Continue Your Toddler’s Learning from Home
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Interactivity In the House
Activities throughout your living space is super important for toddler development. What is amazing about doing this, is that it can evolve over time. More things can be added. Once your toddler has started to pick things up quickly and their language develops, you can add things to your routine to explore their mental development further. Having different interactive tasks and games throughout your household can develop memory, motor skills, and critical thinking.
There are always helpful tasks like developing language by singing vocabulary words, words of the day, picking the days out in a calendar and things like that, but what other ways can you do to incorporate yourself and your toddler into a learning routine? We understand, as educators and parents ourselves, that a parent is kept busy anyways. As helpful it is for your toddler to learn every single day, we discover through research and putting into practice that a learning routine at home ignites parts of the brain and is always putting your toddler’s brain into practice throughout the day. Routine is also a great tool for parents and guardians to use to help achieve daily tasks as well, and is an ally to motivation.
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Hang photos
This a great way to help develop articulation in your toddler. Photos of different people, friends or family, in your family’s life and pointing them out for your toddler to identify is a great way to help develop memory. Refer to who they are in your lives too, perhaps write who they are on the bottom of the photo. Family trees, collection of different animals, are also popular options. You can really get creative with it and incorporate such things in your toddler’s room as part of the design.
Whether wall
What is the weather today? Ask your toddler this every morning while looking out the window and let them tell you. Interact, and place an image to determine today’s weather on the weather wall for the day. There are many creative ways to develop this. Some create weather garlands, which grow over time as each day passes. Some even like to hang little memories to each day, perhaps a photo of your toddler in the snow on a snowy day.
Help Organize & Label
The majority of children love to be helpful. Always channel this! Include them on organization days and help them separate things into their corresponding places. Have this active as well in their rooms. Label your toy bin and your clothes bin. When its time to clean up, challenge them to put their items in the right places and reward them for doing things correctly. It’s interesting watching this practice unfold as toddlers grow. You may find them feeling more like part of the family. If you’re busy, the whole family can be busy too and productive together. It’s rewarding to see your achievements right before your eyes, and this is a healthy habit you’d want to encourage.
Labels fit in very well as your toddlers grow. You can start with labels with images on them, but as they develop their language skills better, you can start labeling things by letter or word. It’s a beautiful critical thinking exercise, but remember to rotate which labels to start practicing with every once in a while so it’s always a new challenge.
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Knowing Your Neighborhood
Strolling around your neighborhood with your child is always a rewarding experience for both of you. The San Francisco Bay Area is full of amazing neighborhoods. There is so much to look at and so many questions to answer. A simple thing you can do as a parent or guardian while you’re out and about, is pointing at different buildings and saying what they are. Over time, you can start asking them what building is what. Teach them things like the laundromat, the grocery store, the police station, and let them explain to you what those things are what people do there. Feed into their curiosity by taking them inside if they are curious how things work. Challenge them with questions like, “Who works at the police station? A police officer or a fire fighter?”
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We know how things can get busy at home, especially if you work from home too. It’s important to engage in learning tasks and games with your children to develop a number of different cognitive abilities and skills. You can really make this fun for them and build upon their curious nature, so they start to build a passion for learning new things and aren’t frightened by it. Through some challenges now and then, your toddler can learn how to approach problems or difficult questions without fear, and be okay if it’s not right.
At Little Ducklings Clubhouse, we engage and question our toddlers all day about different things, and allow them to open up about what they know. We ask questions often so they can further develop their articulation and critical thinking skills. Kids love sharing what they know, what they’ve seen, and what they’re learning. To encourage that is to open up new avenues for your children to express themselves.
About Little Ducklings Clubhouse
Little Ducklings Clubhouse started out as an at home business focused on babies and toddlers. The daycare blew up quickly and founder Marlene Ramos went on to officially open her very own daycare facility. Little Ducklings Clubhouse is focused on providing a positive and supporting environment for these growing children bi incorporating fun activities and learning initiatives to prepare them for school. Our daily goal is to be nurturing and loving to all of our children.