News You Can Use

Quality Corner

While state regulations require one annual family engagement event, and STARS Standards recommend three family engagement events per year, we haven’t really discussed why we push for these events each year. What it comes down to are three main principles: investment in children’s education, relationship building, and a greater understanding for what happens within a Family Child Care Program.

Investment in Children’s Education
The children’s families that you work with trust you to build and encourage the children’s first love of learning. You have the children in your program, more often than not, more than the time the children spend at home. When they leave your program for the day or the weekend, you have no input on what the child does, what conversations they have, or even if they think back to the lessons they learned that week. Having regular family engagement events can help families take an interest in what their children are learning, and that initial spark of interest can carry over to having an interest in the child’s education throughout their school days once they leave your program for good.

Relationship Building

Relationships are the backbone to our everyday life. That trust you build within your families, the care you show to them and their children, help provide them with a sense of relief in the chaos that is child care in general. Having family engagement events helps bridge any gaps of understanding between you and the families. It helps them feel more comfortable coming to you if they have any concerns they want to bring up. Developmental Screeners, Specialist Referrals, Community Resources, all of these great resources for families are all very tender topics to approach when you don’t have that relationship built. And, not to mention, families refer your program to others when they have that relationship piece built with you.

Greater Understanding

Finally, we want to touch on the all important topic of understanding. Having the families come into the program, participate in a learning activity, and being able to see the work their child has done so far all help families understand that they aren’t just dropping their child off at a babysitter’s house. Especially when your program serves younger ages, many families may just see their child spending the day playing, but these family engagement events are our opportunities to show off exactly what skills their children are learning.

KY COLT

The Division of Child Care is working hard to get KY COLT live. As of now, you are still able to use your KY TRIS account as usual, however, expect to see a few changes here in the next few months.

Check out the link for more information on KY COLT:

https://www.childcareawareky.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/EKUTRIS_FAQ.pdf

In addition, the WKU Family Child Care Network is still offering by request training. If you contact our main office, we can set you up with one of our trainers to help get a training that suits your and your programs needs.

Kids Corner

Lesson planning is a task that oftentimes feels like a chore for most providers. Whether you spend your lesson planning time scrolling pinterest, throwing past activities back on the schedule, or diving into curriculum, we’ve got an idea that will help spark creativity in your program!

Rather than searching aimlessly, think about following a theme or, more specifically, pull your theme from a book!

Children’s books are full of great adventures and powerful questions that can help guide learners of any age. Having a theme or a book be your guide can help make activities come to mind a bit easier.

Let’s take Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle’s “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you See?” book as our example.

To start, we have our literacy component already selected. Let’s take it a step further into Art, and you can have the children work on collage projects where they make and describe any animal of their choosing. Thinking about gross motor, Animal Walk, where they walk around like the animals in the book, is an easy tie in. Science could have a whole topic on habitats for the animals and a music corner set up with animal sounds ready to be played on a tablet or recorded CD.

The next time you’re finding yourself challenged with your lesson plan, why not open a book and see where it takes you?

The Local Hotspot

Please get ready to Save the Date for our Annual Family Child Care Conference! This is our conference that we host JUST for Family Child Care Programs across the state of Kentucky.

If you want to network with other Family Child Care Programs, complete some training hours, and attend a Fantastic Awards Ceremony, save the date and check back in for when Registration goes live! See you in Covington!

In addition, the WKU Family Child Care Network is still offering by request training.

If you contact our main office at 270-745-2216, we can set you up with one of our trainers to help get a training that suits your and your programs needs.

Also, we have a new training series on the horizon! Be on the lookout for when the Little Lunch Learners series goes live!

This will be a series of individual trainings that will spend an hour focusing on practical, hands on, classroom ready strategies and resources you can easily apply to your child care program. More information to come soon!

And finishing off our month, we are excited to host our first Special Education Needs Approved Training: Picking Our Picky Eaters.

This will be an in person training in Owensboro, KY on Monday, September 28th at 5:45pm central. This training will go into why we see children as picky eaters and what we can do to ensure children are still receiving their dietary requirements.

This is a free training for Family Child Care Providers, but costs $10 per person for Licensed Type I providers.

You will provide your program name upon registration and one of our staff will confirm your status upon submission. Register here: https://wku.eventsair.com/2026-09-picky/reg/Site/Register

Regulation Reminder

As we have gotten back into our school year routines, a key part of that routine we want to emphasize is handwashing!

Handwashing is a great way to limit the spread of illnesses and can be a great barrier against those viruses that slowly start to ramp up with school going back in session.

Make sure you are washing hands whenever they look or feel dirty, upon arrival to the child care, before and after eating or handling food, after toileting and diaper changes, after handling animals, and before and after gross motor!

270-745-2216

fccnkyinfo@wku.edu