Hand-holding the way to greater independence

The Young Toddler program is another first from Sparrows. The program is meant to help children who have outgrown infancy but are yet not big enough to participate in a regular playschool program. The program takes in children around eighteen months of age when they are walking around, eating light solids and are on the verge of developing a small vocabulary and be toilet trained. The program helps children develop adequate self-sufficiency to better articulate their needs, develop eating and napping schedules, enhance their cognitive, motor and social skills, and transition into our play-school program after about six months.

The constant individual attention from our infant program is continued into the young toddler program as well with better than even the most stringent international ratios between teachers and young toddlers being maintained.

\ We want you to feel totally connected with your child while in our care. We encourage you to partner with us to develop a custom plan for your child’s transition. In addition, we enable parents to visit the facility and monitor their child from inside or outside (through closed circuit television) the classroom to monitor their child’s adjustment and development.

At the end of each day, our teachers provide you with communications about your toddler’s activities and developmental milestones. The daily report includes:

• Eating, Sleeping and Diaper Changes
• Well-being and Development milestones
• Special moments

All-round Development

Our teachers facilitate the development of young toddlers through individual love and attention. They work on various aspects of development by engaging the child in developmentally appropriate activities through age appropriate toys, music, board books, blocks and other equipments:

• Feeding and toilet training
• Gross and fine motor skills
• Cognitive development
• Language skills
• Music appreciation
• Emotional and social development

Feeding
Our program is designed to develop a proper feeding schedule consisting of breakfast, lunch and evening snack. We also help children develop greater independence in self-feeding themselves. However, given young toddlers are still graduating from the infant stage and their fine motor skills are not sufficiently developed, the program flexibly aids children with feeding them and with irregular bottle and snack requirements while they adjust.

Toilet Training
We help children, when they are ready, to start toilet training while still in diapers. Depending on their overall progress, we then slowly reduce their dependence on diapers, with the objective of eliminating it completely within the young toddler program or early in the playschool program.

Movement
During this stage, toddlers expand their range of movement and gain more confidence in pushing, pulling, throwing, catching large balls, emptying, filling etc They also enhance their fine motor skills by stacking, stringing etc
Our activity center is equipped to provide children the right environment to appropriately develop their motor skills under the nurturing eyes of our teachers. Given children are still not fully in control of their movements, the center is designed to be very safe for children to expand the full range of their movements.

Cognitive Development
Mentally, young toddlers begin to get a better understanding of cause and effect, motion and patterns. Our teachers help stimulate development of their cognitive skills by leading various activities including stacking, sorting, sequencing, arranging, matching and moving using puzzles, toys, blocks etc These activities lay the foundation for experimental understanding, as well as, mathematical, perceptual discrimination and logical reasoning skills. We also make music an integral part of the child’s day to help develop aesthetic and rhythm appreciation. Colors and crayons are also introduced.

Language Development
From enhancing their understanding of spoken words to articulating thoughts themselves, the young toddler is going through an exciting phase of language development. Our teachers constantly encourage spoken conversation, while also expanding book reading for story telling to develop the import of written words. Children also like to scribble at this stage and begin to enjoy holding crayons and pencils.

Emotional and Social Development
Children begin to acquire an understanding of various roles and are most impressionable by their caregivers. Pretend play can start at this stage with children mostly play acting adult activities they observe in their homes and at the center. Our teachers are trained to leverage toddlers imitative skills to help them develop social skills like sharing, playing co-operatively, following adult instructions, appropriately displaying their emotions and learning the importance of every-day tasks.

Our teachers hand-hold your child at each step of the way while helping her develop greater independence, realize her potential and move forward self assuredly and positively.