Need Advice on How to Schedule the Day for at Home Childcare

I am a licensed childcare provider, and I order a pre-school cirriculum for my children, however, prior to doing so, I used to use different websites to give me ideas. I will list a few. The first one is my favorite, it allows you to print the templates in B&W or color and the children cut and paste, obviously depends on the ages of the children in your care. Hope this helps a little bit.

Dltk-kids.com
LearningPage.com
EnchantedLearning.com

And you can always do a search on any search enging online for preschool activities, you'll have a lot of different sites to choose from.

I don't have a specific schedule as my daycare person has only infants and toddlers, so the schedules wouldn't be appropriate for you age group...but the things that could carry over to your age group are as follows:

If you are planning on offering breakfast, if parents aren't going to be there by 8:00 am (or when ever you do breakfast) they should feed their child before they show up.

If they are done playing with a toy or doing an activity, they put it away....that will help you keep the area clean and not keep you cleaning all evening.

Lunch between 11:30 and noon

Snack maybe around 3:00 or 3:30

My daycare has a schedule she follows that she has had for years.

Breakfast -8:00AM, if your child is not there by then they don't get breakfast, she will feed them earlier if they are there, she opens at 7:30

Between breakfast and lunch she lets the kids play either inside or outside depending on the weather. She will also do arts and crafts and reading books. She will let them watch TV when she is preparing lunch.

Lunch - noon

Naptime - gets the kids down between 1 and 1:30 and gets the kids up around 3:30PM. She will let the younger kids sleep longer (such as babies) if they need it.

After nap they get a small snack. She does arts and crafts with them after naptime until the parents come get them. If she's not doing arts and crafts and the weather is good she will let them play outside.

One thing I do in the summer months is have the older (school age) kids think of ideas. We write them down, so I don't forget! and we them over hte course of the summer. I put some of them "in charge" of the activities, they love it! They have come up with some pretty fun things to do that don't involve leaving the house! For example, cmaping day. We put a tent up in the back yard made smores (in the microwave) had a picnic etc. Water day, put up a pool, made water baloons, filled the squirt guns, they looked forward to that and can't wait for it again this year!
I also have quiet time for the ones that do not nap. At 1:00 after the little ones go down the older ones have to read for 45 minutes so I can get some sanity back!! and to get lunch cleaned up and the house back to some order!

Here is an idea for a basic one.

7:30 am Breakfast
8:00 am Clean Up
8:30 am Showtime (Nick Jr, PBS, Noggin)
9:00 am Music Time
9:15 am Free Time
10:00 am Clean Up
10:15 am Story Time
10:30 am Table Time
11:00 am Lunch Time
11:30 am Clean Up
11:45 am Outside (weather permitting)
12:30 pm Clean Up
12:35 pm Quiet Activity
1:00 pm Naptime / Quiet Time
3:00 pm Snack Time
3:20 pm Clean Up
3:25 pm Outside (weather permitting)
4:15 pm Clean Up
4:20 pm Quiet Activity after getting ready to go home