Young Toddlers Classroom

The young toddler classroom gives children the opportunity to practice new social skills, play more independently and try doing things for themselves.  Children can explore simple, interesting materials and are beginning to handle small group activities.  Teachers and caregivers encourage children to use their words and help them express their feelings in positive ways.

What Parents Should Know

In our room, we require the toddlers to be able to drink from a regular cup and we do not allow sippy cups or pacifiers. We also encourage self-feeding using utensils and work with our toddlers to do so. When coming into our classroom, we ask for a sheet, blanket, and a few changes of clothes as well as diapers and wipes. We do go outside daily weather-permitting and ask that parents send weather appropriate clothing in for the toddlers to wear. In the summer, we do water play once a week on Wednesdays and we ask parents to send in swim clothes, a towel, and an extra pair of shoes. 

Each child is given a cubby where we store their clothing as well as a mailbox on our door where we place daily sheets at the end of the day as well as important papers being sent home. We ask that parents check the mailboxes daily. Our sign in sheet is located right outside the door on the wall and we ask that parents sign their children in and out daily.

Within our classroom, we like to do art and crafts and will display the wonderful art we make on the wall outside our classroom.  I love doing messy art that focuses on fine motor skills and we vary art to be whole group, small group, and individual work depending on the project. When I make the lessons for each week, I like to focus on themes like special holidays as well as multicultural celebrations around the world. I like to visit our local library to find books that revolve around our theme and we make room to do activities in the block area, the housekeeping area, outside, the art area, the sand/water table, and the book area. An example is we turned our book area into a groundhog’s burrow to allow the toddlers to act like groundhogs and imagine what it feels like to live in a burrow.

In our classroom, I ask that our toddlers do not bring in outside food due to our food program. Our food program provides a healthy breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack and milk is offered at each meal, with the option of bringing in any special milk or required foods due to dietary restrictions and allergies. We do try to keep extra snacks from our food program for days when our toddlers are a little hungrier.

With the DHS guidelines, we change diapers every two hours and more often than that when needed. In our classroom, we welcome parents who want to do early potty training and use a sticker reward system. Our classroom contains a toilet, a child level sink, and a potty seat to be used for potty training. We also have a paper towel dispenser that is at child level to help them work on independence.

  In order to communicate concerns and things that need to be known, we have a communication binder that we use to communicate things between the teachers in my classroom when one of us is not present due to scheduling. In our classroom, we like to give the toddlers options and choices in what we choose to do during centers and discovery play time. When we do have to give our students a time out or a break from the other students due to behavior, we call it our “thinking time.” We do carry out assessments of the toddlers in our classroom every six months and offer parent conferences to discuss what we are noticing.

Goals Being Met and Worked On in 116

In order to move onto room 212, our next age group, the toddlers have to be 2 years old, be in pull-ups, and be working on potty training. We take our friends working on potty training to our toilet every 45-60 minutes and are very encouraging when it comes to helping them to learn to pee and poop on the potty. Since we know that potty training is a process, we encourage parents to send in multiple pairs of underwear when they choose to work on potty training using this method. When accidents do happen, we have zip-lock bags that are used to contain the soiled clothing.

In our classroom, we work a lot on fine and gross motor skills through multiple means.  We make time when we come into the gym for practicing climbing stairs, riding child bikes, and rowing using our boats as well as learning to throw and kick using balls. Our language skills are also important and we work with our toddlers on using words to communicate needs and wants. By the time they are ready to go upstairs, they should have about 50 words and the ability to use small sentences to communicate with others.

Staff