Meetings for Staff Feedback

• Hold regular meetings with your staff for the purpose of sharing information and opinions, solving problems, updating necessary skills, making decisions, giving the staff your support and possibly completing a project. Encourage open communication. Provide refreshments during the meeting. This meeting can take place in a separate, designated room or in the main childcare room.
  
  

Meetings With Families

• Invite each daycare family separately to come to the daycare for a private meeting. Discussion topics can include the child's academic and social progress and any concerns you or the parents may have. Some families are not able to come inside the daycare on a regular basis, so give them a tour of the daycare area. Show them their child's artwork and areas of the childcare room that are his favorites.
  
  

Meetings for Community Awareness

• Host a community-wide informational meeting at your home daycare, in an open-house format. Choose a specific theme to plan the meeting room's decorations around, such as "Week of the Young Child" or "Growing Together" (for a springtime open house). Use this meeting opportunity to present the community with information about your home daycare as well as to become familiar with potential clients. Provide refreshments during the meeting that follow the open-house theme. This meeting is not a parent-teacher conference, but rather a marketing opportunity for your home daycare.
  
  

Meetings Involving Child Participation

• Schedule a special meeting for the children as well as for all of the home daycare providers. (Meetings aren't just for adults!) Teach the children about why meetings are important and what generally happens at a meeting. Ask the children for feedback about how they like daycare and whether they have any good ideas for activities they would like to do in the future. (Kids typically have lots of new, fresh ideas!) The home daycare provider can even give each child a spiral-bound notebook to bring to the meeting. Have the children decorate the cover, and include a special pencil or crayons for "taking notes." Provide simple refreshments for a post-meeting snack (the children could even help prepare the snack ahead of time).