Early Childcare Assistant

Why Collaboration Skills Matter for Grads of Child Care Assistant Courses

May 05, 2017

ECA Instructor smiling in photo

Working as an early child care assistant often means working as part of a team with teachers, coworkers, and other child care professionals. Whether you’re working together to brainstorm fun new activities, help kids during craft time, or to maintain a safe learning environment, the team you work with will need to collaborate often throughout the workday. That’s why, to help you prepare for this team dynamic, top early child care programs emphasize collaboration skills.

Want to learn more about how developing top teamwork skills will be important in your future career? Here’s a look at a few examples of some of the responsibilities you may have that can best be completed when you work together.

Collaboration Skills Can Help You Design Fun and Educational Activities for Kids

In daycares, preschools, and other environments where you can work as a child care assistant, you’ll be responsible for helping to plan and run activities that will help kids develop emotionally, socially, intellectually, and physically. Having top collaboration and communication skills will allow you to coordinate your efforts with the teachers, child care professionals, or other colleagues in your workplace so that together you can deliver activities that the kids under your care will love.

There is no end to the kinds of activities you can plan. Anything from finger painting, to story time, to singing songs can be fun ways to help children learn. Learning to come up with ideas for interesting activities during your child care assistant course, and how to exchange and refine these ideas with your colleagues, will help you plan engaging activities that will help young kids learn and grow.

Childcare worker plays with the kids
Child care training can help you plan stimulating activities like crafts

Collaboration Skills Can Help Grads of Child Care Assistant Courses Maintain Safety

Safety is a top priority for childcare professionals with an early childcare assistant diploma, and understanding how to collaborate effectively will help you and your coworkers maintain a proper level of supervision at all times.

Supervising children takes plenty of cooperation. In fact, there are even legal limits and guidelines on the number of children that a single child care professional can oversee. In addition, because there is often a great deal of movement and activity going on in a child care environment, working together will help make sure that all children are supervised at all times.

Child care worker watches over the children
Collaboration helps make sure that children are always properly supervised

Collaboration Skills Can Help You Connect With Kids After Child Care Assistant Courses

It’s important to know that it’s not only with other adults that collaboration skills will come in handy. In Ontario, the Early Learning Framework exists as a guide for delivering effective and valuable education to children in preschools, kindergartens, primary schools, and other environments. One important element of the program is that it is based on ongoing collaboration between child care professionals and the children they are watching over.

In this way, collaboration typically means listening to what children say, being patient when explaining things to them, and ensuring you have a back-and-forth interaction with them. This can take a bit of practice to master. Still, through the externship component of your training, which will see you do practical work in a real child care environment, you can easily become comfortable with this aspect of your future career.

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