Throw Out the Crafts! New Ways to Show the Value of Your Toddler Program

Many toddler teachers feel pressure to do craft projects with their children. I’m not talking about “exploring with crayons” or “experimenting with paint”. I’m talking about crafts that are supposed to look like something in particular like a jack-o-lantern or a classic holiday turkey. Projects where the teacher is doing most of the work, often fighting the toddler for correct placement of the various parts or features.

The toddler teachers I’ve talked are not big fans of these projects, but feel obligated to do them to meet the expectations of parents or program administrators. Parents want to know that their toddler is doing something constructive during their time in child care and somehow these developmentally inappropriate activities have become a common way of fulfilling this need.

Here are some suggestions of other ways to communicate the value of your program to parents:

• Send home monthly newsletters talking about current or upcoming classroom activities. If you can include photos of children at work, even better!
• Send home suggested activities for parents and children to do together. They can be as simple as “play some music and dance with your child”. Be sure to include the benefits of the activity, i.e. “improves coordination and muscle movement, encourages social skills”. Use plain language and avoid developmental jargon. This will help parents to see the value of the experiential activities you do with toddlers.
• Take pictures of children doing activities and post them near your entrance with captions to help parents understand what they are seeing.
• Have regularly scheduled parent conferences. You can make them short and sweet. Just take a moment to give parents some details about how you have seen their child grow and develop in your care.

If the motivation for these projects is to create a lasting keepsake, consider simple sensory experiences like hand or foot prints, a voice recording and slide show on CD, or a simple photo of a child engrossed in an activity accompanied by a poem.

Trying to get a toddler to create a specific finished product is a lot of work for teachers, frustrating for toddlers who want to do their own thing, and is likely to end up in a parent’s recycle bin after a brief moment of admiration for the child’s sake. Definitely not worth the effort!