Our PreSchool Blog

The studio toddler class has taken the month of September to explore our environment, learn routines, and adjust to being away from parents for the first time but it is also a time of socialization and making new friends.  Socializing with other children  is an excellent way to foster a toddler’s social and emotional development.  We set up our environment for purposeful play and social experiences.  Children begin to mimic during parallel play and then start to communicate with peers. They learn vocabulary and appropriate ways to express themselves through pretend play, free choice centers, and games.  As teachers, we facilitate the environment and activities and then gently guide the toddlers to use words, solve problems, take turns, and have fun through play.  The result is a classroom full of new friends!

We have spent the first few weeks getting to know each other.  At around 18 months, there are changes in cognitive skills that help real friendships blossom.  Toddlers become more consciously aware of themselves and others.  Even when toddlers are playing side by side, without much interaction, they are still picking up play behaviors from one another.  These shared experiences help toddlers gain the play vocabulary they will need when they begin to play with friends.  We try to foster an environment that invites interaction, observation, as well as parallel play.  As teachers, we play alongside the children giving them simple words and vocabulary to help facilitate communication.  It has been so fun fun to watch the toddlers begin to bond.  We look forward to a year full of friendships.

Toddlers love to play – and at Tots we do tons of fun learning activities that teach important developmental skills every day.  This month we are focused on developing the concept top, middle and bottom. Take a look at our decorated tree as the toddler’s worked on placing the star at the top, the ornaments in the middle, and the presents at the bottom.

Here’s a website of month-by-month tips that will help you maneuver the ins and outs of toddler growth and development.

http://www.whattoexpect.com/growth-and-child-development-tips.aspx#

Our Language and Vocabulary for the month is working with the words on and off.  In this spider themed activity the children placed spiders on the spider web and took them off.

We worked on the concept in and out using our oatmeal discovery tub.

Fun with the color yellow!

This week we are working with the letter B!

You can’t have a fish theme without going fishing! The Early 3’s used fishing poles with suction cups to pick up card board fish! Who got the catch of the day?

We have been talking about igloos, icerbergs, cold weather, and the kinds of clothes you wear in the cold here in the early 3’s. Today we put on our winter gear to build an igloo out of blocks! The children used their fine motor muscles to put on their gear and their gross motor to build the igloos.

The Early 3’s are exploring winter weather this month. We took a closer look at our arctic friends and their habitat. We talked about what ice feels like, and whether it felt cold/hot, slippery, hard, etc. The early 3’s had an Arctic blast playing with these icebergs!