UNDERSTANDING THE TODDLER

Learning All the Time
A peek inside the toddler mind
By Holly Bennett

What is toddler learning? Is it chanting one to 10, or memorizing the letters for cat and dog?

That kind of learning is not high on a toddler’s list of priorities, says Christine Cadieux, a professor in the department of early childhood education at Centennial College in Toronto. “Young toddlers are in what’s known as the sensory-motor stage. They learn through their senses, and by moving around. It’s all about exploration.” Starting at about age two, children enter the pre-operational stage and begin to add pretend play to their activities.

And what are they learning? Cadieux points to some specifics: “The toddler in the sandbox is learning about gravity. What he pours goes down. He’s learning what fits in different size containers, about measurements, about properties — if he adds water to sand, it acts differently than dry sand. He’s learning cause and effect: What happens if I do this?”

In fact, toddlers are busy developing a basic understanding of what things and people are, how they act and how to interact with them. That’s the essential ground on which their further learning is built. So toddlers need to literally get their hands on the world. We can help by:

• giving them lots of interesting, safe objects and environments to explore, dress-up clothes and realistic toys such as telephones or play stoves for pretend play
• including them in our own everyday activities such as shovelling snow or setting the table
• providing opportunities for them to learn about whatever captivates them at the moment, whether that’s cars, animals or vacuum cleaners
• talking to them about what they — and we — are doing
• cuddling up to read together


Hands-on experience

That’s not only a rich environment for all kinds of valuable learning right now, but also important preparation for later academic learning.

Because toddlers are not yet symbolic thinkers, they can’t really understand what letters and numbers are. They may learn a counting song, and even enjoy it, but from a math point of view, “it doesn’t really mean anything,” says Cadieux. But if a child has hands-on experience with, say, sorting rocks and socks, watching his dad cut a pie into eight slices or giving two crackers to each person at playgroup, then when he does start learning math he will be well equipped to understand what numbers actually represent.

Play teaches other lifelong skills too: problem solving, self-direction, creative thinking and, as soon as another person joins in the play, social skills. Oh, and one more not to be underestimated: the ability to have fun!


Learning stages

Annika, 18 months
Stage: sensory-motor
What she loves: exploring the great outdoors. “She loves to pick up stones, dandelions, sticks, and put them in her pocket or throw them,” says mom Astrid Van Den Broek. “She gets in the sandbox and runs her hands through the sand, tries to pick it up, digs at it with a shovel, lies in it, even tries to eat it.”
What she’s learning: fine- and gross-motor skills (picking up, manipulating tools, throwing), textures, gravity, cause and effect. “Maybe even her own power to change things,” speculates Van Den Broek.

Giselle, 16 months
Stage: sensory-motor
What she loves: filling and dumping “She does a lot of playing with the cups in her bath,” says her mom, Karen Gow. “She pulls out all the plastic bowls and cups from the cupboard, then puts them back in. She moves Cheerios from one bowl to another. Anything in a bag or box, she likes to unload, then fill back up again.”
What she’s learning: Gravity, volume, mass (the water fits in one cup, but not in the other), object permanence, fine-motor skills, early numeracy (the Cheerios), tidy-up skills

Daniel, 2
Stage: pre-operational
What he loves: helping in the kitchen “He stands on a chair beside me at the counter and helps mix the ingredients for muffins, or watches me cut vegetables. His favourite is adding coloured icing and sprinkles to cupcakes,” says mom Fina Scroppo.
What he’s learning: fine-motor skills, measuring, changing properties (dry ingredients to batter), safety and hygiene rules, healthy food attitudes

Reilly, 2½
Stage: pre-operational
What she loves: playing with her Little People Zoo. “Reilly loves animals,” Sharon Hanley-Smith explains. “She has more than 50 little animals. She plays animal rescue with her zoo set. She tells me one is stuck or lost, then she brings him back to the zoo and reunites him with his family.”
What she’s learning: When it comes to animals, Reilly is an information sponge! She knows the names of all the animals she has, from iguana to yak — and the sounds they make. She’s learning about habitats — that bighorn sheep live in the mountains, and hippos and crocodiles live near water.