This month in Toddler 1, the children have taken an interest in animals. Multiple children will work together at taking animals out from the bin and lining them up in the classroom or carrying them around. They will bring the animals up to a teacher and ask what sound that animal makes. We also have a lot of books in the classroom that are animal related. Miles and Rian love the books where you have to guess which animal is on the next page by looking at their fur, nose or feet! Then we all make the animal noise when we see which animal it is.
To expand on these activities, we decided to engage with stamps. By using stamp pads and adding animals we created foot prints! The children were enjoying stamping an animal of their choosing onto the stamp pad and watching the feet appear on the page. “Woah” said Jackson as his moose stamped the paper. Logan was eager to use different animals and to switch colours of stamps. Miles kept asking “More, more!” as he pointed at different animals to use. During this activity we played animal sound music so everyone could hear how the animals really sound! Amelia and Rian repeated the lion noise lots of times as they giggled at each other doing it.
We listened to different animal songs this month and even added a few new songs to our room that include animals. They enjoy dinosaur stomp, animal freeze dance, and the animal sound song. But we can’t forget about your favourites like Baby Shark, Baa Baa Black Sheep and Old MacDonald!
We were also focusing on building our fine motor skills this month so this activity was interactive for both aspects of learning! Holding onto the animals and stamping them, as well as using our fingers to explore the stamp pads was beneficial for our fine motor skills. The more we improve and build on our fine motor skills the more independent the children get. It is helpful for doing tasks like drawing, writing, grasping items and even feeding themselves.
