A more personal take on the issue of older children in a daycare of mostly younger children.
The older children in my school were blessed to have the benefit of the after school program and the summer school age programming that I helped to create. However, the program typically ends at 5:00 and there are usually one or two school-agers still in the center that then join the yoiunger children in the daycare. This is usually not met with enthusiasm.
Them older children are greatly loved by the littler children who immediately beset their older brothers and sisters and those that they are not related to in an effort to get them to play with them and acknowledge what they have done that day.
At first, the older students perspective troubled me greatly and I sought every way that the older students could be occupied for the last half an hour to an hour of their daycare day. I was concerned because it seemed that once they rejoined the younger students, they either wanted to play on the computers, read a book, or form a group composed of only older students.
Eventually I learned to keep this in perspective. I thought about what these children would be doing if they were at home. Would they be playing with siblings that were younger than them by three or four years? Not for much of the time. Would they be playing with toys appropriate for these younger children? I thought not. This rule of thumb had one noteable exception. For those students who seemed to always play on the computer when they rejoined the daycare,I found that the games that they wanted to play with were games that they remembered from when they were preschoolers as well as a few new games that were for preschools and would NEVER have played in the elementary school setting.
I eventually saw this to be true with some of the table toys that were available during these final hours. One of the most popular choices eventually came to be simple playdough. I think that these fourth and fifth graders needed the opportunity to safely play with toys that were nosdtalgic for their earlier years at the center in a place where they would not be looked at as silly or immature by the larger groups of children their own age.
For the other side of the coin, view my recent article on this topic, here.
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