We have had so much fun with fall and farm activities in the toddler room this month. Lots of sensory experiences have been planned to help explore and learn. An apple peeler provided us with fine motor practice, yummy snack, and cute photo opportunity. Watercolor, glue, and other art mediums were provided to create fall foxes, scarecrows, and leaves. Old McDonald has been a favorite classic to sing and play with instruments. We discussed things that we were thankful for and talked about foods that families eat on Thanksgiving Day. We are so thankful for our toddlers and their families!
Foundational math skills are an important part of developing the minds of young learners. Matching is one of the most basic math concepts we teach in the toddler room, but a very important one! Matching, which usually involves one-to-one correspondence, can help a child to better understand that different items can still share characteristics, such as size, color, or shape.
In our leaf sorting activity, our little learners chose a leaf, told me the color, and matched it to the tree of the same color.
Spider Ring Stacking
5 Little Pumpkins Craft
Monster Donuts!
The fun month of October has been filled with lots of orange, pumpkins, and Halloween celebrations.
The toddlers enjoyed several sensory experiences.
We also practiced several fine motor activities.
Five Little Pumpkins has been a favorite song this month. We sang it several times using different props and media.
We finished October out with fun Halloween games, activities, and snacks.
Baking in the toddler classroom is a fun way to learn through our senses. We made simple pumpkin muffins with mini chocolate chips. The toddlers used their eyes and noses to experience the orange pumpkin that we added to our batter. We put together all the ingredients to a big plastic bag and took turns “mixing”. Each child took a turn scooping a teaspoon of mini chocolate chips. The result: yummy pumpkin muffins for snack!
We have been learning about the square for our shape this month. We try to incorporate the shape into our centers, with a craft, and with hands-on activities. This helps reiterate the shape in different capacities. For example, our little learners can learn through hands on manipulation of the shape, as well as learning to sight the shape by finding different items throughout our classroom that are square.
Going along with our monster theme, we invited the toddlers to create monsters by having monster bodies behind contact paper, and then sitting out monster eyes, mouths, horns, arms, etcetera for them to create their own monster. It is an activity to help foster their creativity and imaginations in open-ended ways. It is also good fine motor practice, with the toddlers having to peel the pieces back off of the contact paper. Check out some of our students creating below:
Head to the dino washing station to scrub some dinosaur scales! We had fun in our discovery bins washing the dinosaurs. We use our discovery bins to provide different sensory experiences for our little learners to explore.
We also sorted dinosaurs by color, matching the color of the dinosaur to the bowl.
An invitation to play is arranging the environment so that it “invites” young children to come to an area in the classroom to explore, investigate, question, examine, participate, touch, feel, and manipulate through as much independent play as the materials can possibly allow. It can offer children the opportunity to direct their own play, follow their interests, learn more about the world around them, express themselves creatively and use their imagination to extend upon the initial invitation.
For our dinosaur unit this month we have combined invitations to play, invitations to create, whole group manipulatives, crafts, books, songs, and much more to engage our young learners.
Creative Tots has specialized in the private education of both toddlers and preschool age children for over 15 years. We began in the heart of Madeira and now also have a new Mason location. We are specifically designed to focus on early childhood development for children ages 18 months to 5 years.
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