The five corners for your toddler

Five corners? Well, you don't exactly need a pentagon layout for this but early childhood educators suggest that to optimise your toddler's development, your home should be set up in the following manner. If space is a problem, fret not. You can always improvise.

The five corners are:

1. The Physical Corner - this is an area where your toddler can climb, jump, dance, crawl and be a monkey. Only in this corner is she allowed to explore her physical exploits, so make it safe. To further enhance this area, create mini obstacle course like activities for her to explore. Have her throw balls into hula hoops, walk on ropes (on the ground), jump from a step etc. In our home, we have a mini bouncy castle, all her vehicles, a basketball hoop, a skipping rope and she moves her furniture around to make her own obstacle course. It's really role-playing for her as she builds bridges from chairs and tables as tunnels.


2. The Arts and Craft Corner - this is where your toddler gets to express her creativity in it's free-est form. Let her paint, colour, stick, cut and experiment with different textures and materials. Let her get messy and sticky and icky. Also you may want to rotate her tools. For example, one month is colour pencils month. The next is crayons, the next finger paints etc. The duration can also lessen depending on your toddler's attention span. We have an easel in our study where she has all her tools in one corner. Only when she wants to paint does she have to ask me and I will set up a large plastic mat on the floor and prepare her painting water, brushes, art block, paint and apron. I also make it a point that whenever she is finished, that she has to clean up. It's good to start this habit young. You can get nice big A2 sized art blocks from Popular Book Store costing RM10 each for 20 pages but because the pages are so big, they actually take longer to go through them. Well worth it!!! Also, if your toddler comes up with a masterpiece, an A2 good quality piece of paper is worth framing.
3. The Educational Toys Corner - this is a place for your toddler to play building blocks, jigsaw puzzles, and any other toys that allows him to explore his creativity and allows him to think. According to early childhood educators again, if you want to create a smart toddler, then buy him only toys that he can make things out of. The best toys you can get your toddler is a set of building blocks. Or even cereal which he can make shapes and letters out of, or pieces of paper cut out in various rectangular shapes. It doesn't have to cost a lot of money. Even rubberbands are considered educational toys.
4. The Home Centre - toddlers love emulating their parents so have a corner for all things home like a toy kitchen and really anything else, that you have in your home. You do not have to buy toys for this purpose and can really use whatever you have already at home to set up this corner. My daughter is tremendously spoilt by her grandmother so she has not only a toy kitchen but a toy baby high chair, a toy baby mop and broom, a toy hoover, a toy kettle, a toy toaster, a toy trolley, a supermarket trolley, a bicycle, a car, a potty for her doll, a toy crib........you know what? She has everything! *roll eyeballs*
5. The Thinking Corner - this is where your toddler is sent to think. Think about her behaviour whenever she is disobedient, or if she has done something very wrong. Toddlers hate this corner and there is a rule of thumb to measure the time that a toddler is meant to stay at the thinking corner (1 minute for every year of age) but I prefer to play it by ear and see how sorry she looks and the amount of apologies that she offers. *wink* The thinking corner or chair or step is very necessary though in toddler development.
6. The Reading Corner is actually left out but I've added this in myself because we have one at home. This is a place where Tee chooses her own books and brings them to me to read to her or goes through them herself. Reading must be inculcated young. Do teach your children to respect books. They need to be reminded constantly, so no stepping on books!

For your information, this is how the better schools in town are set up. This is because toddlers do not have the capacity yet to follow instructions fully and focus on a task at hand. Thus good pre-schools have these corners so at any one time, toddlers can roam about to do whatever they wish despite the fact that lessons are going on. Just because a toddler is painting doesn't mean she is not listening to what the teacher is saying. She is still absorbing everything.

This style of teaching goes right up to eight years old as can be observed in International schools locally or good pre-schools.