Great Spaces for Babies

08/09/2007

Every child begins the world again.
Henry David Thoreau

In one of the newest Out of the Box Training Kits, “Great Places to Be a Baby: Infants' and Toddlers' Learning Environments,” Jim Greenman provides practical suggestions on setting up appropriate spaces for infants in a child care setting. In introducing this article, he observes that babies enter the world with four big jobs:

To make sense of the world. Through exploring the sensoryscape of the places they enter, infants progress from seeing to looking, smelling to sniffing, hearing to listening, feeling to touching, and from being moved about to moving.
To discover and develop all their bodily powers. The landscapes they inhabit help or inhibit their efforts to move from laying around to roll over to pull up, from creeping to crawling to stepping to toddling, from grasping to holding to dropping to tossing, from finding to searching, from poking to digging, from doing to thinking and planning.
To fully connect with others. Through coming to deeply know others and be known and prized, babies move from the womb to the world, from mothers to others, to “I” to “we” to “us,” from instinct to basic trust, from total dependency to autonomy, from only "I want" to "I want to give."
To learn to communicate fully. Through conversation, babies go from cries and gurgles to many vocalizations; from: Ma or Da to hundreds of words; from: “I want” to “please pass the potatoes”; from talking to drawing to writing.

Training Staff on Environments and Infants

Now you can use the Out of the Box Training Kit, “Great Places to Be a Baby: Infants' and Toddlers' Learning Environments,” as well as other Kits focusing on infants and toddlers, on environments, and on curriculum topics to beef up and reduce the stress of your staff development efforts. Take a few minutes to look through our extensive list of Out of the Box Training Kits at Then pick out five Kits that meet your needs and get one of them for free.

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