Everyday Activities: Perfect Opportunities to Help Babies and Toddlers Learn Through Their Senses
Amy L Dombro, Infant/Toddler Specialist and Consultant to the Families and Work Institute, and Denice Glover, Program Specialist Head Start Bureau
Daily activities can provide infants and toddlers with perfect opportunities to learn through their senses. Daily routines (dressing, diapering/toileting, and preparing snacks), which might seem boring to adults, are exciting adventures for young children. To help children learn, these daily routines should be taken advantage of.
Babies and toddlers constantly explore the world through their senses. Overtime, as children under three figure a blanket's soft edge, respond to smiles of their special adults, hear the crash as they bang on a pot with a spoon, and smell and taste a slice of pear, they collect information about themselves, other people, and the things around them. This collection process is of critical importance because it provides raw data for the children's first concepts of themselves and their world.
To gather the information they will need to understand themselves and their world, babies and toddlers must have many hands-on experiences. There is no better way to give them these experiences than by involving them in everyday routines. Let's look at an everyday activity of preparing and eating a snack through the eyes of children to see the lessons it offers to the babies and toddlers you work with:·For Roberto, an infant, snack time is filled with the sounds of older children talking, the smell of bananas, and most important of all, the feel of his special provider's arms holding him securely and the smile on her face as she offers him a bottle. He is learning that he can trust another person to keep him safe and to feed him when he is hungry.
·For Karlene, a toddler, snack time is an opportunity to learn about her world as she explores how bananas look, feel, smell, and taste-with and without their peels! She also may learn something about other people, such as some don't. And she can feel competent as she successfully peels her banana all by herself!