It’s all about the children when you’re in the child care business. Taking the time and making the effort to enhance their experience is crucial to operating a successful child care center. Holidays and seasons are a meaningful part of childhood, and those can and should be celebrated in daycare and childcare facilities.
A cook at an Illinois daycare center came up with some original ideas for the Thanksgiving-Christmas season. She stocks up on seasonal flavors of 100 percent juice concentrate such as PureFUN! Cran-Apple. Then she serves the juice as sparkling punch by mixing the juice concentrate with carbonated water.
The children love it. “They think they’re drinking pop, but they’re not.”
To make for an even more festive holiday table at the childcare center, she sometimes puts frozen cranberries into the punchbowl to keep the punch cold. Or she pours cranberry or orange gelatin into ice trays, then uses the ice cubes in the punchbowl.
Choosing juice flavors by color is another way for child care centers to mark seasons and holidays. A Wisconsin daycare center asked for "summer-type colors" – yellow, green and pink – when it ordered juice concentrate in July. PureFUN! obliged with its Orange-Pineapple Juice, Green Watermelon Juice and Fresh Strawberry Juice flavors.
The director pointed out the connection to the young students at snack time. "They all think it's fun when there's a color theme to stuff." Many centers serve red, white and blue juice flavors around the Fourth of July, and red and green flavors at Christmas time.
Parents treasure holiday memories made with their own children. Imaginative child care centers can create special memories for the children in their care.
