Daycare Furniture – Working For or Against You

For daycare facilities, the supplies and the daycare furniture are very important necessities needed to help maintain physical environmental essentials for infant and toddler learning. For a teacher or a facilitator, the physical configuration can be your ally or can work against you.

Primarily, the physical placements of furniture pieces and on spaces left open can send the wrong signals to the children. One example is an open space in the center and furniture pieces placed against the wall. With this, all sorts of play can happen.

Triggers

It had been established that children can be sensitive to their surroundings. It comes to a point that their behaviors are cued and influenced by the spaces and other things around. The furniture pieces can be stimulating materials.

Furniture makers knew there is more to effective learning than the use of childhood school furniture than scaled-down children’s furniture.  Today, colors have been discovered to help keep children calm down.

Spaces

A completely open space sparks and invites running and rough game-playing with the older children who are already adept at running around. When the space is broken down into smaller ones, the children gets the meaning subconsciously.

Children always find the spaces that can be used for running. Some are creative enough to widen the small spaces wider for their physical activities. There is need to evaluate the placement of the furniture pieces in a room.

Children’s activities

When considering the space (and the furnishings to fill it up) for an environment for toddlers, it is important to have the space not too crowded or too open. The space need to be just right and adequate for the many activities of the toddlers.

Actually, this is for such activities as jumping and dance, and building with blocks. These children would need ample floor space to build their movements from rolling over to crawling and walking.

Having no space for these activities for them might hinder and impede their physical development. The younger kids also need some protected areas. They cannot be safely places in large spaces with the other moving and walking children.

Furniture 

Furniture and other supplies for the daycare can be mixed and grouped together to have an environment that will meet the needs of the young children with different ages, needs, characters and attitudes and other developing things in them.

One mistake is expecting infants and toddlers fit into an adult-sized space with only few modifications to fill the needs of the youngsters.

For adults only

Adult-sized facility may be easier on the caregiver. However, the daily interaction between them and the children with the inclusion of wrong-sized environment can end up in some chaos.

The adult-sized chairs and other furniture pieces will become instant climbing items for toddlers. The books that are not for infants can easily become their teething rings, maybe even a potential choking hazard.

Child-sizing the daycare furniture for the infant or toddler room will create a safer environment for your young wards. Doing so will also lets you spend less time lifting and re-directing children or bend over to pick up knocked-over items.