Anticipate young children’s exuberance and ensure the space is clear and suitable for their rapid and sometimes unpredictable movements.
Provide opportunities to swing, spin and bounce.
Provide different arrangements of toys and soft play materials to encourage crawling, tumbling, rolling and climbing.
Use music to stimulate exploration with rhythmic movements.
Ensure that toddlers spend lots of time outdoors experiencing uneven ground and changing gradients.
Provide a daily walk (out of pushchairs) in the immediate locality: the same walk every day is most valuable at this age.
Provide a range of wheeled toys indoors and outdoors, such as trundle trikes, buggies for dolls, push carts and wheelbarrows.
Offer “heuristic” (exploratory) play with sets of simple natural and household objects for toddlers to manipulate, investigate and find out what they can make them do.
Provide items for filling, emptying and carrying, and a variety of materials to put into them.
Provide materials that enable children to help with care-taking tasks such as sweeping, washing, pouring and digging.
Provide sticks, rollers and moulds for young children to use in dough, clay, mud or sand.
