Recently, we’ve had a lot of Museum in school experiences with toddlers, and it got me thinking about a question we often receive “Can I do a project with toddlers?” Yes! You can! However, projects for toddlers look slightly different. A huge component of project work is that it is driven by child interest and what they want to know. With older students, they can verbally tell us what they want to know. To find out what toddlers want to know, it’s a lot of observation, observation, observation!
At Eton school in New Mexico, Yvonne Kogan & Josefina Pin describe this wonderfully in their article Beginning the Journey: The Project Approach with Toddlers
“Our first step was to work at becoming more proficient listeners and better observers of young children to improve our understanding of how these young learners explore their environment and build their knowledge about things that are close to them. We spent long periods of time watching how they interacted with different provocations, how they explored materials, and how they made sense of the world. We became more aware of nonverbal cues, and we attained a better understanding of their interests than we had previously.”
An example of a toddler provocation, might be an action like a toddler holding up a new object to an adult: What is this?
Or it might be a statement like, “Ball no go” when they drop a deflated ball: Why doesn’t this ball roll or bounce?
Using observations such as these and connecting them to a topic that is close to the children’s’ world can lead to a great project. For toddlers, these are topics that focus on their everyday lives and involve a lot of sensory input. So things they interact with every day like food, water, clothes, and objects make for great topics.
Toddler classrooms may have limitations on being able to go to a field sites, but you can have lots of experts come to you or choose a topic that students have access to inside your classroom or building.
Looking for a toddler project example? Check out this past project on boxes!
Written by Amelia Troutman