Blog: Toddlers

Happy Friday! We are almost through another week. We hope these invitations bring some joy and wonder into your home today. Have a great weekend!

Building Invitation: Block building

This morning you might consider pulling out whatever blocks you have and inviting your toddler to build. You can also invite them to build with empty cardboard or paperboard boxes. The invitation can be varied by where you put the blocks (a different room, on a table instead of the floor, or even onto a porch). You can also add small people or animal figures. Can you toddler build something as tall as their waist? Can they build a home for a person or animal? What else might they create?

Blocks provide an opportunity for children to continue building and refining connecting and disconnecting schema, they are a medium for increasing imagination as well. Building towers and houses requires persistence, especially on novel surfaces.

 

Art Invitation: Paint and cardboard

This invitation can be offered with any type of child-safe paint including homemade liquid watercolors from dry washable markers (see this Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh video for a how-to). An empty cardboard box becomes a 3-D canvas in this invitation. Your toddler may paint the outside, or the inside of the box. 

The sides present new challenges for applying paint and an opportunity to explore the effect of gravity on liquid paint. Holding the brush is exercise for fine motor muscles. Open-ended painting is an opportunity for creative expression.

 

Large Motor Invitation: Dance party!

You can offer your child’s favorite music, or try some new movement songs. Koo Koo Kanga Roo has many exciting songs, or you can check out local artist Baron Von Rumblebuss. 

 

Dance is a wonderful way to build balance, coordination and other motor skills. Children also love to express themselves through movement.

It’s Thursday! It looks like the weather will be cool and wet this morning, a great day for boots and raincoats. Here are a few invitations we hope will inspire your toddler today.

Small Motor/Cognitive Invitation: Muffin tin sorting

Young children are natural explorers, from a young age they are drawn to sorting and classifying as they work to make sense of the world. Toddlers in particular like to sort things. A muffin tin and a collection of small (but too big to be choking hazards) objects becomes an open-ended puzzle. You can offer clean bottle tops, small blocks, tiny animals, etc.

This invitation was inspired by one of our favorite books, Loose Parts 2: Inspiring Play with Infants and Toddlers by Lisa Daly and Miriam Beloglovsky.

 

Art Invitation: Play dough and sticks

Play dough and clay are wonderful materials for young children. They can be used as tools for exploration and creative expression. Today we suggest having your child collect some sticks, or pulling out some craft sticks (coffee stir sticks or straws also work) and set them out with a ball of play dough, or clay if you have it. Your child might poke all the sticks into the dough like a porcupine, use them to create holes and tunnels, or something else entirely! 

 

Outdoor/Sensory Invitation: Mashing mud

With the wet weather expected today, there may be mud available near you. You can put some in a bucket or bowl and invite your child to explore the mud with a potato masher or similar tool. You can also use child-safe potting soil and have your child mix it with water in a tub.

This sensory invitation encourages children to explore the many properties of and possibilities in soil mixed with water. They can test theories, investigate texture, and build motor skills.

It’s Wednesday, the middle of another week. The weather looks like it will be lovely in Durham today, we hope you and your toddler have a chance to go outside, or at least open a window. Here are three invitations that might inspire your toddler today.

Fine Motor/Engineering Invitation: Paper towel tubes and pom poms

Using blue tape or masking tape, attach paper towel or other cardboard tubes to a door or wall. You can put some straight up and down and others at an angle, or make a maze if you are feeling ambitious. Children can put pom poms or small balls through the tubes.

This invitation is a wonderful way for children to investigate concepts in physics, explore trial and error, and build motor skills.

Art Invitation: Markers and paper

A simple invitation like mark-making on paper with washable markers provides freedom for creative expression and experimentation. You can make the invitation fresh by changing the size, color or texture of the paper, or limiting the colors of markers to warm, cool, or primaries.

Outdoor/Sensory Invitation: Water play

It will probably be a little cool today for a full-body water play experience, but the weather is perfect for a dishpan or bowl with a couple of inches of warm water, some scoops or spoons, and a bottle. You can add a small amount of baby shampoo to the water if your child likes to explore making foam and bubbles.

Sensory invitations like this are a way for toddlers to investigate many concepts, build small motor skills, and find joy in exploration.