With August just around the corner, many teachers are gearing up to restart preschool curriculums that they have let slide over the summer months. This is the perfect time to do a quick check to make sure that your curriculum is meeting the educational needs of your little ones, particularly two-year-olds. All too often two-year-olds are roped into participating in full preschool programs which they are not ready for. Two-year-olds are still mentally toddlers, in that they learn primarily through repetitive use of senses. When you try and force preschool style learning on two year old brains the results can be explosive, resulting in incidents of biting, tantrums, regression, and other challenging behaviors. So what should a curriculum for two-year-olds involve? Here are some quick learning experiences for two-year-olds that should be incorporated into any developmentally appropriate curriculum
- Daily reading experiences that include interaction with book through turn taking, finger plays, and re-enacting stories
- Comparing differences in size
- Frequent conversations about diversity that recognize differences in a positive way
- Simple sorting experiences such as sorting item by color or size
- Exposure to the natural world with an emphasis on caring for items in nature such as watering flowers or feeding birds
- Daily physical exercise that allows for jumping, throwing, crawling, tumbling, and yelling to allow children to explore their body’s strengths and challenges
- Simple science experiments that encourage questions
- For example placing ice in a sensory table with water, hammers, sponges to explore melting
- Large blocks of uninterrupted play with toys that promote early learning such as
- Dramatic play toys that allow children to recreate scenes that relate to real life
- Block sets that include different sizes and shapes of blocks
- Matching games
- Art materials that are open-ended or are not focused on an end result but rather focused on learning how to hold tools and be creative
- Quiet area that allows for reading and snuggling
