My job as a preschool aide has taught me a lot of things but one of the lessons I was reminded of recently was to lead the child lead. That everything I do with the children in group activities should be led and initiated by the children, and that I am merely their to follow along and assist.
I had four 3 year old boys with me and I asked them to draw a picture of themselves. I had envisioned adorable pictures with figures shaped like a ball/potato with some odd lines sticking out that were meant to be body parts. What I got instead from them was colorful scribble with no discernible pattern . I had them draw 3 seperate drawings and they all turned out to be colorful scribble. I was a bit worried I had someone explained the project in a wrong way to the boys but they were all very clear on the fact that the scribble were self-portraits. So I gave up and inquired about the drawing abilities of a 3 year old. Turns out they are still prone to scrabbling at this age :)
And I had the children point out their body parts among the scribble and they all did it with gusto. As it turns out they had a pretty arty perspective of their own selves but it was adorable. And the children were very proud of their projects which is what is most important.
I was able to get over my own pride that their projects must be perfect and should be in a certain way and enjoy them for what they were:the truly adorable scribbles of enthusiastic 3 year olds.
Friday, October 12, 2012
Monday, October 1, 2012
Multiethnic dolls
One of the things we are commited to doing at my preschool is exposing the children to various foreign cultures and languages and promoting a multicultar worldview. We do this pretty well, it´s a part of our daily routine and play and the children react well to it.
One of the things we are very careful about is exposing the children to the fact that there exist all sorts of skin colours out there. Although the biggest part of the group of children and workers are Scandinavian/European Caucasians, as a multi-ethnic preschool we got all sorts of races within our community. And one of the ways we expose the children to the normalcy of people having a different skin color/look is through our selection of toys, precisely our dolls.
Right now we have a collection of 7 dolls for the children to play with and they all represent various racial and ethnical identities. We have 2 African dolls (black skin), 1 Hispanic, 2 Asian and 2 Caucasian. It may not sound like a lot but hopefully, through this as well having a multiethnic group of children we can teach our children that skin colors vary but that it´s normal. If they grow up used to others looking completely differently than themselves, we are hopefully bringing up the next of culturally aware and open-minded children.
One of the things we are very careful about is exposing the children to the fact that there exist all sorts of skin colours out there. Although the biggest part of the group of children and workers are Scandinavian/European Caucasians, as a multi-ethnic preschool we got all sorts of races within our community. And one of the ways we expose the children to the normalcy of people having a different skin color/look is through our selection of toys, precisely our dolls.
Right now we have a collection of 7 dolls for the children to play with and they all represent various racial and ethnical identities. We have 2 African dolls (black skin), 1 Hispanic, 2 Asian and 2 Caucasian. It may not sound like a lot but hopefully, through this as well having a multiethnic group of children we can teach our children that skin colors vary but that it´s normal. If they grow up used to others looking completely differently than themselves, we are hopefully bringing up the next of culturally aware and open-minded children.
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