April 4, 2024
On Valentine’s Day 2024, Early Edge California launched the #WeLoveLittles social media campaign to celebrate children, ages birth to three! Featuring the voices of parents and caregivers, the campaign uplifted how incredible infants and toddlers are and the critical supports they need to learn and develop. The campaign also launched a special video series that featured high-quality interactions between littles and their caregivers and shared key facts about infant/toddler development.
Watch the videos below to learn more about these meaningful interactions:
We love this interaction between infants and their teachers in a Spanish Dual Language Immersion infant program singing “Araña pequeña” (“Itsy Bitsy Spider”)! Not only is it adorable but it demonstrates how talking, reading, and of course, singing to babies, as these educators are doing, is so essential and beneficial to their language development. And, not only are babies capable of learning any language starting at birth, babies who are spoken to regularly in two or more languages have better executive function later in life.
Watch as this sweet toddler gets up and busts a move when it’s his turn to do a music and movement activity with his teachers and peers. Dancing is a great way to promote a young child’s physical development by working on those gross motor skills through big movements while also practicing balance, coordination, and spatial awareness. It also helps them develop a sense of rhythm and timing, while allowing them to engage in creative and emotional expression.
Watch two toddlers and their educator work together to build a tower of blocks. Block building is a great way to promote a young child’s fine motor skills through grasping, manipulating, stacking, and balancing. It also helps them develop hand-eye coordination and is a great form of open-ended play.
Little ones are great observers and one way this comes into play is learning language through imitation. In this video, a caregiver uses modeling to show how to ask for a popsicle, “la paleta,” which the toddler then imitates. The caregiver uses clear, simple language for the toddler and seizes an opportunity for contextual learning: learning as the child engages in everyday activities, which supports language comprehension and retention. And, she provides feedback for the toddler in real time. This is a great example of how important it is to soak up every opportunity for learning with little ones and how it can be woven into their day.
This video features toddlers whipping up something tasty as they pretend to be chefs. Imaginative play like this is critical to supporting toddlers’ development across cognitive, language, social, emotional, and physical domains. It promotes creativity, problem-solving, self-expression, storytelling, cooperation, empathy, physical coordination and so much more.
We love this video from two toddlers in celebration mode, giving each other a round of applause! Engaging in reciprocal action, such as clapping or waving, represents so much happening in a toddler’s social emotional development: it signifies their burgeoning social interactions with their peers, which develops their skills in communication, relationship-building, and joint attention–-learning to coordinate their attention with others, which leads to sharing experiences as well as learning new skills from each other.
Engaging interactions between little ones and the adults in their lives is important in so many ways. In this video, an Early Learning teacher and toddler play with playdough together, and she shows him how to roll a ball. Rich interactions like this one help young children with their language development, build their problem-solving skills, and strengthen their relationships with their caring adults, just to name a few of the many benefits!