Professional Resources

After reading through a few Profesional Journals done by The Canadian Childcare Federation, there were two that stood out to me for different reasons. I’ll start with the first article Found in Interaction Volume 25, Number 1, Spring 20011, Nurturing Creativity in Children. The title of this article is -To Evaluate or Not Evaluate Preschool Development, That is the question? Written by Suzanne Major, B.A., C.A., M.A. ECE PhD candidate in Anthropology of Health and Education. In this article, Suzanne poses the question of whether or not school readiness can really be determined by professionals who might not know the child as well as the parents or close friends, as these people know the children’s genetic and biological inheritance, as well as their social and family life, temperament, attitude, abilities and talents.  This quandary leads to the questions; does evaluating school readiness by professionals lend to participating in moulding the children to serve a system? Does it provide equal opportunity for self-fulfilment? Does evaluating support integration or assimilation?  These were some big questions that made me really think about conformity vs. individuality.  I’ve always been a person who seeks to embrace the differences in children, whether their specific behaviour or development is viewed as a positive attribute in their lives.  Now that I’ve had an opportunity to read this article I can trust my own intuition and know that I most certainly agree with Suzanne on this topic. With my own children, I have never thought the evaluation process in schools was a  beneficial or accurate representation of a child’s learning either. Going forward, I would never suggest evaluating another person’s child in my care as “normal Develpomentaly” as I do not believe that even exists.

The next Journal article I chose to talk about is also from the Canadian Childcare Federation found in Volume 32, Number 1, summer 2018, The Power and Importance of Play. The title of the article is -The Value of Play, Everything we do inside we can do outside! Only Better! written by Denise Skuce. In this article Denise talk about instead of bringing the outside in, why not bring the inside out? she gives many good reasons this should be and could be done and the benefits of outside play. As I read this article It was perfect for describing my current setup with my own daycare center as we are currently facing quite a few restrictions and regulations in this pandemic time, I’ve made the decision to run my Daycare outside my home aside from bathroom and baby nap spaces. This is a big change for me and I felt a bit uneasy about how the parents would respond to my new set up. The article talks about having all the same zones you would have in a traditional classroom and it is possible to achieve this same quality outside and it may even enhance some of the play. I find reading this article gave me a way more confident approach to my decision and I will use some of the ideas talked about in creating spaces for the children to be more similar to what my inside classroom we used to use had. I still have some reservations of what the colder, wetter weather will look like for the coming months but I am more confident about my setup and I’ll be doing some research into how to adapt in the changing weather as it approaches.