Toddler

Group time discussion and involvement

Our children have been showing interest through pretend play making pizza's in our home corner kitchen with our felt food and using our pretend pizza oven to bake them. 

We have also been asked to create a pasting activity where our children were creating their own pizza using tomato, lettuce, ham and cheese cut outs. 

During our group times we have introduced our children to a little video, about an Italian man who was creating a beautiful wood oven pizza in a pizza oven. Our children enjoyed watching and learning how a pizza get's made. We had our children tell us, that they make pizza's at home with their mummy's and daddy's. 

This morning our children joined in by watching Nuria make a fresh pizza dough. Our discussion involved talking about measurements of ingredients, such as cup sizes, spoon sizes and of course the ingredients we needed to make the pizza dough.  

Our children seemed excited and kept asking, " can we eat this?" We answered, " yes, but we need to let our dough rise outside in the warm sun and then bake it in the oven." We even had some of our children ask us to help them put on their apron for the experience. 

We enjoyed our home made pizza's for afternoon tea. It was delicious!

Learning our numbers: 

We extended our learning about numbers by introducing colourful number printouts to the Toddler children. Toddlers were showing interest in presenting the numbers to their peers and able to recognize the numbers that were displayed. The colourful printouts also helped the children learn their colours at the same time. 

We introduced board games to the children. Snakes and ladders, number cards and practicing to write numbers was a new activity. During group time we encouraged the children to count out loud as a group, counting all the children in the room. 

These activities helps children refine their knowledge in remembering, recognition and help building their confidence.

‘All children learn in their own time and in their own unique way’ 

Outside play 

Outdoor play offers the children a chance to explore the natural world as well as be active, strengthening their fine and gross motor skills. The children have been enjoying running, jumping, kicking and rolling balls. We have created a few ball games to develop their hand-eye co-ordination, build on strength and emphasize on taking turns. The activity involved kicking the ball through goals. As the children mastered it with ease, we encouraged them to step back and have a go further away. The children had to put more power into the kick to ensure the ball made it through the goals. We all cheered and encouraged each attempt demonstrating good sportsmanship. We introduced different variations of the game, this time encouraging the children to extend on their upper body and roll the ball into a boxed tunnel. We always started the game closer to the target and as the children built confidence and accuracy, we made the game more challenging by stepping further away from the target. We were impressed to see how well the children used their hand-eye co-ordination and physical strength. 

Pin bowling was also another popular activity, which we introduce this week. The children lined up the pins and chose to kick or roll the ball, hoping to knock down the pins. The children navigated through the activity, by inventing different variations to the game. This was pleasing to see, as they created their own games expanding on their imagination and cognitive skills. 

Our final outdoor activity was the large construction connectors. At first, with the help of the educator, the children were guided and within a short time, they were building bikes and rockets. Tyler, Max and Logan were all excited with their motor bikes. They hopped on and slowly shuffled along the path until the bike broke in half. The children began rebuilding their bikes each time. Logan’s bike broke in half and while trying to put it back together, he stumbled on a new creation, a rocket! The children were overwhelmed with excitement and began building rockets. 

We hope our families are well and are staying safe during this time.

Thank you from the Toddler room

Nuria, Olga and Inoka and Sonia