For this month, I will discuss how to involve your young children in Community Projects. The child care that I own and operate participates in a community project each month. I always make sure to choose something that the kids themselves (as young as 2 years old) can actually help participate in. I don’t just want the parents to give us money and then we turn it over to the organization we choose for that month, I want the families and their children to be hands on with the project.
For the month of September I will post blogs about each project that we have done so far & then I will in the future add blogs posts about the new ones we do.
“The highest of distinctions is service to others.” King George IV (1762-1830); King Of Great Britain, Ireland And Hanover
“How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?” -Unknown
“How can we expect our children to know and experience the joy of giving unless we teach them that the greater pleasure in life lies in the art of giving rather than receiving.” James Cash Penney (1875-1971); Founder of J.C. Penney Corporation
ADOPT – A – DUCK
This was one of our more recent community projects.
We participated in the Eastern Iowa Duck Races.
Each family had the opportunity to purchase ducks under the child care’s name. As the ducks were purchased we graphed them (you had 4 choices of which community team you wanted the ducks to be purchased for)
The ducks were fairly inexpensive ($5.00 a piece) so it wasn’t a huge commitment on the parents end and the children got a math lesson out of it, got to learn about what each team in the race did and had the opportunity to attend the duck race on race day (and potentially earn prizes).
The skills we worked on with this project:
-Counting (total ducks and amount of ducks in each column)
-One to One Correspondence
-Addition (as ducks were added, we added the amount already in the column with the amount we were adding)
-Colors (I try to include all age groups in the projects, so by making each teams ducks, I could help the littlest ones work on color identification)