This Month at RisingOaks Early Learning | St. Patrick, the toddler 2 room has enhanced their skills though play stacking with a variety of materials. Stacking for toddlers is crucial in developing fine motor and dexterity as they pick up, grasp, and precisely place the materials, strengthening hand muscles. It also strengthens cognition and problem solving as toddlers learn about size, shapes, weight, and experimenting with balancing. In toddler 2, the toddlers experimented with balancing stacked boxes, plastic cups, and many different sized magnetic connectors and balls. Florence, Sebastian and Robbie, as they stacked with the boxes, found that as their tower of boxes became higher that their tower became more unstable and fall. Florence continued to place boxes on top of the tower and watch them fall, seeing the cause and effect of balancing the boxes. When using the plastic cups, the children experimented with the size of the cups. The toddlers saw that stacking the cups out of order, caused the cups to fall as they did not sit on the cup below. The toddlers experimented with stacking the cups many different ways, including turning the cups around and stacking them backwards, finding this did not work either. Showing the toddlers we could stack the cups biggest to smallest, the toddlers slowly tried to follow what the educators did stacking the cups little by little. The connectors and balls, were a favourite for the toddlers. They enjoyed the snap of putting connectors together and adding the balls to the top of their towers, before knocking them over. The toddlers continuously stacked and knocked the connectors over, experimenting with height, weight and balancing. To further their exploration, we added a magnetic board to the table for the children to stack on. This helped with stabilizing the base of their stacking and gave the toddlers a solid foundation to stack more connectors on top. This also gave the toddlers an opportunity to used their creativity making different structures with the connectors and balls, including a birthday cake with candles and singing happy birthday with the educators before pretending to blow and knock the connectors over.