Create a Preschool Calendar That Wows Parents

If you’ve ever wondered what events, activities, and field trips you should add to your preschool calendar, you’ll get all your answers here! This post will show you how to set up your calendar for an amazing year.

1. Length of School Year

With a 9-month schedule you will get three months off in the summer, but you will also not get paid for three months of the year. This can make budgeting difficult during the down time.

A 10 month preschool calendar will give you a guaranteed 10 month income because your students will be in a 10 month contract, but keep in mind that there are some months (August and December) where you will only have class for two weeks out of the month. You may get questioned about this practice. Here is how you answer them:

“We have a 10-month preschool program so we’ve taken all the days we’re in session and prorated them out over 10 months to help everyone’s budget so there are 10 monthly payments. And our last payment is due in May. Even though we go into June, there is no June payment, so every monthly tuition payment is the same.”

You can also tell them, for example, “Our preschool tuition is $2,000, but to help everyone’s budgets we’ve prorated that over 10 months.” If you are still getting kick back and questions over tuition payments, you are not saying it the right way to alleviate any concerns. As with any of your policies, always find a way to spin them in a positive light.

2. First and Last Days of School Year

The easiest way to figure out your preschool school year calendar is to match whatever the local school district is doing. But first you must decide if you want to have a 9 month or 10-month schedule.

With a 9-month schedule it works well to start the day after Labor Day and to end the day before Memorial Day. This is an easy to remember, traditional school calendar.

With a 10-month preschool schedule, you would start in mid-August, the week before the local school district starts and end one week after Memorial Day.

3. No School Days

Here is a list of the typical days off during a school calendar:

• Labor Day
• Veterans Day
• President’s Day
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day
• Memorial Day
• 1 week at Thanksgiving
• 2 weeks at Christmas
• 1 week at Spring Break
• During the summer, you can either take the time off, without the income, or have summer camps instead of preschool classes. You can plan your vacations around one or more of these times off.

4. Field Trips and Family Events

You should have either a field trip or an event planned for every month of your preschool year. These field trips and events help to build a sense of family and community within your preschool and this feeling of family is what will keep your preschool families coming back to your preschool year after year. Here are the field trips and events we recommend:

• August—Meet and Greet (This is a big PRE-preschool event. All the families attend and get to meet each other, the other students in the class and their student’s teacher. Use this event to set the tone for the entire year. Review the policies and procedures and start to train both the students and the parents in how your home preschool operates.)
• September—Field Trip (Suggestions: petting zoo, apple orchard. Rather than transporting your entire class to the field trip location, have the parents bring them to the location instead of bringing them to class on the day of the field trip. Let the parents (and any other family members who’d like to come along) attend the field trip for free. This relieves you of not only the transportation, but also of the chaperone duties since each child will be with their own family. The September field trip is so important because you will have parent/teacher conferences coming up in October and the time the families spend with the teacher on this field trip will begin to build rapport that will help make the conferences more productive.
• October—Fall Festival
• November—Thanksgiving Feast
• December—Christmas Party
• January—Field Trip (suggestions: Taekwondo, dance studio, or gymnastics studio combined with post office, fire station, grocery store, etc.)
• February—Valentine’s Day Party
• March—Registration (All year long, find ways to direct your preschool families’ attention toward March and Registration. Be sure your families know why this is so important. Let them know that on April 1st you will be sending out 5,000 flyers to your community so if they don’t reregister their child in March, they will lose their child’s spot.)
• April—Zoo (Make this one a big trip to help keep the children excited toward the end of the school year.)
• May—Graduation

And because you have created a preschool calendar to wow parents with awesome field trips and events and made this a phenomenal year for their child and their family, your preschool families will rave about you to all their friends!