Is it important to provide age appropriate craft activities or should a parent observe their child to determine what they can do?

Answer 1

Observance or Age AppropriatenessI believe it is important to observe each child and provide activities that they can do, but that challenge them to improve without challenging them to the point of discouragement. I believe children flourish when this is done and the activities provided are fun for them! They do not realize that part of the reason for the activity is to teach them, and their abilities improve greatly, especially if they are allowed to do the activities themselves with very little help from an adult.

About age appropriate activities: I worked with children in a daycare before I ever learned the concept of age appropriate activities. They were two-year-olds and everything I knew about their capabilities I learned from observance.I also knew they loved their craft activities, and part of my job was to teach them. In a matter of a few months, those children, for the most part, had improved their coloring, cutting, and pasting skills a great deal, some to the point where they were cutting on the lines and coloring within the lines (most of the time), and had fairly good conrol of the glue sticks we used. The children were not stressed because it was fun for them. If I perceived a child needed help, I would help them by putting my hand over their hand to help cut, color, paste, etc. This group flourished!

On the other hand, I later worked in an environment where age appropriate activities were stressed very heavily. This time, I worked with four-year-olds. The administration at this establishment controlled everything we did as teachers and nothing that was not considered to be age appropriate could be done with the children. I found this to be a hindrance, rather than something positive for the growth of the children. Though they were four-year-olds, the expectations for them based on age appropriateness was less than the expectations I had for the two-year-olds based on observance. As a result, these children, I felt, were held back from their true abilities.

I would like to add here that it is always best to set high, though not so high that the child can not succeed, expectations for all children based upon what they are capable of doing in the present. The concept of age appropriateness does not do that. It groups all children into the same mold and allows for no individual differences. I would say that the expectations set are way below what is actually the average ability of a given age, and it is well known that children will almost always live up or down to whatever expectations are set for them. In the case of age appropriateness, my experience has shown that observing children to determine their capabilities, and providing activites that are designed to take the child a little farther, is a much better way to decide what craft activities to provide.

well i think you should watch over your kids alot