Today’s Tots Home Daycare

08/31/2026

08/30/2026

If you or someone you know is looking for Licensed Childcare send them my way Please share and help my business flourish!!😘

Locations: 📍West End Of Crystal Lake closest to West Beach!

* I have two full-time openings currently for children ages 5 and up.

*  I will have one opening starting February 2027 for a toddler 2 1/2 to 5 years of age.

08/29/2026

🌈📚 Happy Friday from Today’s Tots Home Daycare! ☀️💛

We wrapped up our week with a wonderful day full of hands-on learning, movement, outdoor exploration, colors, friendship, and plenty of fresh air! One of my favorite things about early childhood education is watching the children learn naturally through play, sometimes the simplest activities are building so many important developmental skills at once. 🏡✨

🌈 Fine Motor & Color Sorting Fun

We began our morning with a colorful hands-on activity using ladles, colorful balls, and muffin tins! The children practiced scooping the balls and carefully placing them into the muffin cups while identifying and organizing the different colors.
🔴🟣🟢🟡🟠

This activity supported so many developmental skills:

* 🖐️ Fine motor development – strengthening the small muscles in the hands, fingers, and wrists.
* 👀 Hand-eye coordination – carefully guiding the ladle toward the balls and muffin cups.
* 🌈 Color recognition and matching – identifying, naming, grouping, and comparing colors.
* 🧠 Sorting and classification – an important early math skill that teaches children how objects can be organized by shared characteristics.
* 🔢 Early math concepts – counting balls, comparing quantities, noticing which cups had more or fewer, and recognizing patterns.
* 🤔 Problem-solving skills – figuring out how to scoop, balance, carry, and successfully place the balls.
* 🎯 Concentration and attention span – slowing down and focusing on completing each step.
* ✋ Pre-writing development – strengthening many of the same muscles children later use to properly hold pencils, crayons, and scissors.
* 💪 Independence and confidence – giving the children the opportunity to complete a task all by themselves!

☀️ Outdoor Play in the Front Yard

After our morning activity, we headed outside to enjoy the beautiful weather! The children rode our outdoor toys, ran, played together, and created with sidewalk chalk. 🚲 ⚽️ 🏀

🌳 Outdoor play helps children develop:

* 🚲 Gross motor skills through riding, running, pushing, climbing, and balancing.
* ⚖️ Balance and coordination
* 💪 Core and leg strength
* 🧠 Spatial awareness and body control
* 🎨 Creativity and early writing skills through chalk drawing.
* 🤝 Social skills such as sharing, taking turns, communicating, and playing cooperatively.
* 🌞 Sensory experiences through sunshine, fresh air, sounds, textures, movement, and nature.

🌳 Adventure to Della Park!

Since the weather was just too beautiful to waste, we decided to take an extra trip to Della Park! The children climbed, ran, balanced, explored the playground equipment, observed their surroundings, and enjoyed checking out nature and the nearby creek.

Playgrounds are truly outdoor classrooms! 🌿

* 🧗 Climbing strengthens the entire body while developing coordination, grip strength, balance, and motor planning.
* 🧠 Motor planning teaches children how to decide where their hands and feet need to go next.
* 💭 Risk assessment and problem solving develop as children decide how to safely navigate playground equipment.
* ❤️ Confidence grows when children accomplish something that once seemed challenging.
* 👬 Social-emotional development happens naturally as children cooperate, wait for turns, encourage friends, and navigate group play.
* 🌳 Nature exploration builds curiosity and encourages children to observe plants, insects, water, trees, weather, and the changing environment.
* 👂 Outdoor environments provide endless opportunities for sensory learning through sights, sounds, textures, smells, and movement.

Outdoor time is incredibly important during early childhood. Children need opportunities to move their bodies freely, explore, take appropriate risks, use their imaginations, release energy, and connect with nature. It also provides a wonderful change of environment that encourages curiosity and helps children return indoors more regulated and ready to learn. 🌎💚

🥗 Lunch & Recharge

After all that running, climbing, exploring, and learning, we came back to Today’s Tots for a healthy lunch and some time to recharge. Mealtimes are learning opportunities too, children practice independence, table manners, conversation, self-help skills, and listening to their own hunger and fullness cues.

📚 Book of the Day: The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s Colors / Colores

Our Book of the Day fit perfectly with everything we had been learning! 🌈🐛 🎨

Inspired by the colorful artwork and familiar world of Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s Colors / Colores introduces young children to colors while also exposing them to the Spanish words for those colors. 📖

It connected beautifully with our morning activity because the children had already been sorting, identifying, matching, and talking about colors throughout the day. ☺️

Reading a bilingual color book supports:

* 🌈 Color recognition and vocabulary
* 🇺🇸🇪🇸 Exposure to both English and Spanish
* 👂 Listening comprehension
* 🗣️ Language development and pronunciation
* 🧠 Memory and word association
* 📖 Early literacy and print awareness
* 💡 Making connections between what children see in books and what they experience during play

The children were able to connect the colors in our story with the colorful balls, chalk, playground equipment, flowers, trees, sky, and everything else we had observed throughout our Friday adventures. 🌸🌳☀️⛅️

😴 Quiet Time & One More Dose of Sunshine! ☀️

After lunch and our story, everyone enjoyed some much-needed quiet time to allow their bodies and minds to rest after such an active morning. 😴

Then, because Mother Nature gave us such a gorgeous Friday, we finished our afternoon back outside in the front yard, playing together and soaking up the sunshine while we waited for our families to arrive. 💛☀️☺️

There is something extra special about ending the week with happy kiddos, tired little legs, sunshine, laughter, learning, and lots of outdoor memories. ☀️🥰

I hope all of my Today’s Tots families have a wonderful, relaxing, and safe weekend! See everyone next week for another week of learning through play! 🌈🏡📚💕

❤️- Ms. Dana
Today’s Tots Home Daycare

08/27/2026

🌻 A Beautiful Day of Learning, Movement & Outdoor Adventures at Today’s Tots Home Daycare! 🌻☀️

We packed so much learning, movement, creativity, and fresh air into our day today! With summer beginning to wind down and cooler months getting closer, we’re soaking up every opportunity we can to get outside, move our bodies, explore, and learn through play. 💛☀️

🌸 We started our morning with building our pretend flowers!

The children worked together to connect stems, leaves, and colorful flower pieces while counting each piece as they built their creations.

• Strengthened fine-motor skills and hand-eye coordination as little hands pushed, pulled, connected, and separated the pieces
• Practiced counting, one-to-one correspondence, and early number concepts
• Encouraged problem-solving and spatial awareness while figuring out how the pieces fit together
• Built creativity and imaginative thinking by designing their own flowers
• Practiced sharing, cooperation, communication, and turn-taking while creating together

🏃‍♀️⚽️ Next, we headed into the front yard for some BIG movement! We ran, raced, explored, played with our outdoor toys, and had plenty of opportunities to burn off some morning energy. ☺️

• Running and racing strengthen gross-motor development, balance, coordination, endurance, and core strength
• Outdoor free play gives children opportunities to practice body awareness and spatial awareness
• Group games encourage social interaction, teamwork, taking turns, and following directions
• Open-ended outdoor play encourages children to make choices, solve problems, and build independence and confidence
• Active play is also wonderful for helping children regulate their bodies and prepare their brains for learning

🌳🛝 We even squeezed in an EXTRA trip to the park today!

As we get closer to fall and eventually our colder winter months, we’re taking full advantage of these beautiful days and adding as much outdoor time as we can. ❤️

Outdoor play is incredibly important for young children because it supports their development in so many ways:

• Builds stronger muscles, bones, balance, coordination, and cardiovascular endurance
• Gives children more room for climbing, running, jumping, stretching, and exploring
• Supports sensory development through sunshine, wind, grass, trees, different textures, sounds, and movement
• Encourages curiosity, creativity, exploration, and independent problem-solving
• Provides opportunities for children to practice appropriate risk-taking and confidence on playground equipment
• Helps support attention, mood, emotional regulation, and overall well-being
• Gives children the chance to simply be children, exploring their world through movement and play! 💚

🔤🐊 After all of that outdoor fun, we came inside for our preschool lesson and focused on the letter A!

Our Book of the Day was The Adventures of Abby Alligator from the AlphaTales series. 📖 📕

Abby’s adventure is filled with words and ideas connected to the letter A, making it a fun way for children to repeatedly hear the beginning /A/ sound while following along with a silly, memorable story.

Our story connected perfectly with today’s lesson by helping us: 📕

• Recognize the uppercase A and lowercase a
• Listen for the beginning sound in words
• Build phonological awareness, an important early-reading skill
• Introduce and reinforce new vocabulary
• Practice listening, comprehension, prediction, and recalling details from a story
• Make connections between letters, sounds, pictures, and spoken words
• Show children that literacy can be playful, silly, and FUN! 📚✨

🐄🧲 We also explored our magnetic animal matching set!

The children worked together to match each animal’s head with the correct body, then we talked about the different animals, what they do, where they might live, and the sounds they make this encourages:

• Strengthened visual discrimination and matching skills by identifying which pieces belonged together
• Encouraged problem-solving and critical thinking as the children tested different combinations
• Built fine-motor strength and hand-eye coordination while manipulating the magnetic pieces
• Expanded language and vocabulary by naming animals and describing their characteristics
• Practiced animal sound recognition, which supports listening and early language development
• Encouraged memory and recall as children remembered familiar animals and the sounds they make
• Supported science and early world knowledge as we discussed animal habitats, behaviors, and characteristics
• Promoted social interaction and communication as the children shared ideas and helped one another find the correct matches

It fit perfectly into our day because it combined hands-on play with language, science, memory, matching, and fine-motor learning all at once! 🐶🐮🐴🦁💕

🍎 After our lesson, we enjoyed lunch together, which gives us another opportunity every day to practice independence, conversation, manners, patience, and healthy routines.

😴 Then it was time for quiet time, giving growing bodies and busy brains an opportunity to rest, reset, and recharge after such an active morning. Some of us slept while others quietly played.

☀️ We spent the remainder of our day enjoying this gorgeous summer weather with more outdoor play, friends, movement, and sunshine. We know fall will be here before we know it and Illinois winter won’t be far behind! 😂❄️ So for now, we’re soaking up every warm day we can.

One of my favorite things about early childhood education is that children are learning constantly, even when what they’re doing simply looks like “playing.”

Today we practiced literacy, early math, fine-motor development, gross-motor skills, social-emotional development, creativity, problem-solving, independence, communication, and so much more.

Another busy, beautiful day of learning through play at Today’s Tots Home Daycare! 🏡💕📚🌸🐊☀️

❤️- Ms. Dana