Children's fine motor skills continue to develop and they enjoy making marks using a variety of materials, looking at picture books and listening to stories, all are important steps in literacy. Independence soon emerges where adults support and encourage the children in areas such as eating, dressing and toileting. Continual praise for new achievements helps to build their self-esteem. During this stage of development, children's language is developing rapidly and many are beginning to put sentences together. Joining in conversations with children is an important way for children to learn new things and to begin to think about past, present and future. Developing physical skills mean that children can now walk, climb and run, and join in active play with other children. This is an important time for learning about dangers and safe limits.

Learning and Development

The Violets area operate on a 1 adult to 4 children ratio and is designed to allow children to have free access to a wide variety of resources which are age appropriate. The outdoor environment offers the children opportunities for doing things in different ways and on different scales than when indoors. The activities and resources in this age group reflect the following themes:

• Large Movement Area - To encourage posture and large movements
• Small Movement Play - To encourage vision, fine movements and imagination.
• Imaginative Play - To encourage speech, social and listening skills by the use of dolls, teddies and simple every day objects.
• Messy Play - To encourage fine motor skills and creative exploration of objects using all the senses.
• Sensory Play - To encourage all aspects of sensory development, exploring objects, developing attention and concentration, hand-eye co-ordination and making simple preferences, choices and begin to assign words and attributes to objects .
• Book Play - To develop language skills and encourage an early love of books sharing them with a caring adult.
• Sand and Water Play - To encourage exploration of objects using a child-focused approach.
• Language Resources - Using language games and resources to focus in on the children's language skills which provides fun games, rhymes and songs to enhance the children's communication skills raising their self esteem, confidence and social skills with others.
• Physical Activities - Every environment indoors and out has a place for children to be active or rest and reflect. Our dance session encourages a progression of skills to promote confident movement, health and bodily awareness as well as control in using physical play equipment.

• < Daisies (12 - 18 months) & Poppies (18 -24 months)
• Sunflowers (3 to 5 Years) >