From age two-three children begin to show awareness of their feelings and the feelings of others.  We work with students on expressing their emotions in a healthy way, this often includes teaching them self-advocacy strategies and helping them communicate their wants and needs.  We work with children on sharing and playing in coordination with a peer.  Within the Turtles class, students are working on taking a more integral role in their on self-help skills, including toilet training when ready.

Our Turtles class, is a language rich environment to help our students further expand their vocabulary and increase their communication.  Fun movement activities help introduce positional and motion vocabulary like “go & stop” or “up & down”.  Children have access to books all day to encourage early literacy skills including recognizing and labeling pictures, recognizing and playing with repetitive text, and retelling familiar stories.

Within the Turtles classroom, students are working on matching like objects, sorting objects with similar characteristics, and beginning to recognize cause and effect.  To support these developmental skills we encourage and support our students while increasing their sustained attention, persistence, and flexible problem solving skills.  Children work on following simple one-step directions and initiating and completing tasks while being immersed in early learning skills such as colors, shapes and numbers.

Within the Turtles class students work on developing the gross motor skills to run with increasing control, jump in place with two feet, climb simple structures, and kicking a stationary ball…they are on the move!  To address our students fine motor development, the children are exposed to stacking blocks, simple writing tools, inset puzzles, and lock and latch boards.  These, along with the rest of our manipulative activities, help our children develop hand and finger coordination that support them later in pre-writing  and self-help skills.