Accelerated Curriculum
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To enhance your infant toddler curriculum: find ways to discover each baby’s way of thinking and expressing herself, and how to make everyday routines and events pleasurable and multisensory -- this is the process of accelerating infant toddler curriculum
Ask babies, “What do you think?” “Are you ready to tell me what you think?” “How does that feel?” Crying counts as talking and communicating, so use the information you get from crying as a tool to discover how to make babies feel comfortable and pleasant. Babies adapt and learn by using their very efficient multisensory bodies and brains!
- Two-to-go: Arrange sets of objects (trays are nice because they are easy to see into and around) by twos. Place them on the floor as “locations” for babies to go to, always two or more! This creates a “paired response,” and allows babies to make decisions and choices. Caregivers can often tune into what they are thinking. Always offer two objects.
- Spaces for faces: Arrange lookout posts for babies and toddlers where they can pull up or stand and look out at interesting spaces, such as windows, gardens, rocks, etc.
- Location, location, location: Wash, change and rearrange temporary shelving to varying heights, widths and colors and place “toys that teach” on these shelves on the floor. Toys that can be sorted matched (paired), dumped, poured, caught, thrown, or otherwise manipulated so that the location is changed on purpose is the point.
- Conversational talk-teach: Learn to use a conversational tone of voice for most play times and learn to sing as an alternative to the spoken word to calm babies and toddlers down. Read stories and tell stories at the same time you feed or at times when babies feed themselves. Babies are simultaneous thinkers and can do two things at once.
- Containers count: Use all types of geometric shapes as containers -- babies like the outsides of objects as well as the insides, using their fingers to do the walking and touch to do the talking.
- Follow the bouncing ball: Babies love to track objects on the floor according to their exact path, preferring to use detours anddiscover theirdirectional skills in this way—no direct movement for them! Their eyes and hands are the drivers, directing their legs to get where they are going.
- Making Friends: Wherever babies and toddlers reside, especially in the arms of caregivers, babies get pleasure from “placeholding.” “Placeholding” means they look at a person, turn toward another source of interest, and then they return to the person or object with renewed interest. Simultaneous looking and listening is easy for babies, and helps them to make friends and enjoy familiar objects.
- The “Room Tour”: Babies need to be taken and toddlers need to be guided to make a room tour every day to give them the lay of the land in their rooms. Remind them of their sleeping place, their play place, and their fresh air place. Changes of light, air and temperature are their sensory guideposts to different familiar and unfamiliar spaces, as much as food smells, and body smells are.
- Record exactly what baby’s say and do: Force yourself to write down for families what each baby or toddler says or does and how they do it. Family-based assessment means you really see and hear each baby or toddler’s voice and watch their mobility and tell people what you saw and heard. This is how you learn child development and how you assess strengths and concerns. You collect data, lots of it. You are a researcher about how infants and toddlers think.
All the babies and toddlers thank you.
