By Claire Nguyen, Toddler Guide
The Young Children’s Community is busy mastering their movements, the BIG movements! They practice daily climbing up and down the stairs and riding the trike, repeatedly. In addition, the toddlers are focusing more on the intricate and controlled movements they do in mixing the ingredients for bread, kneading the dough, and particularly in dish washing, table scrubbing, hand washing, and window washing.
The latter four works I mentioned share an important matter needed to do the activities, they all require WATER!! Water is used daily for many things. In our toddler classroom, we use water in our practical life works to care for the environment and to care for ourselves. Children are naturally attracted to water which is why these works are so interesting to them. They love these works so much that most children need to change in to dry clothes (sometimes twice) before the morning concludes.
To give you a glimpse of what the children do when they choose a practical life work, here are the steps:
Fill the pitcher with water (sometimes several times);
Hold the pitcher with two hands and walk carefully with the water-filled pitcher to the basin/bowl;
Pour the water into the basin/bowl; and
Do the work (hand washing, dishwashing, table scrubbing, etc.) – the child is engaged for long periods of time and is deeply concentrated.
After step 4, most children walk away from the work without cleaning up, which is normal for toddlers that are 1 or 2 years of age. Some toddlers do the clean up process and/or restore the work back on the shelf. As the year progresses, most of the children, if not all, will be able to accomplish the work from beginning to end.
As I’ve mentioned before in one of our weekly updates, the importance of repetition with no time restrictions is necessary in supporting toddlers to master their skills and achieve independence. I highly encourage parents to allow your children to work as freely as possible with water. Water is invaluable for their development so “sit back” and witness the full sense of joy and love of your children’s activity!