Toddlers
Preschool Lessons
The toddler curriculum at Treetop Friends focuses on different goals to help children who are finding their way in the world learn new skills and reach important milestones.
These include social-emotional milestones, physical milestones, language milestones, mathematics milestones, science milestones, social studies milestones, and literacy milestones.
Learn more about each of these milestones below.
Social-Emotional Milestones
Social-emotional milestones for toddlers at Treetop Friends focus on regulating emotions and behaviors.
Some of these milestones include:
- Learning to self-soothe
- Helping to understand expectations
- Building relationships with adults
- Ability to play with peers
At this age, toddlers have little understanding of feelings and require assistance with basic needs. Tantrums are common as toddlers often have trouble verbalizing frustration. Our curriculum has created a toolbox to help teachers understand these development stages and enable growth in students.
Physical Milestones
As part of our toddler curriculum
We expect to see children achieve age-appropriate physical milestones, such as:
- Demonstrating healthy choices
- Fine motor skills
- Gross motor skills
Literacy Milestones
Treetop Friends literacy milestones will help toddlers achieve:
- Letter recognition
- The pairing of letters together to understand word formation
- Number recognition
Language Milestones
Reaching language milestones will help our toddlers engage in activities and sociodramatic play.
For toddlers at Treetop Friends, language milestones we are hoping to see enhanced through our curriculum include:
Language development skills to be learned by toddlers at Treetop Friends include the listening to and understanding of language, as well as the ability to follow one-step directions.
Communication skills help in the development of building a child’s vocabulary, which includes the saying of two or three words together in short sentences.
Classification skills include the ability to pick up and pick out toys that belong together.
Other language skills that will be achieved through the toddler curriculum include participation in activities and the use of imaginary play.
Mathematics Milestones
The mathematics curriculum at Treetop Friends focuses on spatial relationships, shapes, and using number concepts and operations.
We will help toddlers reach milestones in spatial relationships by exploring simple puzzles. To help our students learn shapes, we’ll have them attempt to draw basic shapes. Finally, we’ll develop their number usage and concepts by having them attempt to count to 10, even if it’s out of order.
Social Studies Milestones
Social studies are a close look at the world around us, how we interact with our community, and how we learn about how our world works.
For our toddlers, we are looking at a few milestones in terms of social studies. A community milestone we’re hoping our toddlers can achieve is to start to understand the role of community helpers. We’re also looking to see if our toddlers can understand how family works by asking them to name immediate family members.
Science Milestones
Treetop Friends will also focus on developing an understanding of science and scientific skills as a part of our curriculum.
We do have specific scientific milestones in mind for our toddlers as part of their curriculum and daycare activities. The science milestones we focus on are:
- Use of Tools to Observe and Explore
- Earth’s Environment
- How to Use Scientific Inquiry Skills
- Characteristics of Living Organisms
- Physical Properties of Objects and Materials
We will hope to see our toddlers begin to use their bodies to explore the world around them. In doing so, they will be able to choose the tools they need to grow.
Our toddlers will begin to learn about the earth’s environment by identifying basic weather, such as sun and rain.
We will begin to see our toddlers reach milestones in the use of scientific inquiry skills as they will be able to observe during an activity.
Toddlers will achieve science milestones related to the characteristics of living organisms. We will know toddlers are meeting these milestones if they can understand basic healthy habits (such as hand washing), identify basic body parts, and begin to understand the five senses.
The scientific milestones toddlers will begin to reach also include the physical properties of objects and materials. We’ll be able to see if these toddlers have knowledge of primary colors.