Whales, Snails and Puppy Dog Tails Child Care Center
717-938-9978
Unlike other Etters, Newberrytown, New Cumberland and Fishing Creek childcare centers, we keep or Summer Program Children busy every day. We go on four to five field trips per week and we travel only in school buses for the safety of the children.
Why our Summer Program is the Best:
The summer program at our Center serving Etters, Newberrytown, Lewisberry, York Haven and New Cumberland daycare center includes Hot Breakfast, Lunch and Two Snacks for no additional charge. On the field trips, we pack two large coolers full of food, including fresh fruits and vegetables of all kinds. I quiz the children for what they like and we provide them with the foods they like so they eat more and eat healthier. An example is that the children saw the staff eating salads and cheese and crackers. The next field trip and every one since, we have had these items for the children also. We bring four to five 5-Gallon Drink Dispensers on all field trips which travels with the children as they are on the field trip so they can drink whenever they want. This is way different than other programs, where the children often appear dehydrated because they have to wait for lunch to drink.
We go on four to five field trips per week. Field Trips are not just to parks, but to special places you would like to take your child if you had the Summer off. These field trips cost us between $40 and$50 per week per child (admission fees, parking, diesel, tolls, etc.) and are included in our low Summer Program rate of $195 per week.
We are a fully licensed and accredited program with the State of Pennsylvania. We work directly with Child Care Consultants / Child Care Network and accept subsidized child care from the State of Pennsylvania, which means that many families making under $50,000 per year pay us as little as $30 per week for our Summer Program.
The two owners of this Lewisberry after school care center, Bill and Judy Whale, go on all field trips and supervise personally every aspect of the trip. This ensures consistency in the operation and organization of the program and maximizes safety of the children on the trip. Bill and Judy have been doing Summer Programs since 2000 and have worked out standard procedures for every aspect of each field trip.
All transportation is in full size school buses to maximize safety of the children. Our Center has two full size school buses with two trained bus drivers who have been driving school bus since 2005. The advantage is that if one school bus would break down, the other could be put into service immediately to get the children.
We run an active program in which the children get plenty of physical exercise. We routinely go on Summer Program trips where people pull us aside and ask where we are from and how we are able to do so much and at the pace we go at, as if we are from another universe or something. An example would be how we had the boys and girls race across the Washington Zoo from the lowest section to the highest section while all the time pushing and pulling two huge wooden wagons with five 5-gallon drink dispensers in one and tons of food in the other. People were looking at us like we had two heads when we blew by them when they were having difficulty just walking their own bodies up the hill. Oh, and yes, the girls won. They Cheated!
Another example is when a program passed our program eating at the base of Hawk Mountain last summer. First of all they were looking at us with envy because, as usual, we had watermelon, bananas, apples and other fruit, as well as cheese and crackers, every kind of meat sandwich and peanut butter and jelly, as well as desert for children who ate their meal. We took our time and enjoyed our meal perhaps eating for another half-hour after they passed us. When we started off, a few of the children wanted to "run up the mountain". I saw no harm in getting the blood flowing, so I agreed and off we went. To my surprise, more than half our group was running with me (and half my staff. I specifically hire athletic summer staff). Again, to my surprise, the children didn't tire out and we ran all the way to the top, from the base, passing at full run the other program that passed us a half hour before. They gave us the "What planet are these guys from?" look, which we all relished. Half of our children also surveyed every peak before coming back down. Hawk Mountain is always one of our last trips because we want to see the hawks begin their migration at the end of Summer, so by this trip, the children are usually in pretty good shape after a summer in our program.
The Summer Program Children have their own building with an educational floor and a rec room floor. We divide the children between those two floors and our outside play area which is big enough for organized sports. In this way, the children are never crowded. We can also have all kinds of school age games and activities that would not be permitted in a building with younger children. Pool tables, for example, would not be permitted in our school age building if preschoolers were also using this building because the risk imposed by the hard pool balls and cue sticks. I once had a school age boy kick a ball hard and was disciplined by one of my staff because he bowled a small child over with the kicked ball. He said to me, while he was on time out, that he "didn't want to be part of this baby program". At the time, I was contemplating a new location for a bigger building that would house our growing program and that statement was one of the most helpful I had ever received. It occurred to me that I didn't want a bigger building, but rather, two buildings and an additional large play area. The second building an additional large play are would be just for my school age children and they could have in it what they liked and play as hard as they liked (as long as they weren't hurting each other, which was not as easy to do because the children were all bigger on this playground). It has worked out great for the children and for us.
Educationally Based Program: I have three degreed staff that run the Summer Program. Two of the staff have four-year Elementary Education Degrees and one of the staff has an Undergraduate and Masters Degree. We also utilize college students going for their Education Degrees. The program is set up for fun, but we incorporate a great deal of learning in this framework. We have four microscopes, for example and this Summer, we are planning an embryology project where we will hatch out chicks and go over all the stages of embryo development and stages of growth to adulthood. We will talk about animal husbandry and many other scientific areas.
We incorporate a great deal of music into our program, which the children love. We have over two-hundred children's music and educational CD's in our Center which are used regularly. We also have an 8 speaker stereo system on the bus with Sirius Satelite Radio, which the children enjoy going to and from field trips.
We take a great deal of video and pictures (which are incorporated into the video) and we professionally edit the video and pictures. We usually have about three hours of edited video of the Summer Program each year which we distribute to all the children of the Summer Program free of charge.
Whales Snails and Puppy Dog Tails is located in Etters, PA. We are off Exit #32, the Newberrytown Exit of Route 83 and we serve children in Newberrytown, Etters, Lewisberry, Fishing Creek, New Cumberland, Dover, York Haven, Manchester, Mechanicsburg and Camp Hill, PA.
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Copyright 2012: Whales, Snails and Puppy Dog Tails Child Care Center. Fishing Creek Childcare. All rights reserved.
2125 York Haven Road
Etters, PA 17319
717-938-9978
