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There are so many fun centres you can develop for children. Many of them can actually be kept in a shoe-box for easy storage. These might include:

The Science Centre

Plastic animals, magnifying glasses, measuring cups, rocks, bug catchers, small toy greenhouses, shells, magnets, prisms, a compass, anything that involves the senses; sight, taste, smell, hearing, and touch, along with adventurous science items can be kept in a box and brought out on weekly basis to introduce the children to simple science. The library is chockfull of great science books to inspire budding scientists.

The Math Centre

An interesting math centre might contain: counting items such as beads, bread tags, buttons, small blocks, shells rocks plastic numbers, number games, play money, a cash register, flash cards, clocks, timers, bingo cards, etc. equipment for measuring such as rulers, a measuring tape, spoons, cups, and so on.

The Camping Centre

Kids love to camp, whether it be outside in the back yard, or in the family room on a rainy day. Backpacks, sleeping bags, tents or even larger blankets fashioned into tens make for some great outings. Include a few old pots and pans, some tine cups, a canteen, binoculars, an old cooler and grill and presto, you’ve created a campsite kids will love.

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Parents are naturally concerned about what their child does all day at daycare. Are they watching too much television? Are they getting enough exercise? Are they doing things that make them happy – that will help them in their overall development? A recent survey of 800 American children from across the country gives us a “kids-eye” view of the activities children favour most. Luckily for parents, television isn’t the only activity children enjoy.

The study confirms that active, highly social activities like snack time, playing with others, going on outings and making friends outfavour television. Better than 80 percent of the children said they like these activities “a lot”.

“This survey confirms the wisdom of what quality child care providers already do: have a wide-ranging curriculum that includes active, social and creatively challenging activities”, says Barbara Reisman, executive director of the Child Care Action Campaign.

“The good news is that children overwhelmingly like their child care activities because they can just be kids as they learn and grow,” says Kenneth A. Macke, chairman and chief executive officer of Dayton Hudson Corporation, which underwrote the survey on behalf of its Child Care Aware program, a public service education campaign on quality child care. “We want to share the information with working parents as they continue to monitor how their child care arrangements fit their children’s needs”, he said.

Here’s a look at what activities children in both center-based and family daycare enjoy doing.

ACTIVITY

Having a snack-85%
Playing with others -84%
Going to the playground -83%
Going for walks/outings- 82%
Making friends- 82%
Getting hugs from teachers- 68%
Storytelling- 64%
Playing “make believe/dress-up/house -64%
Playing musical instruments -64%
Playing in the sandbox- 61%
Writing -61%
Reading -61%
Watching television -79%
Taking care of animals- 78%
Playing board games/blocks -74%
Painting/drawing- 74%
Listening to music- 71%
Singing -49%
Playing alone- 34%
Napping- 31%

“I LIKE IT HERE, ESPECIALLY SHARING DAY WHEN EVERYONE BRINGS A TOY. I ALSO LIKE HUGGING MY TEACHER AND PLAYING OUTSIDE.”- boy aged 4.

Parents should consider sharing this information with their child care provider and taking the time to talk about the activities their child is involved in. A lack of artwork, disrupted toys, happy playing bodies may signal a lack of positive activity and may be detrimental to a child’s development. Take a moment to ask, “What did Johnny do today?”, or what wild and wonderful things your provider has planned for the week. This small investment in time is an investment in your child.

Resources

Child Care Aware is a cooperative public service program of Dayton Hudson Corporation, its foundation and its Target, Mervyn’s, Dayton’s, Hudson’s and Marshall Field’s stores and several prominent national child care advocacy organizations. 1-800-424-2246

Kids love to be busy. It’s how they learn. You can provide that learning experience inexpensively and simply. Here’s how:

Outdoors

Encourage your children to explore the great outdoors. Research shows that children who are connected to and curious about mother nature grow up with more confidence and quick thinking ability. Go for a walk and marvel at how the grass peeps through the side walk cracks, or count the number of bird feeders along your way. While your at it, count the number of different birds you see, the colours of them, their size etc.

Experiments

If you’re more adventuresome, fill the tub or a basin full of suds and let the children (while closely supervised of course) play to their hearts content finding shapes in the bubbles, watching how suds turn to water, trying to fill a container with suds, you can even make a simple bubble mix of dish detergent and water to blow bubbles with. When the suds are gone, the children will spend hours playing with different apparatus in the water.

Dance

Dancing is another freeby that provides a workout at the same time. Play some children’s music and let the children sing, dance their silliest dance, be goofy and jive to the rhythm. There is so much to be learned from listening to music, remembering words and singing them at the appropriate time. Heck you can even start a Congo line that goes out the front door, around the yard, and back in again.

Let your imagination provide you and your children with inexpensive fun. Look back to your childhood years and rekindle the magic and the awe of being a kid again.

All children need time during the day to play quietly by themselves. One such place for them to relax is the Quiet Centre. Here a child can work on a puzzle, string some beads, use a flannel board with shapes and pictures, stack a few toys, simply grab a book and nuzzle up between a few cozy pillows.

Such quiet activities exercise the fine motor skills and teach children concepts of sequences (a math readiness skill) by allowing children to string beads in a certain repeated order, recognize and use variations in shapes, letters, and numbers.

A great Quiet Centre would consist of:

wooden puzzles or regular large piece puzzles
beads of various shapes, sizes and colours
string nesting boxes or rings flannel board and accessories
card games
sorting objects such as buttons, shells, and rocks picture dominoes, etc.

Despite the mess, aggravation and mayhem, cooking with children can actually be a pleasurable and a learning experience. All it takes is a little preplanning and some simple recipes (you can find lots at your local library). The fact is, cooking helps children develop language, social, sensori-motor, and math skills. They also learn a great deal about science and nutrition. Here’s a quick breakdown of the skills children develop while cooking in the kitchen.

Nutrition

Learning about the Canada Food Guide
The value of a healthy meal or snack
The fun in trying new and unusual foods
Language Skills

Reading recipes

Building vocabulary skills
Following written and verbal instructions
Science

How food changes From One State To Another

The different physical properties of food
Food and temperature changes
Social Skills

Getting along

working cooperatively with others

taking turns

sharing
Respect for other’s work
Trying new experiences
A feeling of accomplishment
Sensori-Motor Development

Touch and food texture and size

Taste and smell
Sight and food appearance
Muscle coordination, chopping, stirring, kneading, mixing
Mathematics

Measuring

Numbers and fractions
Ordering

There’s an old saying that “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” Such is the beauty in creating new toys and playthings from materials that might be considered junk. For children, creating toys and art from re-useable items has many advantages. They are excersizing their creativity, developing problem solving skills, and building on their imaginations all they while they are learning the value of recycling and saving the environment. So much for so little.

Imagination Creates Beauty

All you have to do is supply children with some of recyclable materials and ask them, “What could you do with . . .?”

* Torn off ends of computer paper (great for paper flowers, collages)
* Used envelopes
* Large and small cardboard boxes (treasure boxes, houses, cars, tunnels)
* Paper towel or toilet paper rolls (binoculars, musical shakers)
* Buttons cut from old clothing (collages, art projects, counting, stringing)
* Unused checkbooks, deposit slips, ledgers (creative play)
* Meat trays and aluminum pie plates (paintings, musical instruments, sewing with dull needle and yarn)
* Used wrapping paper, bows (collages, artwork)
* Old clothes, hats, scarves, purses, briefcases, jewelry (dress-up play)
* Cereal boxes, food boxes (playing store, three dimensional collages)
* Egg cartons ( seed planting, crafts, sorting objects by size)
* Carrot tops (growing in a tray of water).

© Catherine M. Pruissen

Catherine M. Pruissen is the CEO of About Child Care Consumer Services and developer of child care online. She has published numerous child care related literature, including Start and Run a Profitable Home Day Care, The Daycare Alternative, How to Find Good Child Care, Caregiver Aids: Business Forms for Caregivers and Parents, Income Tax & Record Keeping for Child Care Providers, and a host of workshops and workbooks. She was the editor and publisher of the bi-monthly newsletter, Parent Care, Your Child Care News-line. Catherine was also the coordinator and workshop facilitator for The Child Care Information Centre in Calgary, Alberta, and ran a successful dayhome for eight years.

The playground, the backyard, even the living room floor are arenas where careless giggles, screams of delight and apparent social upheaval occur on a daily basis as children exercise their bodies (and their lungs). Fitness for a child is critical during developmental years and can greatly affect their adult lives.

Should we try to stop this civil unrest? Certainly not, for children need to exercise their growing muscles and bones. In fact, they should be encouraged to run, skip, climb, ride a tricycle and swing that swing. These “fun” activities strengthen their large muscles and develop their coordination.

Active play is an integral part of every child care program. Even when outdoor space is limited there are ways to keep children physically fit. Dancing, for instance, includes an array of movements which utilize leg and arm muscles, and crawling through cardboard box tunnels works out back and neck muscles. And games such as London Bridge Is Falling Down can be easily played in the kitchen or living room with little bother of moving furniture.

Outdoor Play

There is no greater setting for active play than the great outdoors, especially when there is an abundance of age appropriate toys and equipment. Items such as:

balls, wagons
skipping ropes
pedal toys
swings, and
low climbing apparatus are the mainstay of any outdoor toy repertoire. Just a few basic items can whet a child’s appetite for fitness fun.
Indoor pay

Bad weather days are no excuse for not exercising. Given the opportunity children will find plenty of things to do with large cardboard boxes, old sheets, and jump ropes. And who doesn’t love to “Bend and stretch, reach for the sky”?

Fitness Programs

Fitness programs can actually be as much fun for an adult as for a child. Set to music, simple bending and stretching routines can be done by children of different ages and stages. Letting the children take turns at calling out the exercises helps to get them involved. Under no circumstances however, should a child be forced to participate in such activities. The purpose of these programs is to build a foundation for a lifetime of physical activity.

Other Fitness Fun Activities

The list of fun things to do for the sake of physical fitness is as endless as a parent’s or caregiver’s imagination.

Indoor and outdoor obstacle courses
balloon or beach ball volleyball
bean bag toss
angels in the snow
nature hikes in both summer and winter

These activities that will encourage children to have some fitness fun while they strengthen their muscles, refine their balance and coordination and build confidence in themselves and their abilities.
Take a moment to get involved in your child’s care. Ask your provider about her active play program.

The construction center will require more floor space as children are involved in active play using blocks, farm sets, cars and trucks, construction materials, and roadway equipment. Blocks are one of the best toys for the construction centre as children can build anything from skyscrapers to roadways, or from fences to corral the horses, to actual towns.

What the children learn while playing in the construction centre is more than you might imagine. For example:

It takes coordination to build a skyscraper.
It takes counting and visual cognition to line up a bunch of houses in a town.
A roadway takes precision in lining up the blocks perfectly, as does building a fence.
Through it all it builds a child’s imagination, creativity and thought process.

Construction Center Materials

In addition to blocks, when integrated with other types of construction materials like:

sandpaper
foam pieces
play cars
toy people
string
longer pieces of lumber, etc. add to the excitement and creative process, and
larger boxes make great club houses, a post office, or a tunnel.

The possibilities are endless. A great construction centre comes complete with:

an assortment of blocks (wooden, cardboard, foam, even covered-up milk cartons) Dublo, etc.
foam or rubber scraps
cardboard boxes
lumber scraps
farm and zoo animals
airplanes, cars, trucks, and
excavation equipment of allsorts.
For the older children you might want to include:

nuts and bolds
kid size tools
paint odds and ends like steering wheels
small wheels
road signs, and
Tinker Toys, Lego or other building toys.

Music is an integral part of life for most people on the planet. In North America, wherever we go there’s music. Television, radio, advertising piped in music in the mall, music when we’re holding for someone to come to the phone – it’s everywhere.

Music is a part of life for young children as well. Most little ones enjoy music and respond to it instinctively in a positive way. Even infants, when they hear music will bob up and down in their parents’ arms. Children love to make sounds and music with almost anything. They turn a toilet paper roll into the horn and chopsticks become drum sticks.

Making Music Part of Childcare

There are a good many ways to make music part of the daily routines in a childcare center. Tasks associated with young children can be times when songs are used to reinforce ideas. Lullabies have long been used to help babies sleep and a gentle song can soothe a distressed child. There are special songs that serve as ritual songs – songs of greeting, songs for cleanup, and songs for saying goodbye.

Songs and music can be built into the daily routine in a daycare without any trouble at all, and they open the door for communication because they involve several children at once. Singing songs and saying rhymes are useful tools in building conversation in children as well. For very young children, singing about a task is important as it is for children from non-English speaking backgrounds because it provides a model of language that is appropriate for what they are doing at that moment.

Older children benefit from the experience of using music as a transition tool. When they move from one play center to another or from one experience to another, they have the chance to coordinate the music with movement. Learning is enhanced as children learn about the world they live in through play – exploring the actions and sounds through the instruments they use. Pots and pans, the table or floor are all instruments for learning.

Music For Education

The repetition of a song helps a child to build memory, listening and vocabulary skills.
Group singing enhances social skills while dance improves coordination and helps develop the large muscles.

Learning new and creative dance steps or letting the children perform their own dance encourages creative thinking and independence.

Creating different sounds by putting more or fewer beans in a can, or small or larger elastics around an open cardboard box and listening to the different sounds teach children to explore cause and effect (science and logical thinking).

More than anything else, music is portable. You can sing along the walk to the park, in the car, while washing up for meals, or standing in line at the zoo.

Music Centre Materials

The equipment needed for a music centre can be as simple as homemade items such as (let the children create their own):

cymbals made from pot lids or pie tins

drums made from coffee cans with plastic lids, ice cream buckets, plastic or metal containers

drum sticks such as wooden spoons, doweling of different sizes, paint stirs, broom handles, etc.

sand blocks created out from blocks of wood and sand paper

tambourines fashioned out of pie tins with bottle caps or paper plates with bells attached

maracas made from yogurt containers filled with gravel, beans, rice, or
sand or rhythm sticks using broom handles, different size doweling or wooden spoons.

Instruments such as guitars, flutes, recorders, etc. tape recorders, children’s music tapes and song books can be purchased second hand to help cut down the costs, but should be part of the music centre