the home environment provides for their children to grow and develop. Our homes provide a place for children to interact and learn from Providers and other children of varied ages and belong to a community.

The Ministry of Education has an approach we follow, called “How Does Learning Happen”, which describes ways in which our Providers ensure that children in their homes have a sense of belonging and well-being and are engaged and able to express themselves in many ways. It is based on the fact that children learn when the environment supports their learning in 4 foundational ways: Belonging, Well-Being, Engagement and Expression.

Together Wee Can Come Together 2021 will explore each Foundation for 3 months with programming and activities that support Providers in building environments for children to thrive!

In 2020, Wee Watch Providers and children engaged in our STEM Program. STEM is very popular with children, educators, schools and camps because it is a natural fit for kids of all ages! Children love to experiment, combine substances, build, collect, sort, and move things. They love to understand why things are the way they are! All this is part of STEM. Throughout the year the children  learned about:

• Science (Biology, Chemistry, Physics) – children learned about living and non-living things and their own bodies. They did lots of chemistry experiments and learned about mass and motion. In February they had a Science Fair to demonstrate all they learned!
• Technology (Tools, Coding, Robotics) – we focused on technology that didn’t include ipads or phones! Children learned about robots and made their own robotic arms and enjoyed a Robot dance party.  They also learned all about coding – which is about patterns at its root! Also they learned that technology is all about tools and how they help us in everyday life.
• Engineering (Civil, Aerospace, Mechanical) – children love to build and they learned about bridges and built structures, built and played with gears and pullies. Learning about planes and helicopters proved to be lots of fun, especially when they participated in a paper airplane challenge!
• Math (Shapes, patterns, numbers) – math is lots of fun, children played shape I-spy and much more including culminating their learning in our Wee Math Olympics where children participated in 3 math events!

In 2019, Providers and children were focused on learning all about the amazing planet we live on – Earth!  Each month learning through play the children were focused on exploring a different component of our planet desert life, different bodies of water, forests, bogs, mountains & volcanoes, the arctic, animals, seasons and weather, people and space!  Some highlights of the program:

• Reading lots of books during Bug Inspired Book week
• Over 600 saplings were planted by our Wee children in communities across Ontario
• Dancing, singing and playing arctic games during our Chill out in the Arctic party in August
• Gross motor skills were developed through “Astronaut Training!”
• Learning about Animals big and small
• Building our own volcanos was a popular experiment for all!

Our Together Wee Can program launched in 2008 as a way to bring all our homes across Ontario together to participate in themed activities and events on specific days throughout the year. The theme of which is learning about connections to the community.  This year we took the favourite activities and programs from the past 10 years to celebrate!  Highlights included:

• Valentines for Seniors- the children made valentines and delivered them to Seniors in their communities!
• Fill a box to Fill a Tummy! – Providers and children creatively decorated donation boxes and then collected non-perishable items to deliver to food banks in their communities
• Twice as Nice Art show – using only recycled items, children created works of art!
• Mad Science week – a week of fun experiments!