Child Development Environment

While reading chapter 12 The Physical Environment of our textbook Infants, Toddlers, and Caregivers I stumbled across a quote that stuck with me throughout this project. According to Louis Torelli “A well, designed environment…supports infants’ and toddlers’ emotional well being, stimulates their senses and challenges their motor skills. A well designed group care environment promotes children’s’ individual and social development.” This quote is so meaningful because before doing this project I never realized the layout of your classroom is so influential on the success of your students. When creating the budget, it was really an eye opening experience to how much little and big things that complete a classroom. It is very easy to go into

First one, touched upon was their physical development. Since our classroom design is for infants under one this is the age where they are going to be exploring rolling, crawling, and using their motor skills. Taking that into consideration we have included things to cover the different aspects. Items such as foam floor puzzle mat, Bobby seats, and the Ball yard/ climbing structure are all included to encourage the infants gross motor skills. On the other side we have included items for fine motor skills as well including Birds stacking tower toy, puzzles and more specifically for their manipulation dangling rings will also be in the toy area. Like previously mentioned infants are beginning to move around. According to The Pikler Chart infants from ages 3 weeks to 36 months can experience big gross motor skills everyday. Just to name a few they can go from turns over on stomach, gets up crawling, crawls on all fours, stands up freely, or walks from place to place. In order to allow them to achieve those developmental milestones it is important to have the appropriate about of space and materials. In our classroom we have 2 different playpens and gates along the classroom as well. In our classroom we want to increase the infants’ locomotion so giving plenty of space is

Throughout the day learning is happening all the time, every second of the day. During play they are exploring and discovering all types of things that can’t always be taught. Having things around the classroom that can keep them stimulated and engaged is important due to children demonstrating focused interest, attention, spatial understanding, cause and effect, sensory and aesthetic appreciation. As the teacher role is to facilitate make believe play in children. As infants they are beginning to develop personalities so setting the stage for play, providing time, materials and space lets them express different ideas along as letting them become who they are. Some things that are included in our classroom to encourage aesthetic and cognitive development such as books, animal puppets, kitchen area, soft blocks, puzzles, etc. These types of items spark emotions, peer interactions, memory, emotions that are essential for infants under