Home / Educators / Professional Development (3 - 5 YEARS) / Supporting Young Toddlers’ Learning
- Introduction
- Help Toddlers Express Themselves in Positive Ways
- Expand Toddlers’ Language as You Talk, Read, and Play Together
- Help Toddlers Explore How Things Relate to Each Other
- Try It
- Wrap Up
- Learning Guidelines and Standards
- autonomy: ability to make decisions for oneself and direct one’s own behavior
- empathy: ability to recognize, share, understand, and consider another person’s feelings
- positive guidance: helping a child learn good behaviors and self control
Try It
It’s time to practice what you’ve learned. In this activity, you’ll apply the strategies and techniques you’ve learned to your program’s learning environment.
Read With Me
Download and print the Read With Me (PDF). Practice ways of reading with young toddlers that enlist their active involvement and expand their language.
Choose a book that you’d like to share with young toddlers. Look through the list of toddler engagement strategies below and choose three that you think would be particularly appropriate to use. Try out these strategies with one child before sharing the book with a group.
- Act out words or parts of the story together.
- Read with expression. Use different voices and sound effects.
- Pause to let toddlers repeat or fill in words and sound effects they know.
- Name pictures that toddlers point to, ask about, or seem interested in, and ask them to point to pictures or details that you name.
- Give toddlers a chance to repeat new words and phrases.
- Ask open-ended questions about the pictures, characters, or story events.
- Draw connections between pictures, words, and events in the books and children’s experiences.
- Encourage and respond to toddlers’ questions.
- Talk about characters’ feelings.
- Ask toddlers what they think about the story, characters, or events, and build on their ideas.