MeadowEarly Learning
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12 – 24 months

The Toddler Room

Walking, climbing, carrying, dropping — and finding out what happens.

Meadow ratio
1 : 3
1 educator to 3 toddlers
Group size
6
children, maximum
Oregon maximum
1 : 4
group of 8, certified centers
Staffing
2 educators, one of whom is the room lead

Regulatory — never recoloured

A one-year-old’s job is to move things. Up, down, in, out, across the room and back again. Most toddler rooms fight this. We build for it.

The room has a climbing ramp, a set of steps, baskets with handles, and a great many objects that are worth carrying somewhere else. It also has fewer things in it than you might expect. Six toddlers in a room this size means a child can put something down and find it still there.

This is the year language arrives, so the educators narrate constantly — not questions, not quizzing, just naming what is happening. It is also the year of large feelings, and the room is staffed so that a child in the middle of one gets a whole adult, not a shared one.

The toddler room: a low wooden climbing ramp, open shelves of natural loose parts and a child’s hands stacking wooden blocks

In practice

What this actually looks like

  • Gross motor first

    A low ramp, a platform, steps, a tunnel, and a lot of floor. Risk is real and managed: the equipment is scaled so a fall is a fall, not an injury, and an educator is always within arm’s reach of the highest thing in the room.

  • Real objects

    Wooden bowls, metal jugs, cloth, brushes, pinecones. Everything is checked against a choke tube; anything that fits through it is not in the room. Materials are washed daily and the shelf is reset every afternoon.

  • Beginning to eat together

    Toddlers eat at a low table with real crockery and small metal cutlery, served from a bowl at the table. Educators sit and eat with them. High-risk choking foods — whole grapes, hot dog rounds, whole nuts, popcorn, hard raw carrot — are never served.

  • One nap, mostly

    Most of the room consolidates to a single after-lunch sleep during this year. Children who still need a morning sleep get one, in their own cot, with the room darkened.

The rhythm

A day in toddlers

  1. 7:30 – 8:45Arrival, slow start, breakfast for whoever needs it.
  2. 9:00The shelf is fresh; the room opens up. Climbing, carrying, water.
  3. 10:00Outside — the toddler yard, whatever the weather.
  4. 11:30Lunch together at the low table.
  5. 12:15 – 2:30Sleep, then a slow wake with books.
  6. 3:00 – 5:30Snack, outside again, and the long calm end of the day.

On the shelf

Materials in this room

  • A wooden ramp, platform and steps
  • Baskets, buckets and bags — anything with a handle
  • Posting and dropping boxes, wooden balls and runs
  • Board books at floor level, faced out
  • Water and sand in shallow trays, most days

Moving on

Toddlers move to Twos around 24 months, in small groups of two or three so that a friendship makes the move with them.

See the toddlers room with children in it

Tours run Tuesday and Thursday at 9:30am, while the rooms are full and working. We do not tour on a quiet afternoon, because a quiet afternoon tells you nothing.

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