At Building Kidz, we care for and teach children of a variety of ages, including infants and toddlers; it’s part of what makes our schools so popular.
Our franchisees have the flexibility to provide a range of services that allow them to best align to their community’s needs. One of the optional services for a Building Kidz preschool franchisee is infant care. When a child is born, they are ready to learn. It’s critical to remember, though, that children and infants all develop at different rates. The first years of life are a phenomenal time for humans. At Building Kidz, we proactively evaluate and support the developing brains and bodies of our infants and toddlers in a nurturing environment. We help young children build a strong foundation for success in school and in life.
As early childhood educators and caregivers, we use developmental domains to support the different aspects of each child’s overall development. By grouping related behaviors and skills into domains, we can easily assess each child’s growth. The four development domains used in our proprietary infant and toddler curriculum are: Cognitive, Perceptual Motor, Speech & Language, and Social Intelligence.
Cognitive development involves how children think, how they see the world, and how they use what they learn. Cognitive development relates to reasoning and learning through the development of problem-solving skills, expanded thought processes, and memory.
Infants and toddlers, during their awake hours, are deeply engaged in using and refining their perceptual motor skills. These skills form a foundational development process that continues throughout human life. Perception refers to the process of taking in, organizing, and interpreting sensory information. Perception is multimodal, with multiple sensory inputs contributing to motor responses. Motor development refers to changes in a child’s ability to control their body’s movements. These movements range from an infant’s first spontaneous waving and kicking movements to the adaptive control of moving, reaching, touching, and grabbing objects.
Infants differ from older children. Infants think in symbols, and they are still developing their ability to form memories. Perceptual motor development focuses on the brain functions necessary for children to form memories and make plans and decisions.
Speech and language development for infants involves a lot more of us talking to them than the other way around. But this is crucial for them to develop the ability for speech as they grow older. Throughout an average day at Building Kidz, our teachers play music for infants and toddlers, read to them, and speak to them.
This kind of teaching helps speed up the development of important synapses in the part of the brain that’s responsible for language. The more words an infant hears, the stronger the connections get. Toddlers at Building Kidz learn to engage with their teachers in structured ways that enable enhanced communication. Our curriculum supports accelerated verbal communication.
Social intelligence and emotional development represent the sophisticated understanding of people, things, and themselves. The social-emotional development in children as young as infants and toddlers is critical to their sense of well-being. Through our proprietary curriculum, we continuously support and evaluate this essential development.
If you’d like to learn more about how a preschool franchise can facilitate the educational and social development of infants and toddlers, then please contact us today.