Monday is Snoop’s first day in the Toddler Room. There are some older kids who were ahead of her in the schedule to move up, but Snoop was the one they asked to move because, as the owner told me, ’she’s ready.’ They tell me that she does really well with the older kids, and that it’s funny to see her little sixteen and a half month old head sitting at the table with the bigger kids, calmly eating her snack or absorbed in turning the pages of a book.
I think it will be good for her. The Infant Room has lots of kids who are still crawling, and none of them are extensively verbalizing. Snoop can speak a few consonant-heavy words, has a pantheon of signs, and understands many more words when asked (for example, if you ask her where something is – the light or the picture – she can point to it.) But I would like to have her interacting with kids who are talking or trying to talk on a regular basis.
I have mixed feelings about baby sign. We didn’t really plan on extensively utilizing it, but we got a set of baby sign DVD’s that Snoop absolutely loved and we ended up watching them ad nauseum. She adored the music and the colors, and they kept her calm and occupied during times when she otherwise couldn’t be entertained. In watching them, we all picked up a lot of signs and Snoop is now fluent. It was nice to know the basic signs when she was pre-verbal – ‘eat’, ‘done’, ‘milk’, ‘more’, etc. But now that she is on the verge of using more spoken words, I think using the baby sign is actually sort of delaying her in speaking. She knows she will be understood if she signs what she wants, so she doesn’t actively try to speak the word unless we are very disciplined in asking her repeatedly to try to speak it. In retrospect, I wouldn’t have shied away from baby sign, but I would have started being more insistent about speaking the words and asking her to try to repeat them in addition to signs at a much earlier stage.
Anyway, the Toddler Room paperwork says they will emphasize topics like manners, feelings, shapes, colors, ABC’s, weather, numbers & counting, music, Spanish, animals, vocabulary, the senses, rhyme and repetition, safety, and being a good friend. In addition, they are ‘teaching the children how to solve minor problems on their own by using their words.’ They will also do baby yoga. !! I think that’s more than I learned at college.
Seriously, it sounds really grandiose, but Acme Daycare Inc is quite adept at making normal fun playtime activities seem way more sophisticated in their parental paperwork. They’re good PR masters. And that’s fine with me. I am not a parent who believes that kids should be reading or doing Euclidean geometry in kindergarten so they can keep up with their peers and get into the good schools. I think parents do that more for themselves than for their children, and when they are little, I believe kids benefit more from imaginative play, books and games and interacting socially with parents, teachers, and friends. I’d be just as happy to rock up to day care and find her playing with her little friends, sharing toys and communicating than I would be to find her trying to learn Spanish. And Snoop really does well with older kids and younger kids, has no timidity or self-consciousness, no shyness, and is developing a good sense of assuredness and confidence that I really like to see. She’ll hang back for a few minutes and get a gauge on the situation, but after that she rolls with the punches and is adaptable to new surroundings, new kids, and new teachers. Since I was never like that as a child, I am happy to see it in her at such a young age.
