Group Activities
These days group activity is considered to be an essential component of student-centred learning and is a major component of active classrooms. In Educare it is important not just for children to be working together in groups, but to be learning how to grow as effective team members, how to use their own unique strengths and qualities for the good of the team, and to understand the notion of ‘strength in unity’. Group activity also needs to be a vehicle for teaching children to accept and respect all people irrespective of their similarities and differences.
The activities include role-play, mime, drama, creative writing, art, attitude checklist, games and – a particularly powerful way to learn through working as a group - service activities. The basic idea behind these activities is to reinforce, to allow for interplay and interaction so that learning proceeds from all directions. Follow-up and Life Application activities (such as service to those who are less fortunate) are designed to help the children incorporate the values into their lives, as part of their developing personalities.
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They are intended to give children the opportunity to practise the values so that the values cease to be abstractions. It is part of the lesson that is intended to take the values into the children’s home. It is one means of establishing contact with the parents, who, together with the teacher, must mediate between the children and the environment.