Toddler Room

General: It is exciting watching toddlers discover new things and develop new skills. Realizing that we often have children more hours of the day than the parents, we work hard with your children to age-appropriately develop their social and manipulative skills needed to grow your child. Offering a safe, loving environment that allows your child to discover the world is paramount. Safety is also an important aspect as we strive to have age appropriate toys and manipulatives for your child. We use no-choke testing tubes to test the size of our toys, and are alert for sharp or jagged points or surfaces. Toddlers are fed in the room and parents will supply bottles, milk, formula, and baby food until the child can eat from our menu. We provide a slightly altered menu for infants and toddlers where some items may be substituted for infant and toddler friendly diets. Parents will also need to supply at least one change of clothes, diapers, ointments, and sunscreen when needed for outside time.

Our teachers make the difference. We take great pride in our teachers as they are engaging, patient, loving, and they want to be here. One can easily tell if a caregiver is engaged and happy by the way they interact with the children. Parents are encouraged to observe the classrooms at any time. We provide a detailed take home sheet every day for your child. This sheet communicates to the parents things like; when and how well they ate their meals or took bottles, diaper changing times, nap times, what they learned today, how they are doing on supplies,

Toddlers: Developmental milestones continue in our toddler room as children continue to build upon the skill development started in the mobile infant room. Now that the children are walking, they need more space to explore. We decided to allocate more space than is required by licensing rules and guidelines for our toddlers. A developmental milestone can be something as small as the first smile, waving bye-bye, or taking the first step. Toddlers will continue to develop gross motor skills (walking, running, jumping, climbing), sensory skills (seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling), fine motor skills (manipulating simple puzzles, drawing, feeding themselves), social skills (taking turns, sharing, playing with others), and language skills (first saying single words, then forming sentences). The use of some basic sign language is taught and encouraged as an additional means of communication until their vocabulary is developed enough to verbally communicate their wants and needs. We also introduce the toddlers to hand washing as it is an important habit to acquire as soon as reasonably possible.