Our Toddler Rooms

Our Toddler Rooms

We have 2 toddler rooms at the Red House. They are split into an art and messy room for wet and messy activities and a room used for floor play and table top activities. The rooms are dedicated for toddler activities and for children aged 2-3.

Some of the activities we get up to in our toddler rooms include:

• Singing lessons
• Painting
• Play dough
• Story time – reading our favourite story of the week, which the children are encouraged to get involved in
• Dancing
• Musical instruments
• Sand Play and Water Play
• Jigsaws
• Collage making
• Giant Snakes and Ladders
• Stickle Bricks and Duplo Bricks
• Trucks and Cars
• Counting
• Dolls and dolls accessories
• Role Play
• Size association (big and small)
• Dressing Up
• Hide and Seek outside
• Cars and Bikes outside
• Tunnels and tents outside
• Chalk drawing outside
• Slides and Seesaws Outside

We focus the activities around the Early Year Foundation Stage framework, which is the new curriculum for nurseries. We also ensure indoor activities are taken to the outside  environment where possible.

We encourage communication, speech and manners at this stage and parents have commented how quickly their child’s speech and sentences improve each day. Thank you and please are encouraged and the carers act as role models to the children, by ensuring they are courteous and pleasant when communicating back to the children. We always ensure the children are familiar with all of our staff and they know them all by their first name.

We encourage counting and try to make this fun for example, asking how many bricks there are in the tower they’ve built. They don’t always get this right at this stage, however we really feel we’re achieving something when we see this developing and becoming more accurate. We see children associate sizes and shapes. We also enourage parents to help with this at home and the feedback we have is often amusing when we’re told a parent couldn’t believe it when they asked for two pegs at home and they couldn’t believe their child actually brought them two!

Nappy training is always fun! Yes, we have quite a few accidents, however that’s what we’re here for. We ask parents to bring in some extra sets of clothes at this stage for obvious reasons. We see children at the Red House very quickly adapt and start to ask to go to the toilet and eventually want to go on their own without having a carer with them.

We take real pleasure in seeing children in our toddler room encourage each other and equally copy each other. If one child is making car out of play dough they often all decide to, often with each child wanting a bigger one than the last!

The individual development files of each child are available to parents throughout their time in the toddler rooms and these include examples of their work, photograph’s and observations from carers. Parents often comment or ask questions on how they can help and have input to the development files themselves and this is actually encouraged by our carers.

Photo’s of the children are continually on display throughout the toddler room’s alongside the children’s artwork.

We have an activity suggestion board on the entrance to the toddler rooms where parents often leave their idea of an activity which may help in the topic of the week.

Some of the sweet comments recorded from children in our toddler rooms include:

“The play dough is sticky”
“I making a cake” even though we make real cakes we’ve heard this in the kitchen role play later on in the day
“It’s tidy up time”
“I’m reading a story” parents have commented they are often read to at home with an open book with a loosely followed story their child has heard at nursery.
“I want to sing twinkle twinkle little star”
“It’s my mummy”
“Can we go outside please?”
“My turn now”
“We’ve got to be quiet baby’s sleeping” often when playing with the dolls
“I look like Bob the Builder”
“My car going fast”
“I need a wee”
“Dinner time now?”
“You have to wash your hands first” We hear this from children talking to each other just before lunch