The other teacher and I sat down together to come up with a plan on how we could set up a curriculum that wasn't overwhelming for a two year old but still gave them freedom to gain knowledge. We went through some material about where developmentally a child that age should be. Many of the things that a child is working on developmentally at this age are about their motor skill, gross and fine. The curriculum that we would set up had to involve some practice on things like holding a crayon or throwing/rolling a ball. This age was also about simple cognitive skills, like naming animals in a book and focusing on one activity .
for a short amount of time. Because I entered the class in January and the school year ends in June, we just needed to come up with a plan for 6 months rather than a full year. We began by having a color month where we would learn about the colors and the names of them all. We motor skills in this by doing painting and coloring with different colors each week and talking about the colors as we did them and by playing games with different colored balls and toys. This whole unit seemed too academic for children on this age. They didn't want to learn about colors, they could do that just by living their lives and learning them as they went. If we pushed the colors too hard on them, they became uninterested in them. This was a great learning experience because I realized we needed to go much more broad with the children and focus on what they were interested in and incorporate things such as colors and numbers within that theme. .
This is when we decided to have a day where we talked to each of the children to figure out what they were genuinely interested in. They hit their developmental cues by just going through their days, not by having a teacher try to push certain things on them. We found out that many of our children loved trucks, dinosaurs, and animals. This was really all we needed to come up with a curriculum that would greatly benefit the children.
