Spending time with 2 year olds

I get to spend my days with some very cute 2 year olds. There are around twelve of them and even though i have only spent a few days with them I can assure you they all have very unique personalities. I LOVE this age. They are so cute, they are small and yet have more personality than lots of adults, it's like it's condensed because they are small. They are constantly discovering, learning and growing and when you are with them every day you are the one who gets to see this. They are learning to talk clearly, more vocabulary, to potty train, to wash hands, dress themselves, to draw, to build, to imagine..... They are constantly learning and there is always wonder. They enjoy the simple things, a bee in the room will have them so fascinated they will sit on the floor together for half an hour watching you catch it. They love stories, love to sing, love playing house and experimenting with sand and water. They are so proud of any creation they make and anything they learn. They love a lot and still want to cuddle.

Anyone who knows a two year old will tell you it's a challenging age, they are discovering so much, just learning to make choices, to do things independently, to communicate. For each of them their world still mostly revolves around them and 'mine' is a favourite word...Sharing is not a priority and they don't always want to be nice to their friends. They almost seem caught between baby hood and child hood, they want to be independent but are still pretty dependent and even though they sometimes want to be independent they still (offcourse) want attention and often want to be babied. Even though they are fully able to put their shoes on sometimes they just don't want to. They are not quite able to reason fully yet so explaining what is wrong takes creativity.

These are the people I spend my days with, preschool-2 class, next September many of them will be starting school so they learn to line up, listen, they are learning numbers, words, colours and shapes. This week and next week the topic is Space so we are learning about planets, moon stars, making papier mache planets and space cookies, imagining we're riding in space rockets, designing their own rockets, creating junk model aliens. We're a busy bunch!!!!!!!

So this is what I'm doing, this is my job. Being with the kids is a big part of it but paper work is also a big part of it. Daily written observations have to be done on each child noticing any developments in their learning from social skills to vocab to how they are holding their crayon. Monthly evaluations and target setting is done for each child. Everything that is observed has evidence such as pictures, photos etc. This makes up each child's personal file which goes home with them kind of like a report card each month (but a very full report card) We have to do lesson plans for each craft and activity we do stating what developmental goals it is aiming to fit and how each child responds to it. There is a lot to it.

So there is a whole bunch about my job. I enjoy it, I'm tired at the end of the day but it's good, I am learning lots. My voice is horse and croaky and I am not sure it will ever be normal again if I keep singing this many kids songs and making this many animal noises but other than that I'm doing well.