“I Want a Marker!” An Exploration of Writing Materials with Infants and Toddlers

Infants and Toddlers in room 138 enjoy writing. We continue to expand on this by providing our children with different mediums for writing such as markers, colored pencils, oil pastels, and ink pens. Our toddlers use writing utensils to draw lines, shapes and traced shapes while our infants create marks on paper to signify their work has meaning. The interest in different writing materials serves as a platform for the exploration of other ideas. The tracing of shapes with colored pencils encourages children to learn more about the shapes and recognize the differences.
Teachers set shapes up in the writing area and ask the children to distinguish between the similarities and differences of the shapes based on size and color. The children draw what they see and incorporate the shapes into their block play. This ongoing project helps develop motor development, language and literacy, and cognition development in our students.
This project connects to the Early Learning and Development Standards in the following domains: Physical Well-Being and Motor Development, Language and Literacy Development, Cognition and General Knowledge, Approaches Towards Learning.