Winter Clothing
Fall weather means changes in the morning routine of daycare parents
With the colder weather comes changes in the type of outerwear that is appropriate to bring for daycare children.
As winter fast approaches over North America, the weather in many places can vary on daily basis by as much as 20 degrees. This proves problematic for many parents who are trying to dress their children for a full day when it is still early morning and rather cold.
Over the years that I have been involved in childcare, it has been one of my greatest joys to take the children outside during the first days of snow, which for some of them will be the first experience with snow that they will remember for the rest of their lives.
Despite this, the beginning of the cold weather is also a source of great frustration-- for several reasons. The first issue with this change in weather is that many students do not come adequately dressed for the cold weather. I have seen children come dressed in flip-flops on days where icicles have formed on the eaves by mid-afternoon. Countless times children have come with no coat or a fall jacket when snow-pants would be easily called for. A simple policy can be to bring your child with snow items every day past a certain date (perhaps in a plastic bag) or simply have a en extra set of winter things purchased from Goodwill or other discount store that may stay at daycare all the time.
Another source of frustration happens conversely when parents do remember to bring clothing for their children. The three colors of snowpants that are seen overwhelmingly in my daycare are black, blue, and pink. And commonly parents do not remember to label them for their children. In a typical daycare with 15 children to dress there will be 15 coats, 15 snowpants, 30 mittens or gloves, 30 boots, and 15 hats/hoods/scarves. That totals 105 articles of clothing that need to be placed on the appropriate children.
Combined with this is the fact that several children have different coats for outside play than they do to come to and from school, and many bring several hats or sets of gloves. Confusion is bound to happen. My center has adopted a policy that a letter be sent home mandating that all articles of clothing be labelled with at least initials of the children or a last name if the clothing will be handed down to other kids, and after a certain date we find that they are not labelled we will do so with masking tape written on with a Sharpie marker. Even still, problems arise trying to get so many wiggling 2-5 year olds into winter clothes when they would much rather be playing outside in the fluffy white stuff.
Put simply, confusion is bound to happen, and the only solution is to be flexible with parents, teachers and children alike.
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