Toddler Classroom

TODDLER CLASSROOM

• The LSCIP Toddler Classroom, for 18 months to 3 year-old students, focuses on sensory exploration; our students use their five senses to learn from the world around them. Our students see, touch, smell, taste, hear, and feel to connect themselves with their environment. Growing from these sensory experiences, our students learn to think, create, observe, and organize as they solve real life problems and tasks.
• We provide authentic, hands-on learning experiences so that our students are immersed in each lesson. For example, our students don’t just hear about “autumn,” they crumble leaves in their hands, smell fresh pumpkin and corn, hear the howling wind, and taste mashed potatoes that they created. We bring nature into the classroom as the environment becomes the third teacher.
• In our Engineering Zone, students build their own world full of blue circles, green squares, red trapezoids, and yellow spheres. Students learn about numbers, shapes, colors, patterns, materials, and objects as they construct the world around them and develop their motor skills.
• The LSCIP Toddler Classroom also has a Science Zone, Reading and Literacy Zone, Art Zone, each with their own hands-on environment to immerse students in theme-based learning.
• Building upon the Montessori and Reggio Emilia learning philosophies, we believe that children’s own interests are the most natural and efficient way for a child to learn and grow. This will plant a seed of curiosity and motivation that will blossom into life-long learners who actively seek knowledge. 

This poem by Loris Malaguzzi, the creator of the Reggio Emilia approach, captures why we teach how we do:

No way. The hundred is there.
The child is made of one hundred.
The child has a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking, of playing, of speaking.
A hundred, always a hundred ways of listening of marveling, of loving
a hundred joys for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds to discover
a hundred worlds to invent
a hundred worlds to dream.
The child has a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
But the world steals ninety-nine
They tell the child: that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.

-Loris Malaguzzi (translated by Lella Gandini)
Founder of the Reggio Emilia Approach