A few weeks ago, our theme in Toddlerville was 'What can your hands do?'- in previous weeks, we had a bit of an increase in using hands for pushing others to get what we needed instead of communicating. Mostly, this involved wanting a toy that someone else was using or wanting to play in an area where someone else was already playing....mine, mine, mine. Oh, toddlers.
This behavior is quite typical of Toddler types as they are in the midst of learning both language skills and the art of social interaction- but when we see an increase in the number of kids using hands as their primary use of communication, we need to find creative ways to address it.
One tool we prepared for the week's lesson we called 'High Five Hands'. A pretty simple idea to allow kids to think about what hands CAN do - Paper hands on sticks that the kids can hold and give High Fives to their pals instead of hitting them on the head or pushing them down. SIDENOTE: It's important to make many, many of these so all kids can have full access to one or two (as most children have 2 hands and want to hold one in each). Also, if there aren't enough for all, then we start fighting and pushing to have a turn, sheesh....and the helpful tool becomes part of the problem we are trying to eliminate.
Ok here's the High Five Hands play-by-play:
I freestyled a toddler sized hand with paper and pencil to transfer to cardstock and use as a template (but tracing a real live toddlers hand would probably be much easier- I forgot to do such things before leaving work that day so had to improvise):
Then traced out many, many hands (also on cardstock):
Normally I would then staple a few sheets together for quicker cutting, but I didn't have a stapler. Improvisation #2...clips:
Many, many hands:
From there, my favorite. Laminating! I don't know why I love it so much. I just find cutting out laminated things to be relaxing and quite enjoyable:
After cutting out all the newly laminated hands (ahhhh, that was fun), I added a large popsicle stick to the back of each and secured it with some fun duct tape. I didn't really worry about how fancy it looked since I knew in my heart that these tools would get a lot of love (i.e....toddlers break things that are made of paper) from the kids:
I brought the High Five Hands to school and put them in a basket on the shelf for the lovely children to discover:
It didn't take long! They examined the new tools within minutes to figure out what to do with them- I gave a quick tutorial (by holding one and saying,"Hey, give me a High Five!") and the kids took it from there:
We will always have challenges related to toddlers needing things (right now) that they cannot communicate fast enough with words. Hitting and pushing with hands is indeed an effective method of getting what they need....it gets results! But, it's my goal as an educator to not only help the toddlers learn to use words to get what they need but also to begin to develop understanding about how to be a kind and caring human. We can be their model and guide to help kids find new strategies to achieve the same goal with practice, repetition and fun little paper hands:)
