Tired of Feeling Stuck in the QRIS Process? Watch This!

Good morning, it's Erica Sakosho here at the Child Care Director's chair. A couple shout outs. First of all, I am shooting today from the home offices of Family Tree School Age Enrichment Program. I'd like to wish Ms. Amanda a happy birthday. This is the third shooting we've done on someone's birthday. I don't know, it just kind of happened that way. It's also Super Bowl Sunday. For those of you out there who are gonna watch football tonight, I want to say good luck to my husband's team, the 49ers. I'm not really a football girl, but good luck to them. It's also our one year anniversary, so we shot our first video literally last year on Super Bowl Sunday. So happy anniversary to the Child Care Director's chair Video channel. I also would like to thank our cameraman, Derek Rodricks. So if in your Rhode island, if you're in Rhode island and you need a, you need a camera guy, hit us up on the comments below. And here's your guy if you need someone to shoot you some, some video footage. So today we're going to talk a little bit about our goals. We had just had our 2020 strategic planning meeting about three weeks ago and I want to help my team kind of just see where we are with those goals, what their part is in the goals, and share some of the resources that we have in the office to help get our goal into place. The first thing I wanted to share is a fantastic book that we just purchased. I think I've had it for about maybe two weeks. It's the Happiness Guide for Early Childhood Educators and it's written by Brian Dupre and Chris Murray. I love Chris Murray books, but this is a fantastic book and I wanted to share one of the parts here. They have gems on each page and I wanted to share gem15. The first is a quote from Tony Robbins. It says, setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the invisible. If you fail to plan, then you're planning to fail. So today we're going to talk about some of the things that we have planned as a group and what the next steps are going to be so that we can make sure that our plan becomes a reality. So this is a great book, as I said, wonderful mindset book for early educators. I highly recommend getting one, adding it to your own personal resource library.

So you can see my desk is kind of covered with a lot of resources today. The first thing we're going to talk about is how to apply for a school Age 5 star Bright stars rating which is the major goal for our school age program this year. So I don't have a fancy one here. They do make these in color. Specifically I am making this for my team at Edith Street. So this is going to be very.

Specific for you. The first thing you want to do is when you get the framework is you're going to go to standard number one, which is daily child's experience. So with this you're going to use a spacers book to rate your learning environment. So this is the early childhood one. The school age one has a purple cover but currently they have that at Eden street. So I didn't have that book to show you, but it looks exactly like this with a purple cover and it will say school age, same company, same writers, etc. So you're going to use this book, you're going to make photocopies and you're going to take at least two or three directors or teachers to do an assessment of your learning space. So this is going to be looking at things like general supervision. It's going to be looking at what you have for materials in terms of math and dramatic play and blocks and art. It's also going to look at the way that staff encourage children to communicate, the way that staff communicate with each other. So this is your first step. So the reason I'm going to say this is your first step is you're going to take the information from this and then you're going to create a quality improvement plan and what things you need to improve, what materials you may be lacking, what materials you have a significant amount of and then determine what your next steps would be. So you're going to start with this, you're going to start with doing assessment of the learning space to reach a five star level. They're going to want you to make sure that one, you have the most recent copy of your DCYF visit or DHS at this point visit, you're going to have a copy of that visit. Make sure that there are no non compliances. If there are any non compliances you have to correct those first. Have your site visit come back out to make sure that those have been corrected and they'll give you a clean compliance sheet. So you'll need that first before you can move any further. Secondly, when you do your learning environment you have to have the area is at least rate a 5 or higher. So you can score up to a 7 in an area but you have to have an average of five in each of the scoring areas which are in the back, the back here. So if you're stuck on that after you've scored everything and you need some help figuring out your averages, just give us a call at the home office. We'll be happy to help you do that. But the first step is you need to photocopy this book. Get at least two or three complete site evaluations. A site evaluation will probably take you two to three hours. It isn't something that you do quick and it should be done while the program is in session. You can look at some of the materials when the program is not in accession, but you do need to.

Look to make sure that you have everything in place. And again, you need to catch those interactions. You can do that in the before school program and the after school program. You can look at multiple different groups with different teachers and see how you're doing. So that is step one for standard one is a clean compliance visit that is documented and a couple of visits of this and add up your scores and then make your course of action. We are back for standard two, which is curriculum, child assessment, and the process of learning. So in this space, you're gonna take three or four copies of your monthly curriculum calendar. You're gonna put them in a folder file. When they're looking at the curriculum, they're gonna be looking to make sure you have at least two to three activities that meet these requirements, which would be active physical activity, creative expression, and academic support. So we offer homework club four days out of the week. We just don't offer on Friday. So it does need to be labeled on your calendar of activities that that is an option for children. You also want to make sure that children have other opportunities to do other things. In your creative expression. You would have art, you would have music, you could have theater. There's lots of different things that you can do in that. And then physical activity obviously is going to be your, your gross motor and your fine motor movement type of activities. We do offer other things that are more in the cognitive space or science or math or STEM activities, and those are fine too. STEM activities can also look at or be categorized in the academic support. So you want to make sure that you have copies of at least three months of calendars and that all of those things are indicated and labeled as such on the bottom of your calendar or you can color code it. Either way will work. But you have to make it very easy and obvious to see that at least two to three of those examples are a part of your curriculum throughout the Week. The other part that you're going to do is child assessment. So in school age, they will accept things like observations, anecdotal notes, checklists, interest inventory. So when you take those surveys with the children, make sure they put their names on it, where they tell you what type of activities they like to do, what they would like to see more of, what they like to see less of, what kind of snacks they like, all those interesting questions that children can give you feedback on the program, also school performance information and any other assessment tools that you use. You want to collect that data, you're also going to put that in your file folder. So this is your file folder. Ms. Mossy has already started it for you. Inside here there are, they're all tabs. Standard 1, 2, 3, 4. Basically, when you're doing an application, all you're doing is making copies of documents that prove or show how you do these things in your program. So most of this, I'd say 90% of your application process is making photocopies. So please get your team involved in doing that. Anybody who knows how to use a school copy machine can help you out with this. Try to make this not be daunting and try to make this be more of a team experience so that everybody has buy in and everybody's invested. This is not meant for one person to sit, you know, in an office and just do all the paperwork. That's not the, that's not the intent of this. It is a group, it is a group process. And then if everybody has a piece of it, it's a lot more fun when you actually achieve it and you find yourself successful. So curriculum again for school age. Make sure you have those three areas covered and that they're labeled. Other than that, that's pretty simple. So that's standard two. So we're back with standard three and four. These ones are pretty straightforward, so I'm going to do them together. So standard three is your maximum staff to child ratio. Pretty much. To prepare for this, you just need to have the, the approved signage in each classroom where it states 1 to 13 or 1 to 12 if it's kindergartners. That one's pretty straightforward. We have plenty of teachers at Edith Street. 77 kids. You really, really only would need six teachers. I think we're at like 12 or 14 depending on the day. So you guys are all set with that. Just make sure that each room has the size that says what the ratio is. The second part, standard four is maximum group size. So at no point should you have more than 26 children in a group. If they are kindergarten, you should not have more than 24 in a group. So keep that in mind, especially when you are transitioning or homework club or cooking clubs or the play yard. So if two groups go outside at the same time, that's totally, totally fine. But we do have that fence that divides through the middle of the playground. You just take some of the children on the other side so that you never have more than 26 in a group. That's a bright star standard. It's also a DCYF DHS standard. So you want to make sure that you always stay in compliance as far as that, as far as that goes. So standard standard four and five, sorry, standard three and four are pretty straightforward. Just a matter of signage and making sure that you all as a group are aware of the flow.

Standard five is family communication. That one is a little bit more in depth. So they're going to be looking at collection of monthly newsletters, a collection of our community calendar along with any signs of family events that we have that may not be included in that calendar. Your parent advisory group meeting notes from that list of participants in the, in the advisory board, our annual surveys. So those surveys that just went out that I sent back to the office, you want to keep those and then we want to take that feedback and compile our findings and then what we're going to do to increase the scores in the areas and that would also be part of our improvement plan. So we'll. We're basically just collecting a lot of data of where we're at and the things that we're going to do to continually improve. That's why it's called a continual improvement plan. So once you even hit five stars, you don't stop there. You continue to maintain that level and then always improving, improving, improving. And that's, you know, how you become the best at anything, Even the best of the best in any field. Don't stop when they're on the top. They keep, they keep moving.

Parent conferences, any parent conferences that you have, usually twice a year. So that would be maybe the open house. I know you guys are doing a meet and greet in February, so document that. Who came, who attended, take some pictures. Those are all ways to document the ways that we at Family Tree do family communication and involvement with parents. Any family engagement activities that you do, put those up and label them as such. Any book bags, any art activities, any, any recipe swaps, anything like that that you're doing where inviting the parents to be Part of our programming. You want to document that. So that is how we collect standard five. We need to have just three of all of those things that we listed which we definitely exceed in that area in our program. So that's the end of standard five. So we have standard six, which is a lead staff requirements. So at a level five, we're going to be looking for three teachers because we have three groups. So three lead teachers who have 60 college credits or more, it says, in any field. But most of you who work at our program have it in either child development or early education or elementary education. So three teachers will be identified as lead teachers who have 60 college credits or more as our lead staff. And then the program qualifications for a director is the director has to have a bachelor's degree and 18 of their credits need to be in the child and youth field. So we also have somebody who meets those requirements at our center as well. So those are pretty cut and dry. It's a matter of taking a copy of the either college transcripts or the person's degree, identify them on the sheet as the lead, identify them on the sheet as the program director. And that's it. That's pretty simple.

We're going to go into standard eight, which is program management. So at a level five, there is another tool that we're going to use and that is the school age PQA which is another self assessment tool. This, the really cool thing about it was developed in part in Rhode island and this tool is, is used I believe throughout the country. But this was developed through PASA and they worked with another group here.

To, to create this. So this is another assessment tool that you will use to do a self assessment. This will take you a little bit of time. It's quite extensive. As you can see, there's many, many pages. Again, don't become overwhelmed. It's, it's, it's easy to use, but it just, it collects a lot of information. It also, as you working through this, it really does make you think about the things that you're offering in the program and ways that you can improve. Which is why I really love the process more than the end result. The end result is great. Yeah, you, you get your certificate, you put it on the wall and you're proud to have that, you know, proud of the work that you've done. But I really feel like the process for me when I did accreditation and when we've worked, you know, in achieving five stars at Greco, four stars at the Early Learning center or four stars at Warwick App really the process of what I learned through collecting these tools, talking with the teachers, reviewing the materials, looking at the feedback from parents, that was where I felt like the good stuff happened. So I hope that you find that as well as you work through the process. Again, involve your team. It's very important that the teachers are a part of this. This is not just for two people to sit in the office and do, you know, working on papers and filling things out really is important. Involve the children. Get as much feedback as you can from your kids. It is their program and our job is to design a program that meets their needs.

Last. That is the last one. So program management. So as you can see, this is not, this is not as hard or as tedious as people might think. It's just a few standards. Most of them are pretty cool, cut and dry. You have the requirements or you don't. You meet the group size or you don't really. It's the nitty gritty is in the, is in the feedback, is in the self assessment is in the creating the environments. That's really where the, where the good stuff happens. So to me, out of all these standards, three is where the work happens and the rest is really a matter of just documentation and making copies and putting it in your folder. One last thing I did have, because we've had visits at that location before, we have all of our feedback from our last visit. So you can look at that and see where they found areas to be lacking and what areas they thought were our strengths and use that information. So you got data from a previous visit. So I think that that is, you know, something that's priceless when you're working on your assessment tools. Okay, So I wish you guys lucky. Eden Street. Here's what I'm going to say. We need to have our goals and we need a timeline. So we're going to get all of this stuff over to you for Monday or Tuesday and for the month of February, I expect all the documentation and the self assessments and surveys to be done and completed. The bad news is bright size does not come out during the summer because that's not what they consider a typical retail running of your program. So we've really got to get this application to them by the end of February so that we can get in either April or May visit before the school year ends. So again, lots of photocopies. You can do it. I promise you. You got to work as a team. There's, there's 13 of you, 14 of you. Make it happen. If you have any questions, call me at the home office. I'm available. Thank you.

Okay, so I have some great resources available at the office that will help give you a better understanding of quality programming in the after school space. One of the books is actually all my favorite books are, honestly by Roberta Newman, who's amazing. She. I met her at a national after school conference probably like 10 years ago. She is amazing. She knows her stuff. I'm gonna say probably my favorite person in school. School age by. By leaps and bounds. So this book here is Perspectives and out of school Programs. And there's short articles in here on all different topics. They're super easy to read, very insightful. No matter what level teacher you are. Her stuff, it just connects. So let me just go to one. I'll just find a page. Let's see.

I didn't really have anyone specific out, but there are like tips for involving children in the portfolio process using portfolio tools for professional development. There's how to work with kids who are giving you challenging behaviors. There's making a place for every child and youth. There's just so many awesome things in here. How to be creative, how to put competency.

So she finds like the ten C's of professionalism are. Are you confident? Are you confident? Do you collaborate? Are you good with communication? Are you. Are you good with creativity? Are you open to change? Are you compassionate? Do you have courage? Do you show compassionate compassion? And are you committed? So and again it's like two, three page article. Awesome for school age staff. 100% I would say pick this up for those of you who are struggling with portfolios as portfolios is part of our process of getting our five stars. Here's a whole book on the best ways to create fantastic portfolios for school age children. It's a matter of documenting some of their work. But again, there's literally every single thing that you want to know about portfolios is in here. Super easy read. It's broken down into small content areas. So creating Creating Portfolios Again by Roberta Newman. And then when you're looking at developing spaces, this is has to be the best school age book on the market. Does your after school program have that wow factor? This is great. After school programs and spaces for children. Fantastic. This is colorful, super, super easy to use, a little bit more wordy. But definitely when you want to create certain areas in your classroom or in your space or you feel like you know this area has been here a long time, I want to switch it up. This is the book we have all These things here at the office, you're welcome to come and use them. You certainly can't keep them, but you're certainly welcome to use them again. Three awesome resources. So we have the support for you again. If you have any questions, call me. But this stuff is here. So last resource of the day we talked about parent engagement and helping parents understand what we're doing here really does help children learn and grow and develop. So I have two tools here. First, I have the Fun Family activity cards toolkit. And this is provided to us by the folks that make the Rhode Island Early Learning Standards. So in here it has all different activities that we can do as a center to help create parent engagement. Some of it is activities that can be done on site at the program and some are things that we can do at home. So we have.

These small toolkits and then we also have this really big fun family activities guide. And this is for every age group. So I think as a group we should select the next four or five parent engagement activities and do them across the board. So I don't want just book bags going home with just our preschoolers, I think our toddlers, I think our infants, etc, all the way across. We're all working on cognitive development, we're all working on social skills, we're all working on helping children with self regulation skills which will help with how children respond to you, how children communicate. We're all working on language. I mean maybe infants and toddlers aren't necessarily working on math skills. So let's focus on the ones that all across the board will be working on. So I have a packet for each location. Make sure that the directors, you guys come pick it up. It'll be in your outgoing mailbox. I want you guys to look and see what ones you think are the best. Four or five. And we're going to do one for February, March, April, May and June. So five months right before we get to summer camp. Summer camp. Super excited about that. That's going to be 50 days past 50, 50 days around the world. Passport for fun. So start to think about your diversity. The other thing about diversity, we're not just talking about race, we're talking about lots of things other than race and heritage and culture. So think about when we say diversity, what do we mean? We have children who live in foster families, we have children who have two moms or children who have two dads, all those things. So really think big and think outside the box when you're creating activities and when you're doing things that involve parents, make sure that we're compassionate and that we include everybody and that we make it be all inclusive. I have faith that you guys are going to implement, execute, and make this plan happen.