Project Reflection: ‘The Hours Spent Coloring Sugar Was Worth It’

With the rise of things to do and no rise in time to complete them, everyone is pressed for time and we can’t seem to get enough of it. For many parents, they experience this struggle every day. Tasks that are essential for daily living often take priority over parents spending quality time with their children. Tablets and cell phones become virtual babysitters and easy ways of educating children. Some of my fondest memories as a child aren’t in front of a screen but spending time with people I loved and cared about. Whether it was a family game night or running around in the neighborhood with my friends, I loved every second. Facilitating and providing parents with easy ways to become a more active member of their children’s’ lives creates memories that those children will one day cherish as well.

This project provided something new and exciting for the children participating. The counties we provided these activities for are low-income areas. The parents may not be able to afford to purchase their children many toys or educational resources. So for these children, this project was very exciting. They got to bring home something new and put together just for them! I can’t even begin to imagine their excitement when their teacher shared that this would be happening. I can only hope that they came home to tell their parents with the same amount of enthusiasm.

When I was first presented with this project, I was slightly overwhelmed. I knew that I could come up with doable activities to pitch, as my mother was a preschool teacher for quite a few years. I am familiar with this age range and types of activities that are appropriate developmentally. In addition to this previous education about preschool-aged children, the content in the class provided reasoning for fostering certain behaviors in children. While I knew that preschoolers can’t always write their name completely, I learned from this class that this is due to their fine motor skills not being fully developed. Understanding the reading and writing level of children this age was helpful when developing our project. Not only did we focus on the alphabet, but we also incorporated numbers and shapes. These are all skills that they should have started to form before attending kindergarten.

When beginning this project, I was worried that all the groups were going to come up with similar ideas and we would all have to choose something else. I was initially upset that my project was not the one chosen. I thought the reasoning behind not choosing my activity wasn’t logical, but I ended up agreeing that our final project was the best choice. The budget was better suited to the project we ended up producing, as shaving cream is expensive. I thought that making an everyday task such as bath time more exciting would be an easy way for parents to make a chore educational and interactive. Alas, it proved to be too difficult to tell if it was an appropriate activity. I had done the activity with the bathtub paint with children I have babysat in the past and they’ve enjoyed it. But, I can’t base the success just on those children. We had to take into account the demographic and what they would have access to. They may not have a bathtub or the child may not bathe daily. So we went with a simpler activity that could be used in many ways and was easy for everyone to complete.

Achieving the task of creating enough sugar trays for over eighty children was daunting. I was tasked with putting all the kits together and it was overwhelming. To complete my part of the physical project, I put on some music and became a human assembly line. Looking back, it was quite therapeutic and enjoyable. It was quite the accomplishment to step back and look at all the trays on my dining room table. I think that was when I realized the best thing about this project- the immense pride you feel by helping these kids grow. We provided them with a gift and an experience they, hopefully, will never forget. I hope that they remember that Longwood students were the ones who made these activities and consider attending the university when they are old enough.

This photo shows all the completed trays that were distributed to the children in the Head Start program in Prince Edward, Cumberland, and Nottoway.

In the future, I hope that this project continues. I may be taking the methods class in the future, so I am excited to possibly be involved in this project again. I think that this class got to complete the part of the project that was more enjoyable and creative. Those are two things that I don’t often get in my classes, so it was nice to have a meaningful project that I felt connected to. I originally thought that I would’ve wanted to choose my own group, but I think having groups assigned brought us all out of our comfort zones and created more diversity with ideas. I do wish that we had more interaction with the methods students so that we could answer or ask questions.

Overall, this project is not something I expected to do in college. I hope that it will be something that I can talk about participating in when I am applying to grad school. I hope to become a Speech-Language Pathologist and work with young children. I think that taking this class has better prepared me for interacting with children in a professional and educated way, as well as properly educating their parents in order for them to become their child’s biggest cheerleader.