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Day Care Centers – Fun-filled Activities For Your Kids
A day care center is not just some place parents can leave their kids so they can concentrate on their own lives. A day care facility should be more than just a temporary place for the kids to be in when their parents are out to work, it should be a nurturing environment that will encourage development in the children cognitively and physically.
Aside from displaying the foundations of reading, writing, and mathematics – meaning colorful letters and numbers plus an assortment of crayons and writing material – a day care facilitator should also inject an arts and crafts activity into their day care kid’s normal schedule. It does nit have to be everyday because some days you have to reserve for reading, others for outside play, maybe others for special trips to the museum or the zoo.
There are dozens of available help online regarding appropriate activities for day care aged children. All of these help in developing the child’s gross and fine motor skills, exercising their shoulders, wrists, and finger coordination.
Activities that build and develop fine motor skills usually involve a lot of folding, and gluing, and even coloring. You can try for example a simple butterfly-making activity. All you need to have are child scissors, a permanent marker (for your use only since you wouldn’t want your walls turned into a canvass), and different color wrapping tissue, contact paper, and yarn. You’ll need to either cut out the shape of the butterfly on the contact paper or have the kids do it, depending on their ages. The kids can then start tearing up the colorful tissue and stick the small pieces onto the sticky side of the contact paper, creating a sort of collage. Use the yarn to hang the butterflies by the windows. It is important to display the artwork so the kids can enjoy the feeling of fulfillment and can be proud of their finished pieces.
Aside from developing motor skills, doing activities such as arts and crafts help little kids develop a lot of social skills too. They learn to be patient in waiting for their turn. For example, if you are to group the children to about three kids at one table and you provide each with one set of crayons and a pair of scissors to do some artwork, they will need to wait until the kid holding and using the red crayon finishes so he can pass the crayon.
Activities like these can also encourage children to share. Inevitably some of your day care center kids will fight over that pair of scissors or the extra piece of yarn. The good thing about fights though is that you can use it as a discussion point for the kids to understand the value of sharing things with each other. You can say, “See, not sharing the scissors made both of them cry. Next time, so that we do not get angry or sad, let’s all try to share the things we have inside the room with our friends.”
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