Teachers: Hi, I’m Amie Theriault, and I’m Carrie Woodward,
and this is the story of how we redesigned the toddler classroom.
Amie Theriault: So one of our main goals that we had was to make the centers more defined spaces.
We found that a lot of the children were kind of wandering from center to center;
they didn’t have a real focus. And we kind of brainstormed, where would we want all
the individual centers, and then we just started moving.
We started moving furniture, and that’s always a really long process.
I think if we put, pull a few chairs over we can um, they can either use
use things cooperatively if they bring them over,
or learn from each other and do some, you know, parallel play.
One of our biggest goals was to move the block center away from the center of the classroom.
There’s a louder, noisier center right in the center of class,
so we often had children there building big elaborate structures.
It’s a walk way, an area where children are constantly passing through.
It's now off in the corner of the room and we're finding much less conflict.
Child 1: “What are you going to do?”
Child 2: “I’m driving my car.”
Amie: We had music in the room, it was always available, but it was more or less
a basket of instruments. We created an entire center
just for music and so they have their instruments, they have their dancing scarves,
but they've been utilizing it more intentionally now, so it hasn't been
actually as loud as it was just as having a basket there.
We added a large mirror to the area and we're seeing that children are actually
performing in front. They'll have us put scarves on them
and pretend that they're dressing up, and use the instruments as microphones and
sing and dance in front of the mirror.
Amie: One of the issues that I noticed with our
writing center was that children were writing but they were
hearing all the noise in the classroom and
they weren't staying there very long. We now have a very defined space in the corner.
It's actually located right next to the family bulletin board because
if there's ever an instant where a child is
thinking about mom or something they can write a letter, they can look at the pictures
of the families. We made it more inviting by adding mailboxes for the children.
Every once in a while we'll come over and say “Let’s check our mailbox.
Let's see if there's anything in our mailbox."
And I'm finding them going over there much more often now.
Carrie: “Are you going to write a letter to me?"
Child: “Yeah.”
Carrie: “Dear Ms. Carrie. Want to tell me what you did in the great room while I was planning today?”
Amie: Our math and science center, they were kind of a combined
center before and I saw a couple challenges with that
because a lot of the science materials that we have out on a regular
basis are ones that we want their children to use around the classroom,
magnifying glasses, and color wands, and binoculars. We want them to walk around
with those and look around the classroom and
do observations. So when there are children trying to focus on
things in the Math Center it got kind of
loud and there was a lot of commotion going on with people walking back and
forth. So we defined those two spaces as well.
So they're near each other but separated spaces now.
We added a small bookshelf to the Science Center specifically for science related
books so they can actually sit and read there.
In the Math Center we also added a small table and they are
utilizing that all the time. They're bringing the sheets orders over to the
table or they're matching at the table, doing patterns.
So they really really enjoy having the table there to sit
and concentrate on their work.
Child: “Look it, look it.”
Carrie: “Two circles?”
Child: “One, two.”
Carrie: “One, two. You’re right. You have two circles.”
Amie: I think that the room is working out really, really well the way that it is.
I think that and the children are staying engaged
at centers much longer. Having the more defined spaces is helping them with that.
They're really focusing on their work materials aren't traveling
as much from one end of the room to the other. The furniture is extremely
important not just for
placing materials on shelves but actually using them
as boundaries. Really look at what you have, think outside the box, okay this is
a great shelf for this but it can also be used to
define this center. Because clearing
out those large walkways and runways really does help to eliminate
some of the running and the problematic challenging behavior
that can occur when you have to become an open space.
Use the furniture to your advantage the best you can.