My Limit: Six Toddlers

Some time ago, I came to the realization that the ration of six preschoolers or six toddlers to one teacher worked for me, and ever since, I have stived to maintain that quota system while I teach preschool music class. It’s worked out very nicely for me.

Yesterday I was in charge of the toddler room during the service at my church. Parents drop off their two and three year olds, and a middle school-aged student and I watch them while they attend the main service. The kids play with play dough, sing and play instruments, hear a story, make a craft and play for the remainder of the time. I’ve been involved in running the toddler room for quite some time, and I felt pretty well prepared yesterday.

However, we had nine kids. This does not sound like an unreasonable number, but for some strange reason, most of the regular attending kids were not there, and there was a whole slough of visitors or kids who had just turned two and weren’t really used to coming to the toddler room. This coupled with the fact that one child in particular (we’ll call him Bart, but that’s not his name) was a regular old little terror.

Bart enters the toddler room while we are playing with play dough, but elects to smear his playdough all over the Little People Toys instead of keeping it on the mat like all the other kids. Before I can attend to this Bart’s mom tells me that he and his twin sister are very newly potty trained and that he should try to go to the bathroom every 20 minutes or so. While she’s explaining this, Bart involves himself in smashing the toys into the shelves where they were resting.

During music time, Bart throws his egg shakers. The helper takes him to the bathroom and they are gone for a very long time. When they come back to the toddler room I ask if Bart had actually gone potty, but it turned out that he took off his pants and then nearly destroyed the bathroom.

During playtime Bart rammed into a tower that two shy girls were building. The tower of blocks crashed down and the girls began sobbing. I helped Bart apologize and then let the girls sit on what little lap I have, so for a bit I was out of commission in my role of supervisor because I was stuck on the floor with a big belly and two sobbing girls. Thankfully I had an astute helper, and no one actually escaped out of the room.

During craft time Bart threw his crayons across the room. I helped another toddler who had gotten ahold of the scotch tape and unrolled about two miles of clear stickiness, and I looked backward, and noticed Bart walking up and down the top of the craft table. I got him back in his chair and started helping someone else, only to disover Bart was underneath the table. I encouraged him to make friends with his chair, and went to help yet another toddler and heard the words, “LOOK AT ME! I’M COLORING THE WALL!” And sure enough, there was Bart in the corner at the end of the table with about four crayons clutched in those little fingers making creative streaks all across the wall.

The toddler room had turned into a complete zoo and needless to say, by the time I got home, I was ready for a long, long nap.