First-year early childhood education (ECE) students left their classroom for the child care center to get their first real-world experience working with children.
For their art implementation assignment, students paired up to observe the children at the playground to determine their interests. The children that were observed attend daycare at The Ark, the Vermilion campus childcare facility, and showed a marked interest in playing in the sand. And thus, the students were inspired.
Maddie Buhler and partner Jessie Nielsen provided materials for children to explore the artistic possibilities of sand in their project, mixing it with a little bit of glue and glitter.
"We wanted to show the children that they could do more with sand than just scoop and shovel it," says Nielsen. "You can make art with it."
Nielsen came to Lakeland from Timmins, Ont., drawn by the college's rodeo program. She brought her horse with her, determined to merge her two passions - barrel racing and working with children. Coming from a family of eight siblings, she's noticed a huge demand for childcare professionals in her hometown and hopes to bring what she learns at Lakeland back with her to fill that gap.
Together, she and Buhler brought glue, coloured sand and glitter for the children to create with, as well as paintbrushes and sponges. They guided the children through the project, helping them learn the words for the different elements on the table, working on their fine motor skills as they popped open glitter caps and painted with glue.
The most important part, Buhler explained, was ensuring the project remained open-ended.
"I was scared going into it because it's the first time working with children for me in a very long time, but it was amazing," she says. "Keeping it open-ended is really important because it leaves room for the children's creativity and allows them space to use their fine motor skills. We don't show them what the final thing should look like, the final product just comes from their imagination."
Buhler explains that opportunities like this help her conceptualize what they learn in the classroom. They talk about the areas of child development - social, physical, language, intellectual, creative, emotional and spiritual or SPLICES for short -- but a project like this allows her to see those characteristics developing in real time.
"It's really cool to see SPLICESs developing in kids, rather than just reading about them in a textbook," Buhler says. She came to the ECE program after completing Lakeland's American Sign Language and Deaf Culture Studies certificate program at the Alberta School for the Deaf. "Implementing those ideas into a classroom helps me learn. It's better to have that hands-on experience than to just sit in a classroom and read."
