Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/guest-editorial-no-more-activities/5014182/
Our center opens at 7:30 am and the educational activities begin at 9:00.We don't just provide care; we have structured activities every day.
Our program planning revolves around a collection of activities.
We have activities in the morning when the children are fresh. In the afternoon we have free play.
We try to rotate the activities to keep up the children's interest.
The children are bored; we need some ideas for some new activities.
You can't really do activities with babies - they're too young.
In early child care and education it's easy to get tangled up with words, to allow the language that is used to complicate and sometimes even distort what we mean. In fact, care and education are good examples of this. The comments above are commonly heard in early childhood care and education circles.
The term activity is used frequently when early childhood professionals are talking about the importance of what they do. We know that language shapes our thinking and our work. It's worth considering whether or not that term, and the ways that it is used, are actually interfering with thinking about practice in the most constructive way.
Because it's such a common term, maybe we haven't stopped to think about ...