Please see information on Learning Areas for preschoolers for tips on setting up different spaces for play and exploration in your early learning environment (adapt your toddler environment accordingly from the “learning area” link). Also, check out an introduction to using thematic units and helpful tips here.
Farm
Block Area: Include toy farm animals such as cows, horses, chickens, pigs, and geese You may also include other toys that have a farm theme, such as toy tractors, dolls, or a play barn.
Dramatic Play or House Area: Provide props that might be found on a farm, such as overall pants, straw hats, bill caps, boots, small trowels, a scale for weighing plastic eggs, play corn-on-the-cob or play meat, an egg-collecting basket, and a calculator.
Art Area: Provide a collection of cut-out images of farms, farmers, and farm animals. Allow your children to glue the images on paper with other collage items. Cut out medium to large pieces of paper in the shape of a pig or other farm animal, and let them draw on the animals. Ask your preschoolers to group the cut-out pigs by size.
Reading Area: Provide a wide variety of age-appropriate books with farm themes, such as farms in general, farmers, baby animals on the farm, horses, sheep, pigs, cows, chickens, dogs, hay wagons, and barns.
Science and Math Area: Place hay in your sensory table with toy farm animals. Supply a horseshoe, hair from a horse’s mane, clean chicken or turkey feathers, dried or decorative corn-on-the-cob, and other farm items. Provide your preschoolers with a magnifying glass for further exploration.
Cozy Corner: Provide farm books that are accompanied with an audio file. Play the story as you turn the pages in the book. Provide farm-animal puppets and music with farm themes, such as “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and “B-I-N-G-O.”
Transportation
Block Area: Include toys with transportation themes, such as cars, trucks, tractors, and airplanes.
Dramatic Play or House Area: Supply dress-up outfits for a bus driver, train engineer, firefighter, etc. Provide other props to match the outfits you’ve supplied.
Art Area: Allow your children to paint pictures with the wheels of toy cars or trucks. Have them cut out transportation pictures from magazines and stick them to paintings. For example, stick pictures of boats to a blue or green finger painting. Provide rubber stamps and stickers with transportation images.
Reading Area: Supply a wide variety of transportation books. Look for books about airplanes, bicycles, trains, trucks, cars, roller skates, running, submarines, boats, and hot-air balloons.
Science and Math Area: Place toy boats in your water table. Provide toy cars and a homemade ramp for racing.
Cozy Corner: Provide easy puzzles with pictures of boats, cars, and hot-air balloons. Supply music on CDs with transportation themes. (The song “The Wheels on the Bus” is a favorite among small children.)
Pets
Block Area: Provide toy dogs and cats.
Dramatic Play or House Area: Provide stuffed animals that are typical household pets (such as dogs and cats), small animal carriers, leashes, collars, brushes, and food bowls.
Art Area: Provide rubber stamps with paw print images, kittens, puppies, and fish. Provide cut-out pictures of household pets. Your preschoolers may enjoy cutting out these pictures themselves. Allow your toddlers and preschoolers to use these items in their collages and artistic creations.
Reading Area: Provide a wide variety of books about pets or with images of pets.
Science and Math Area: Create a special time tin this area with an actual household or classroom pet. Help your children feed and play with your special friend.
Cozy Corner: Pretend your toddlers are your precious little puppies, and take turns holding them on your lap.
Community Helpers
Block Area: Supply toy fire trucks, school buses, police cares, and mail trucks. You might want to suggest city or street images as they play with the vehicles and blocks. For example, say, “Is the mail carrier making a special delivery to that house?”
Dramatic Play or House Area: Provide dress-up outfits for firefighters, police officers, doctors, or postal workers. Include as many related props and items as you can find.
Art Area: Provide various rubber stamps and stickers with images of different community helpers.
Reading Area: Choose a variety of books that include postal workers, doctors, firefighters, police officers, and teachers.
Science and Math Area: Supply a few stethoscopes, and allow your children to listen to their heartbeats. (Make sure they don’t scream into the stethoscope when it’s placed on tender ears.)
Cozy Corner: Sing “The Wheels on the Bus” with your children.
Creepy, Crawly Critters
This theme can help small children work through fears they may have related to creepy, crawly critters.
Block Area: Supply rubber snakes, plastic spiders, and toy bugs.
Dramatic Play or House Area: After reading Mrs. Spider’s Tea Party, set out play tea cups and plates for imaginary cakes. Buy or make antennae that your children can wear.
Art Area: Provide rubber stamps with images of bugs, snakes, and spiders. Provide black pipe cleaners cut into small pieces and black paper (other colors are also okay) for making spiders. Display your children’s spiders on a web made of string or paper. Remember to allow them to put as many legs as they wish on their spiders—it’s okay if their spiders don’t look exactly like the real thing.
Reading Area: Provide books about spiders, bugs, snakes, and slugs. Beware of books that may scare your children.
Science and Math Area: Buy an ant farm to display, or capture bugs from outside and make them a nice home in a jar with air hoes poked in the lid. Teach your children about respecting your visitors by putting them back outside after a few days.
Cozy Corner: Supply maracas and/or rattles for making “snake music.” Provide simple puzzles of bugs, snakes, or caterpillars. Read them nursery rhyme “Three Nice Mice” and sing “The Eency Weency Spider.”
Nighttime
This theme can help small children work through fears they may have related to the nighttime or the dark.
Block Area: Provide dolls and small “blankets.” Help your children build beds for the dolls.
Dramatic Play or House Area: Provide pillows, blankets, dream catchers, flashlights, and stuffed animals. Supply pajamas for playing dress-up.
Art Area: Provide black paper and white chalk for drawing nighttime pictures. Cut out (or help your preschoolers cut out) large, medium, and small stars for sticking to paintings or gluing to paper. In a shallow box, place a cardboard cutout star on a piece of paper. Have a preschooler “trace” the star with glue, then remove the cardboard star and shake glitter over the glue. Set the star aside to dray before you display it.
Reading Area: Provide books about napping, nighttime animals, the moon, the stars, and bedtime.
Science and Math Area: Cut out various colored stars in different sizes for explorations. Include small, medium, and large stars in at least two different colors. Encourage your preschoolers to arrange the stars into different categories of color and size.
Cozy Corner: Provide stories on tape about bedtime, sleeping, or nighttime that are accompanied with a CD. Turn the pages of the book as the story plays.
Me, My Family, and Friends
Block Area: Display pictures of your children’s homes, and provide dolls that represent several different family members.
Dramatic Play or House Area: Supply items from your children’s homes to use in make-believe play. (A special item from home can ease a young child’s anxiety about being away from home.) Display pictures of your children together, and label it, “My Friends.” Hang the display at their eye level, and talk with them about the pictures.
Art Area: Provide paint and paper for making hand-print paintings. Collect artwork from each child, attach a picture of the artist to the work, and bind it all together. Leave the binder out so that the children can look through it frequently.
Reading Area: Provide a wide selection of books about friends, different kinds of families, moms, dads, brothers, sisters, new babies, grandparents, and other relationship themes.
Science and Math Area: Count fingers, toes, hands, and feet. Show pictures of living things and non-living things for the children to compare.
Cozy Corner: Sing with your toddlers about friendship, and encourage them to hold hands while singing. Talk about feelings with your preschoolers. Show a picture of a child, and ask your preschoolers to point to the parts of their body that feel bad when they are angry. Repeat this exercise with the emotions “happy” and “sad.”
My Five Senses
Block Area: Provide lightweight sandpaper and fake fur for building and playing.
Dramatic Play or House Area: Place clothes with different textures (corduroy, silk, cotton, polyester, etc.) and bright colors in a basket for dress-up play.
Art Area: Paint frosting on sugar cookies for a yummy artist’s treat. Finger-paint with whipped cream or pudding on a clean, smooth surface.
Reading Area: Provide a wide selection of books about seeing, smiling, hearing, tasting, and touching. Try to find books with build-in sounds and textures.
Science and Math Area: Put peppermint extract or lavender oil in your water table. Describe the smells, and ask your children, “Do you like the way peppermint smells?”
Cozy Corner: Lead your children in playing homemade or store-bought musical instruments. Play the instruments softly, then loudly. Then allow your preschoolers to dance as you play music very quietly, then very loudly.
Health
Block Area: Provide dolls, and encourage your children to build beds for the “sick” ones. In addition to the “sick” dolls, designate a few of the dolls as mommies, daddies, or doctors who take care of them.
Dramatic Play or House Area: Provide a doctor’s outfit for dress-up play. Supply play bandages, medicine, chicken soup, and other play medical accessories. Role-playing a trip to the doctor is a good way to help young children work through stress about doctor’s visits.
Art Area: Ask your older toddlers to draw “boo-boo” pictures. Explain to them that a “boo-boo” is a place on their body that has been hurt. Offer an example by pointing to a bruise or scrape. Then, encourage them to draw a picture of a “boo-boo.” Tell them that you will help them put bandages on the “boo-boos” when they have finished. Place a small, adhesive bandage on the “boo-boos” in their pictures. Supply your preschoolers with materials for creating nutrition collages. Then, ask them to make a collage of sweets and desserts (be sure to talk about the differences.) They can use stamps, or cut out pictures from magazines.
Reading Area: Provide a selection of books about washing hands, using the potty, going to the doctor, exercising, and other health themes.
Science and Math Area: Provide your toddlers with a container of cotton swabs in different colors (for example, some with white sticks and some with blue sticks) to explore. You might want to allow your toddlers to play with the swabs in the water table. Provide a magnifying glass for your preschoolers, and encourage them to look at their hair, skin, and fingernails.
Cozy Corner: Sing a “health” version of “If Your Happy and You Know It”:
If you’re healthy and you know it,
clap your hands (clap, clap)
If you’re healthy and you know it,
clap your hands (clap, clap)
If you’re healthy and you know it,
then your face will surely show it,
If you’re healthy and you know it,
clap your hands (clap, clap)
If you’re sick and have a cough,
cover your mouth (cough, cough)
If you’re sick and have a cough,
cover your mouth (cough, cough)
If you’re sick and have a cough,
then your face will surely show it
If you’re sick and have a cough,
cover your mouth (cough, cough)
Make up your own verses about washing hands, brushing teeth, and sneezing.
Winter
Block Area: Provide toy cold-weather animals, such as penguins, polar bears, and other artic animals.
Dramatic Play or House Area: Supply mittens, hats, scarves, and heavy coats for playing dress-up. Provide unbreakable mugs for drinking imaginary cocoa on a cold winter day.
Art Area: Cut out large, medium, and small white circles, and have your children glue them to light-blue paper. Encourage them to use the circles to make snow people or snowballs. They can also use cotton balls for this activity.
Reading Area: Provide a selection of books about winter, penguins, mittens, snow, and cold weather. Read the classic The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats.
Science and Math Area: Provide a container of warm water and a plate of ice cubes. Encourage your children to watch the ice melt in the warm water. For your preschoolers, put blue food coloring in half of the ice cubes and yellow food coloring in the other half. Your preschoolers can watch the water turn green as they melt.
Cozy Corner: Act out The Mitten by Jan Brett with homemade puppets.
Spring
Block Area: Provide toy bunnies, lambs, and chicks.
Dramatic Play or House Area: Supply rain gear for playing dress-up, watering cans, silk flowers, and stuffed baby animals.
Art Area: Provide runner stamps and stickers with images of lambs, chicks, calves, and baby bunnies. Provide eggs shells for making collages. Cut out or draw pictures of tulips and daffodils, and let your children decorate or color them. Encourage your preschoolers to make their own flowers for decorating.
Reading Area: Provide a variety of books about springtime, baby animals, rain, ladybugs, and spring flowers.
Science and Math Area: Supply a bouquet of daisies, and let your children touch and smell the flowers. Count the petals on one of the flowers.
Cozy Corner: Let your children pretend to grow from a seed to a flower. First, crouch low into a ball on the floor, and slowly stand up as you grow. Then, stretch your arms uop over your head, and smile widely as you become a full-grown flower.
Summer
Block Area: Provide dolls dressed in summer clothes. Encourage your children to build the dolls a pool, park slide, or lemonade stand.
Dramatic Play or House Area: Provide hats, towels, over-sized adult swimsuits, and flip-flops for dress-up play.
Art Area: Encourage your children to paint pictures of the sun with red and yellow finger paints.
Reading Area: Provide a variety of books with summer themes, such as beaches, swimming, vegetable gardens, green trees, and fireflies.
Science and Math Area: Place toy boats and water toys in the water table.
Cozy Corner: Go “swimming” with your children. Lie on your stomach, arch our back, and pretend to swim in cool water on a hot day. Then, let your children pretend to swim with you. Imitate them as they expand on your idea.
Fall
Block Area: Supply toy tractors and wheelbarrows. You may also include hay for use in play.
Dramatic Play or House Area: Decorate this area with pictures of pumpkins, scarecrows, and dried corn stalks. Allow your preschoolers to drink real apple cider.
Art Area: Cut out paper with various textures into apple, leaf, and pumpkin shapes for making collages. Encourage your children to paint with the colors orange and brown.
Reading Area: Supply a large variety of books with fall themes, such as fallen leaves, pumpkins, apple harvests, and bailing hay.
Science and Math Area: If it’s fall in your area, fill your sensory table with dried leaves. Display a variety of gourds for exploration.
Cozy Corner: Provide audio books about hayrides or pumpkins. Turn the pages of the actual books as the story plays.
Pond
Block Area: Supply toy frogs, fish, and ducks.
Dramatic Play or House Area: Make hats with pictures of frogs, fish, salamanders, ducks, dragonflies, and other pond animals. Encourage your children to act like the animals in the pictures as they wear the hats.
Art Area: Cut out pictures or make your own drawings of fish, frogs, and snakes. Ask your children to stick the images to paintings or glue them to paper.
Reading Area: Provide a selection of books about frogs, butterflies, dragonflies, swimming, and fish.
Science and Math Area: Place a tadpole in an aquarium and care for it as it turns into a frog. Your local library and pet store are good resources for information about caring for tadpoles.
Cozy Corner: Supply pond-animal puppets and puzzles with images of pond animals.