Activities & Experiences for Toddlers

Hi Gcj,

I have been working in the toddler room as a room leader for the past 14 months. With activities and experiences I think it's important to always have experiences to develop fine motor development and tactile and sensory experiences.

At this stage, toddlers are learning all about themselves and also as an educator we need to assist them with their development. I also have found when working with toddlers it's not all about the activities but also about implementing routines in the room, enabling them with language development, assisting with self help skills etc.

Typically on the curriculum plan each week I add a construction activity, a sensory experiences, drawing as well as add resources throughout the environment that focus on the children's interest. I have my room divided into interest areas which makes it a lot easier to work out the experiences I set up in the room. The areas I have are: block area, puzzles, book corner, drawing table and home corner. Unfortunately I don't have much room to work with so I do the best that I can with what I got. Using each of these areas I break down the experiences and incorporate it into each of these. For e.g. This week in drawing area I added a collage experience that the children could engage in, in block area I added big Lego pieces for construction, book corner I added books on the community such as doctors, dentist, vets etc, puzzles I added more complex puzzles and in home corner I set up an office with mobile phones, keyboards, cameras etc.. In the middle of the room I also have 3 tables for small group activities. 1 table is used as the drawing table and the second and third I usually add follow up activities from the previous week. For e.g. As part of my intentional teaching last week we learnt about fruits and vegetables so as part of an activity for this week I set up a matching game using fruit and vegetable flash cards and toy fruits and vegetables that needed to be matched.

Its not so much about the experiences and activities you can find to implement in the room. It's more about finding out children's interest within the room (talk to parents about what they did on the weekend, listen to the children's conversations) as well as further developing children's development, and come up with experiences from this information.

Cheers ,
L.A

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As I am Montessori trained I implemented a lot of Montessori type activities when I was the Toddler Room GL @ a centre.
I found they enjoyed being challenged and were very interested in things that were manipulative or practical.
Some things I put on the shelves were so simple yet kept them busy for ages, sometimes even 1/2hr or so which is very long for a tod!

- Various size (large - small) padlocks and keys
- Various size (large - small) nuts and bolts
- Screwdriver and screws
http://www.blueberryforest.com/pretend_play/wooden-tool-box-toy.htm

Pouring water/rice/lentils from jug into glasses/cups

Scissors and cutting straight lines/wavy lines

Walking on a line heel to toe holding things like a bell etc (good for balance)

Lots of puzzles, blocks of various sizes and books were all readily available to them at all times.

I found I had to change the environment nearly every week to keep their interest however once exposed to a range of things they then started asking for things that they wanted to do, so then it was easy to plan around their interests

I just saw a great activity that I wanted to share...

What you need:

Sieve (one per child, the big plastic ones that you filter water from pasta etc).
Pipe cleaners

What to do:

1. Turn sieve upside down so that the holes in the bottom are facing up.
2. Encourage child to thread pipe cleaners through the holes.

Great activity to encourage fine motor skills etc.

,
L.A

Hi there,
Something i just did last week spontaneously-> the boys in my 2-3 group like cars and they like to be extremely noisy, so i thought i'll invite them to drive some of the cars on a table covered in shaving cream! the girls joined in on this, was pretty good actually they looked at the trail they made with the cars on the cream, which got them excited!

Hope that helped

Miss T