My name is Sally Faust. I'm married with two beautiful children, Riley (5) and Chloe (3). The idea for QuickCraft came to me when I was expecting my second child and working full time as a family day care carer. Prior to this, I had worked in childcare centres, after school care programs and as a group leader in a pre-school. I was looking through my messy, overflowing filing cabinet of activities and had given up searching the internet because I was tired of those annoying pop ups; both methods were frustrating. I began to think. I should really put all of these on CD. From there the ideas started flooding in and I quickly put pen to paper: create a CD with a theme; have lots of activities to print easily; have different themes. I began 18 months of making up activities from scratch and sourcing software programs. Soon, I had a product! Since my launch date in September 2005, QuickCraft CDs have grown and improved and are still moving forward. It has been very exciting and there is even more I want to do!
What do QuickCraft CDs offer?
QuickCraft is a series of activity CDs, each with over 100 printable activities for children; plus resources for childcare workers, craft activities and children's poems written by an award-winning Australian poet. Each CD has its own learning theme. Drawing upon years of experience, I've developed activities that would be suitable for every age group. For instance, since I have five years experience as an Assistant Co-ordinator in an after school care program, I developed activities that this age group would enjoy. Each CD is a complete package with printable activities, themerelated craft and cooking recipes and childcare worker resources. These resources include borders for newsletters, alphabet cards, name tags, mini awards, certificates and flash cards.
Growing .
The most exciting achievement so far has been to be able to offer these CDs through a partnership with Family Day Care Australia. I now also have a New Zealand and UK dealer, and several Australian software stores and resellers have picked up the CDs. As QuickCraft continues to grow, I am constantly striving to get the products into the hands of consumers and hope to reach more of the Australian and US markets. My dream is that all childcare workers will have a set of QuickCraft CDs on the shelf, making it easier to immediately access an activity or to print activities at the start of each day. Now that my son has started school, he often asks me for activities from the CDs. In fact, the other day he asked me about people from different countries. This was a great time to print out the multi-cultural finger puppets and do an activity together - which led to lots of questions, discussions and fun. My son has now placed an order for a Dinosaur CD, so a QuickCraft Dinosaur CD won't be far away!