Why Movement is Important for Infant and Toddler Classroom Learning

Why Movement is Important for Infant and Toddler Classroom Learning

Seeing a child in motion is a wonderful thing. It is a sign of well-being and growth. Montessori infant daycare and toddler daycare programs always keep this in mind because the strength and health of muscles are dependent upon movement. When a child looks around with his eyes, turns her head, reaches for something, sits, crawls, stands, or walks, the muscles contract and expand.

These actions of muscles keep the body’s bones and organs in their proper places and functioning well. This assures body comfort, good posture, ease of movement, and the ability to enjoy fun activities throughout the day. Our daycare for toddlers and infants offers daily activities that include movement, which add to each child’s quality of life and offer a positive learning experience.

Intelligence, Communication, Social Skills and Sense of Self

Movement within the daycare environment helps the child’s brain to gain knowledge, practice peer interaction, and increase communication skills. While moving, the child’s five senses absorb information. When a child gets slightly closer to a sound, toy, or activity more things are noticed, understood, and remembered.

Sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste flood a child’s brain with facts about our world. These details become part of the infant’s or toddler’s general knowledge. Enrichment of social communication takes place, along with higher levels of understanding and increased expressive vocabulary. Infants and toddlers begin to notice and understand the enjoyable parts of the rich culture in which they are immersed. They interact with others and soon begin to recognize their own important contributions to the group.

Coordination, Practice and Visual Perception

Moving around throughout the day gives children an opportunity to exercise and practice skills. Movements that require both the right and left sides of the body stimulate both hemispheres of the brain. Passing a rattle from one hand to the other requires crossing the midline of the body, which is an important milestone. Maneuvering a ride-on toy or tricycle involves coordination, practice, and strengthening muscles.

Sitting steadily works the core. Reaching out, to place a round block into a round hole, trains the brain to judge the distance between the block and the hole. This action teaches the child to control hand movements that change an object’s position in space. These initial building blocks of visual perception will one day lead to the more advanced life skills of printing neatly on paper or parallel parking a car successfully!

Emotional Health and Happiness

Our daycare for infants strives to add to the health and happiness of our families. As many adults have discovered, using movement is a wonderful way to maintain emotional health and happiness. Walking together, changing yoga poses, going for a run, spending time together at a playground, dancing or moving to music, skipping, playing tag, jumping rope, practicing sports, digging in soil or sand, pouring or splashing water and swimming can create a positive mindset by releasing endorphins and serotonin within the brain. Likewise, movement creates feelings of contentment and peace in children, so happiness may fill their day.

Caring for children is a rewarding activity, filled with all types of movement for both the children and adults. At the American Montessori Campus’s infant and toddler daycare, every staff member understands the importance of including movement in classroom learning and is inspired to do so. Families in the Carrollton, Addison, Frisco, Richardson, North Dallas and The Colony areas tell us they feel fortunate to have our Montessori infant daycare program nearby. American Montessori Campus staff is always focused on offering excellent child care to our local families.

Learn more:

Who Was Maria Montessori?

Why We’re Plano’s Top Montessori School