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TOPIC 2 DIMENSIONS OF YOUNG CHILDREN’S SETTING 
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(a) Developmentally Appropriate Material
Environments should provide children with opportunities to interact with a lot of developmentally appropriate physical materials. Children are active learners and learn most effectively through physical involvement. They participate in a variety of physical activities that suit their interests and abilities.
(b) Opportunities for Concrete Physical Activities
Children need many ways to practise and integrate their new experiences into their existing experience. They require hands-on activities to experiment with things around them using their physical senses. The use of concrete physical activities will be able to help children to understand certain concepts in a meaningful way. Playing in the water, making things with dough and blocks help them to connect concepts through concrete experience.
(c) Variety of Stimulation
Children need more variation with a lot of activities in a stimulating environment. They interact with the environment in different situations. Therefore, a quality stimulating environment is crucial for their development. They use different ways of learning while interacting with the environment. Stimulating choices of materials and activities facilitate childrenÊs learning. A stimulating environment offers children many interesting things to do, see, hear and touch. It is the adultÊs role to provide a stimulating environment for young children.
(d) Colour and Decoration
Colour and decoration should be used to support the various functional areas in the early childhood setting to provide needed stimulus change and develop different moods in the room. Vibrant colours such as red and yellow work well in the gross motor area, while soothing blue and green are good choices for hands-on learning corner. Whereas white and light colours are good for areas that need lots of concentration. Soft pastels work well in reading areas and other low intensity activities. For babies, their eyesight is very limited. Sharp and contrast colours (such as black and white) with large patterns are much easier for them to see and focus. Several researchers have shown that babies show preferences for patterns with high contrast and cannot detect simple patterns with little contrast. For example, infants tend to be interested in objects or images with bold chequerboard patterns or bulls-eye patterns that have sharp contrasting colours.
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