All by Myself

The second half of the second year can often be the most frustrating for both teacher and student because of these four words "I do it myself!" Older toddlers are at the peak of autonomy discovery and they want to do everything themselves, even the things they have never before experienced.

This desire to do everything for themselves is mixed with the exciting time of big leaps in gross and fine motor development, world discovery, and language development. Older twos are beginning to do amazing things with all of the stuff they just spent the last 30 months learning. You will start to hear them string together complex subject-verb sentences, experiment with past and future tenses, use pronouns appropriately, and ask questions to gain desired information.

These littles are also beginning to engage in my personal favorite part of being human, pretend play. Up until now there will have been some use of phones and caring for baby dolls, but it is at about 2 1/2 that children begin to pretend to be something other than children. They begin to be mommies, daddies, and puppies, before graduating into princesses, firefighters, and super heroes. This pretend, or fantasy, play has long reaching benefits for our young people. It engages their imaginations and provides them with opportunities to work through all of those big emotions they experience, helping them to assimilate them into their personal world or as Piaget puts it their schema.

This assimilation through pretend play is a big deal teacher friends and it is also a big problem for them. They are also still working out how to share, are letting go of the idea that every object they see belongs to them, and that they are capable of being kind, caring, and well, capable! Whew, that's a whole lot for a little brain! Not to mention the 300 new words they will be picking up over the next six to eight months, and figuring out how to use properly.

So the question is how do we help all the bigness of the 2 1/2 year old? First we stop calling this age the terrible twos, and remember that they are in the midst of learning a new language and culture, and have only been alive for 2 years! Then we say, I will meet you where you are, in the middle of your big emotions, and acknowledge each and every one of them. Then I will give you tons of time to explore this world using those big emotions. And when all else fails, I will sing all the songs i can think of and blow bubbles, because if there is one thing I have learned about two year olds, they will forget everything for a rousing round of The Wheels on the bus and the magic of bubbles.