I love the way toddlers are ever-present in the moment, and so focused on the tiny changes in their environment. An ant scuttling by provides entertainment and wonder for several minutes. Shifting a chair from one wall to another makes for an hour of exploration in the new space. Everything is a chance to soak up information and test out how the world works.
In a way, toddlers are the perfect lockdown companions. They are content to explore a small space over and over, finding delight in the things we usually overlook. They thrive on repetition - read it again! build it again! sing it again! - and don’t need the novelty of constantly fresh games or stories. And most of all, they love helping with real practical tasks and feeling like valuable members of the family.
Days with toddlers can feel long, especially when you are still having broken sleep at night. Going at a toddler’s pace throughout the day helps a bit - slowing right down to a snail’s pace beside them and trying as much as possible to revel in the expansive time for songs, stories, and activity side by side.
Our Birdie is fast approaching 2 (next Friday!) and over the past month at home he’s changed and grown so much. Part of it is that leap that always happens just before a birthday, but some of it, I think, is down to the slower pace we’ve all had to adopt. He’s no longer the little guy being pulled along at the pace of older family members, too often stuck in a buggy while we dash onto a train or crowd through a bustling museum. He’s an agenda-setter in his own right, and we’re all tending to follow his lead. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his spoken language, literacy, numeracy, and ability to sing back songs have all rapidly taken off in the past 4 weeks.
Although most of our time is spent playing, singing, doing housework, and reading stories. we do spend some time every day doing basic Montessori-inspired literacy and numeracy activities. I include Birdie in our daily morning time, when our family reads a few books on the topics we’re investigating that week and works on literacy and maths skills, and there are a few other points throughout the day when I sit with him and support his development in this area.
At nearly two, toddlers have a vast hunger for identification and classification: they want to know the names for everything. Language development happens rapidly in a language-rich environment! I tend not to make traditional Montessori matching cards or 3-part cards simply because we don’t have a fantastically great printer, but I’ve never felt the boys were missing out. Instead, I provide detailed books with real photographs or detailed drawings, and add in accurate labels wherever necessary. Books from the DK series are excellent, as are the Usborne 199 series. I love any kind of visual dictionary or catalogue of objects, as long as the images are fairly true to life.
Approaching two, toddlers will often begin to notice the shapes of letters and begin to connect sounds with symbols. Creating an initial consonant sounds basket helps with this development. I include a sandpaper letter with a few objects that also start with that sound, and a small book that has a few clear words and images beginning with the sound. We will go through the basket together and I’ll invite Birdie to find other things in the room that start with the same sound. We use the Baan Dek sandpaper alphabet some days, but some of the illustrations are confusing (the van looks too much like a car, for instance).
We also play letter games with our magnetic letters and whiteboard, and take lots of opportunities to point out the sounds of letters as we read.
Receptive language - what children hear and understand - is just as important as spoken language, if not more so in youngsters who naturally develop speech at different rates. I don’t like quizzing Birdie while I read aloud, but I will make observations that usually prompt a response from him, like noticing a small bit of the illustration and seeing if he is able to notice it as well. Allowing toddlers to fill in gaps in a favourite story is another fun way of stretching their receptive language and memory skills. Pausing for a few moments before completing a rhyme will give a toddler the chance to chime in if they choose.
Numeracy at this age consists mostly of understanding quantity. Reciting numbers in order doesn’t hold any meaning for toddlers, but games where they can connect a word (“one”) with a physical quantity helps them to build those foundational associations. I’ve laid out the first three number matching sets of our wooden number dots puzzle, but most of our numeracy activities happen more in line with wild or messy maths. We line up sets of two or three leaves or sticks outdoors, or make a line of sand toys and count them. We group trains into sets of two, three, or four. I do introduce the numeric figure but always alongside an image of the quantity it represents. The Baan Dek sandpaper numbers book is good for this, but I do write the numbers out by hand often and put them near our games.
Shape recognition and judgement about size are also related to developing numeracy skills. Magnetic tiles are great for this, since they have basic shapes and provide a means for talking about the relationship between the shapes as you play. Organically, a child understands the form of shapes and how they combine to make other shapes. We label the shapes as we play: rectangle, square, right triangle, equilateral triangle. I’ve included the most basic shapes from our geometric solids set in our kinetic sand, and label these as well when we play. I introduce a few shapes at a time, because I feel it’s more important for toddlers to really internalise the quality of the shape and notice it in their surroundings, rather than be able to name many shapes in a book.
Determination of size is usually very interesting to toddlers who are in the sensitive period for small objects. They love tiny things, and can easily find the smallest or largest object in a set. Lining up objects in order of size is a simple and fun way to help a toddler’s developing sense of size awareness. We use our Grimm’s stacking boxes and nesting cups for this activity pretty regularly, both to build towers and to make car ramps. The boxes have an added bonus of a change in pitch when a car descends, which leads nicely into music activities!
There’s no need to create an elaborate Montessori-inspired set up to help your toddler develop their language and numeracy skills. Start with what you have, following your child’s interests. I never expected to know the names of so many different kinds of tractor! And although it may seem to have limited value to learn detailed information about a very specific subject like cars or breeds of cat, the act of classifying and identifying itself is useful as toddlers develop new pathways in their brains and begin to really inhabit their world.