When the room is thoughtfully designed and the materials are well-organized children can easily move through the environment. We need to create environments that will make the child feel welcomed and also create provocations for them to explore and investigate everything around them.
Children are eager to learn since they are born. Curious by nature, you can’t keep them from exploring as they try to understand how the world works. Everything is a wonder for them.
It is a fact that Young Toddlers need to be surprised by something different all the time because they are unable to focus on a specific activity or play for a long amount of time. Therefore, a toddlers teacher needs to prepare an environment that is at the same time, inviting and creative for them. So we can stimulate their curiosity and manipulative skills, throughout the day. When we plan on setting up the classroom for a specific experience, we, as educators, need to have a purpose. What are the goals we intend to aim for? What skills do we want to develop? What materials would we like to introduce to them? We have to consider all the facts, before start creating the spaces inside the room.
We also need to be flexible and change the environment according to our student's needs. The school environment must be flexible over time and manipulable. It must also change and be able to be modified by the children's self-learning processes, and, in turn, interact with these processes and modify them. Evolution, therefore, as an operational and cultural condition of space.
When we decide to rotate the materials at a particular learning center or different environments, we can begin by involving our student's interest in the process. First of all, you don’t want to take away materials that may be part of a special routine for a specific child. If a child uses a special material or learning center for comfort or security, it could be very unsettling to him to remove it from there. We have to make changes that are significant and essential to all of our students.
Another strategy for keeping your learning centers fresh is rotating their locations. If children seem to ignore a learning center, move it, and place it in a prominent spot in the classroom to showcase the center’s purpose.
To keep learning centers exciting, you will need to collect and store a wide variety of materials (egg cartons, spoons, bottles, pipes, and others). Children love open-ended materials because of their possibilities they afford them. Using these types of materials encourages the student's imagination, creativity, and problem-solving skills so play can be reacher and complex. For example, the use of open-ended materials supports children's role as scientists who are constantly conducting experiments, testing ideas, and building their understanding of the world.
As children play with the materials, they are exploring what happens, coming up with new ways of manipulating the materials, deciding that one material can symbolize something else, and using lots of languages. This type of play is open-ended and builds creative thinking.