King West Home Daycare

🌟 Real-Life Emotions, Real-Life Strategies 🌟

Toddlers feel big emotions from frustration to excitement, jealousy, curiosity, and sometimes those feelings come out as pushing, hitting, or grabbing. These are normal moments of learning, and that’s why I created a week of hands-on, thoughtful lessons to help children practice gentle, safe, and kind behaviors.

Every day, children encounter moments of conflict or testing boundaries. I don’t just respond, I teach. Through the week’s activities, toddlers learn to:
💛 Recognize their feelings (angry, frustrated, sad, excited)
💛 Understand how their actions affect others
💛 Practice alternatives to pushing, hitting, or grabbing
💛 Use words, gentle touches, and take turns

📚 Stories & Teaching Resources

Books provide a safe way to explore emotions and social situations. This week, we read:
• Hands Are Not for Hitting
• No More Push!
• How Do Dinosaurs Play with Their Friends?
• Llama Llama Time to Share

I also use social stories and teaching resources to address biting, hitting, and pushing to give toddlers clear, relatable examples and strategies to make better choices. I also created visuals with the children that parents can use at home, so they can point to them to remind children when they’re doing something helpful or hurtful.

🎶 Songs & Movement

Music helps toddlers process emotions and practice self-regulation:
• “These Hands Are Made for Helping”
• “If You’re Feeling Mad and You Know It”
• “The Sharing Song”
• “I Can Be a Kind Friend”

📝 Intentional, Thoughtful Learning

Every activity is designed to reinforce strategies for real-life situations:
• Matching good vs. hurtful hand choices
• Practicing turn-taking with spinners and role-play
• Counting and tracking kind actions
• Sequencing gentle behaviours through storytelling

At King West Home Daycare, lessons are intentional. Focused on real emotions, real actions, and real teaching strategies. Children in my care learn that feelings are normal, but how we respond matters. Here, toddlers practice kindness every day in a caring and safe environment ❤️

🚜 We’re Off to the Farm! 🐄🐖🐓

Our little learners traded in their city shoes for muddy boots — because we’re off to the farm (well… our pretend farm 😉)!

Learning about farms isn’t just fun — it helps children understand where our food comes from. From milking cows to collecting eggs, these hands-on activities build appreciation for the hard work that goes into every bite. It’s a playful way to connect kids with nature, responsibility, and the big world around them

📚 Books We Read

We explored life on the farm with some of our favourite storybook characters, Spot, Peppa Pig and her family, Maisy, Biscuit, Barbie, and her friend Emma! These stories helped us learn about animals, farm chores, and how crops grow.

🎶 Songs We Sang

We kept the barn rocking with some farm-tastic tunes, including:
• To the Farm
• Tractor Song
• Old MacDonald Had a Farm
• Farm Sounds
• Do You Want to Be a Vet?
• The Farmer in the Dell
• Baa Baa Black Sheep
• Down on Grandpa’s Farm

🎨 Art & Imagination Projects

• Built a big red tractor and plowed our own field
• Made pretend corn and picked it from our homemade cornfield
• Crafted chickens, clay eggs, and a chicken coop — then gathered the eggs like real farmers
• Milked a cow!
• Created pigs and built them a cozy pig pen
• Made fluffy sheep and assigned them a sheepdog protector (thanks to our volunteer daycare dog!)
• Counted scoops to feed the animals — farm math fun!
• Built a felt board farm with animals, barns, and crops
• Clapped and counted syllables in farm words like “pig,” “tractor,” and “chicken”
• Searched for animals hidden inside homemade squishy sensory bags

📝 Activity Pages

Our letter of the week was F for Farm, and our shape was the rectangle — just like a barn!

We also worked on:
• Farm animal matching
• Animal-themed scissor skills
• Matching babies to their mamas
• Counting farm animals
• “Where do I live?” habitat sorting
• Barn-themed colouring and sorting activities

Our little farmers have been busy learning, laughing, and loving every minute! See you at the farm! 🐾🌽🐓

Hi friends!

Wow—Toronto has had so much snow this month! Too much, if you ask me! So, to warm things up, I turned up the heat with this week’s lesson plan: “I Love Pizza!”

From crafting our own pretend pizzas to exploring different toppings, shapes, and even learning how pizza is made, our little chefs were fully engaged in hands-on learning. We mixed in plenty of sensory play, reading, and pizza-themed games to make it a deliciously fun experience!

📚 BOOKS

We read some silly, pizza-filled stories that made us laugh (and maybe even a little hungry—haha!):
📖 Pizza Mouse – A mouse searching for pizza in the big city
📖 Pizza Pig – A pig who makes pizza for his friends
📖 Pete the Cat and the Perfect Pizza Party – Pete’s friends add crazy toppings to his pizza
📖 Peppa Pig’s Pizza Party – Peppa and her family enjoy a pizza party
📖 Made With Love – A story about how pizza is made

🎶 SONGS

We sang and danced to some fun pizza songs, including:
🍕 On Top of My Pizza
🍕 Pizza, Pizza Full of Cheese
🍕 I Love Pizza
🍕 P-I-Z-Z-A
🍕 Pizza

📝 ACTIVITY PAGES

Our letter of the week was P for Pizza, and our shape of the week was a triangle—just like a pizza slice! We practiced with fun activity pages, including:
🔢 Pizza counting
✏️ Pizza tracing
🧩 Pizza puzzles
🔺 Pizza shape matching
🍕 Sorting different pizza slice shapes

🎭 DRAMATIC PLAY

We even made our very own pizza oven, where the kids got to “cook” the pizzas they crafted! Our little chefs had so much fun playing pretend and serving up their delicious creations.

As we get ready to welcome March, this wraps up our Valentine’s-themed lessons this month. What a fun-filled pizza week—check out some of the fun and adorable moments below! 🍕✨

Hi friends! I hope you’ve had a great week soaking in the last days of summer because heigh ho, heigh ho it’s off to kindergarten the big kids go! So I thought it would be fun to prep all the kids for the change with a “Let’s Get Ready for Kindergarten” lesson plan! The littles felt as cool as the big kids! HA!

📚 Books

They all went to kindergarten with their friends: Rosie, Maisy, Spot, Smig the Smart Pig, Pete the Kitty and a super cute little owl. Some of them are brave and some are a little nervous… which provided an awesome opportunity for them to share how they feel about starting kindergarten so we could combat those fears together!

We also had a chance to reunite with a former graduate who is now off to Grade 1! We discussed how much fun kindergarten is and what to expect! So special!

🎶 SONGS

The songs I provided were all about going to school, learning and making friends! And of course the School Bus so we can get to kindergarten! The kids love to move and dance while singing! Plus it helped them to get their energy out! YEAH!

🎨 ART PROJECTS

I included scissor practice with cutting out our kindergarten school supplies and packing them in our backpacks. Learning skills to help us meet and greet and make new friends with examples of how to create those positive new relationships with new friends in their new classrooms. School buses to take us to kindergarten and LUNCHES! That’s right, we learned how to pack a healthy lunch and made one together that everyone enjoyed together. THE BEST!

🖍️ And yes, there are many extra pages and activities that helped improved the children’s fine motor skills like: tracing lines, words, school labyrinth, finish the pattern, counting, colouring and more! Because who said that learning has to be boring?

We also had two graduation parties!

I don't know if it's just me, but this year summer flew by! My goodness... how is it already September? I guess what they say is true, time really flies when you’re having fun!

Have an amazing Labour Day long weekend friends. We will be starting new littles next week! Super exciting!

Hi Friends! It is HOT here in Toronto! Too hot for my liking… 😜

So I thought how could we beat the heat? In the pool! How about that? Sounds good? Great!

So I created a “Let’s Go Swimming” lesson plan!

💦 READING

Max, Llama Llama, Peppa Pig, Maisy and Spot are going to be coming to the pool with us, and as you probably already know - they kept us entertained FOR SURE!

We also read all about water and sun safety! So we can be safe outside!

💦 NEW SONGS

We learned…

The Swimming Hokey Pokey
Kick, Kick, Kick
Walk, Don’t Run!
Let’s Go Swimming
In My Swimming Pool

💦 ART PROJECTS

Dressing up to go to the pool is fun! We made our own bathing suits, goggles, pool rings and more!

💦 Activity Pages

We traced swimming and safety words, we helped our friends through some complicated mazes to find there swimsuits! We reviewed all the reading we did learning how to stay safe in the water and the sun!

So grab your swimsuits and towels… and let's GO! Time to have some fun in the sun and splash in the water! Woohoo!

Jump in!

Welcome to the squad Juniper! Juni has transitioned into daycare this week beautifully and ended her first week of daycare with her FIRST BIRTHDAY! One thing is for sure…she’s wild about crawling into chapter 1!

Happy Father’s Day to all of our wonderful Dads!

Hi friends!

Are you excited about the warm weather? I know I am! That’s why I loved last weeks theme! It was all about flowers, plants and things that grow!

Here’s what we did:

📚 READING BOOKS

The kids and I read about flowers, how to plant them and how they grow. They also hung out with Kitty the cat who was planting a flower garden, silly Squirrel who is crazy about his special flower and Fran who feeds her flower pizza, cheeseburger and ice cream! Lots of adventures, fun and laughter!


🎶 NEW SONGS

We learned:

Little Seeds

Ten Little Flowers

I’m A Little Flower

Seed Song

Flowers


🎨 ART PROJECTS

Here’s my favorite art project for the week: we planted flower seeds! Then we watered them every day - and don’t worry, it's okay if they get overwater because the point is for the kids to learn what plants need in order to grow. They learned that seeds don’t grow overnight, just like kids don’t, and that we have to take care of our seeds if we want them to grow and become flowers.

🖍️ ACTIVITY PAGES

Our letter of the week was F - so we worked on lots of pages to help the kids learn how to write and recognize letter F. They also counted flowers, figured out a flower maze, traced some flowers, sorted flowers and completed a cool page called Plant Life Cycle which helped them learn how plants grow. I also included a What Flowers Need To Grow page - it went perfectly with our Thursday book about silly Fran!

There you have it! A super flowery and super fun week!

April is all about the weather and the kids became little meteorologists this month and I was so excited for them! They learned A LOT about sunny days, cloudy days, rain, and thunderstorms! It was such a great month! They even made their very own weather books and logged the daily weather reports!

This week was all about CLOUDS —> Clouds In The Sky. Such a cute theme - don’t you think? The kids loved it!

Here’s everything we learned this week!

📚 BOOKS

Little Cloud took our kids on a little adventure. Goose And Cloud are best friends and reading about them gave the kids an opportunity to talk about their friends. How To Hug A Cloud is another super cute book - and sparked great conversations and question to ask our little ones to develop their language skills. And of course Ploof, he’s the cutest cloud ever! We were super excited to read all the cloud stories!

🎶 SONGS

Here are the new songs we learned and sang:

Little Cloud
Cloud
If You Want To Hug A Cloud
10 Little Clouds
Fluffy Clouds

🎨 ART PROJECTS

Clouds are fluffy and cute and that’s what the kids and I made - lots of clouds. The kids had a blast - that’s for sure!

🖍️ ACTIVITY PAGES

Tracing clouds, tracing lines connecting clouds together, tracing and counting numbers and letters inside of clouds, and of course….drawing clouds!

SCIENCE 🧪

When clouds get too heavy moisture will fall through the clouds as rain! That means gravity pulls them down from the clouds! Amazing isn’t it?! To illustrate how clouds hold moisture the kids put varying drops of food coloring in their "clouds". It was so much fun to count and wait to see how many drops it took for each of their clouds begin to rain. We hypothesized it was because some clouds were smaller or not as thick as others. It was so much fun to see the differences and watch it rain!

Now I’m soooo excited about May - I’ll be teaching your little ones all about Spring! 🌷the kids will learn what makes Spring beautiful, colorful and magical. Woohoo! It’s going to be a great month filled with lots of fun books to read! Plus my absolute favourite MOTHER’S DAY and we love our MOMMYS! I’m so excited for the surprises we have in store for all of our daycare moms!

Happy Valentine’s Day friends! Honestly, I’m sooo excited because anything to do with celebrating love (and chocolate) gets my stamp of approval!

And I can heart-ly wait to share what’s inside our lesson plan this week…

🩷 BOOKS

This week is all about LOVE! The kids will learn what Valentine’s Day is and how to celebrate it! Best part: they will learn all about love from their favorite characters like Daniel, Pinkalicious, Llama and Pete the Cat! I loved learning what the kids love by asking them some fun questions! I am sure their answers would have made you giggle just like me. It’s the best!

🩷 SONGS

This week we’ll be singing:

A Hug From You
I Love You
Do You Know My Valentine?
Five Little Cupcakes
L-O-V-E

🩷ART PROJECTS

Silly hats! Because we LOVE being silly!

Valentines exchange boxes! YAY! The kids got to exchange their Valentines at their Valentine’s Day Party. Everyone had so much fun!

We made the cutest little bouquet of flowers with our hand and foot prints for our moms for Valentine’s Day.

We also decorated cookies to bring home and share with our family. YUM!

🩷 ACTIVITY PAGES

Can I just say that this week is filled with LOTS of activity pages. Valentine’s Day Mazes, Tracing Pages, Sort It Pages, Patterns, Find My Shadow, Scissor Skills, Let’s Count, Letter V and Valentine’s Day Memory Game!

Happy Valentine’s Day, friends! Let’s teach our kids how to spread L-O-VE! Sending extra hugs and kisses your way!

❤️ King West Home Daycare

For Shyara, the little girl who rules with kindness, grace, and a heart full of dreams. Happy 3rd Birthday my Princess. I hope your day was as magical as you are.

Hi Friends!

I went to the Mall yesterday evening because I needed to walk and get some exercise …but it’s too cold outside!

Do you guys like to walk?

Staying active is a good thing… even in the winter!

That’s why this week’s theme was “Winter Fun” because yes, there are fun activities we can do in the winter - if we bundle up…

(Okay, now I am thinking, maybe I should have gone to the park instead of the mall!)

Sooooo what happened this week?

📚BOOKS

The kids and I went skating, skiing and sledding with Peppa Pig, Pinkalicious and a cute little mouse named Lucy!

We got a chance to talk with each other about the importance of not giving up, especially when trying new things like skating or skiing.

Sometimes we fall down but if we keep trying, eventually we may have fun and enjoy new things! Just like Peter - Pinkalicious’ brother!

Do you ski? Ice skate? The kids loved hearing about my first experience skiing when I fell down and couldn’t figure out how to stand back up on my skis. It was pretty funny! It was a great time to demonstrate and have a pretend skiing and ice skating time with my favourite little buddies!

🎶 SONGS

Here’s the new songs we learned this week!

🎿 Ski Song
⛸️ Let's Go Ice Skating
🎿Swish, Skate
🛷 A Sledding We Will Go
🧤 Hat And Scarf, Mittens And Boots

❄️Yes, winter is cold and feels like it will never end… but we’ll make it fun no matter what!

Have a great weekend, friends!