18-36 month olds
During 18 to 36 months of age, children’s skill development moves very fast. Their brains are growing rapidly, language is blooming and motor skills are advancing.
At the same time, thinking becomes more developed, and their social and emotional skills enable them to interact with more people. With that said, this is the ideal age to begin participation in structured group activities, such as Mini SKILLZ™.
By understanding the stages of development of 18 to 36 month olds, we were able to select the age-appropriate skills that make up the Mini SKILLZ™ Programme:
Physically, toddlers are very active but don’t have much control of their movements.
We expect them to stumble on most activities and show very little skill in their gross and fine motor skills. The physical goals for our programme are to get them to perform basic exercises and activities with control such as stepping and jumping without falling, kicking while bending their knees, and punching while pulling their other hand back.
We expect toddlers to lose focus often during class and quickly become distracted.
Their thinking skills are all across the board, which makes it hard for them to anticipate what’s coming next. Therefore, their attention span will be very limited. The intellectual goals for our programme are to get them to focus on the task at hand with minimal distractions, such as listening to the instructor, thinking about what comes next in activities and following directions.
Our goal is to help the toddlers have patience during activities, even when they are challenging.
Their feelings are very strong but they are still not at the stage to recognise why. Therefore, they will show a wide range of strong emotions that are not quickly controllable. We expect them to throw temper tantrums when they don’t get their way and run around uncontrollably if they get too excited.
Language development has a big impact on toddlers social development.
They will imitate others but will quickly fight for personal space when they feel too crowded. We expect them to interact on a very basic level but at the same time be more involved in “parallel” play. The social goals for our programme are to help them interact positively by sharing as well as showing respect to the other people in class.
