Skills Your Child Will Acquire In A Nursery School
Early childhood is the most important and sensitive stage of any person’s mental and physical development. At this early stage, a child’s mind completely opens up, thus allowing him/her to fully interact with its surroundings and start questioning all kinds of things.
However, to properly foster that development and behavior, a special environment is needed. In most cases, parents opt of a home-based learning environment for their developing children. However, such environment is usually not enough. These schools offer programs that are essential for the kids and their acquisition of key skills. The purpose of this article is to cover important skills taught to kids in nursery school, so keep reading if you want to know more about them.
Important skills learned
Social skills
Every child is unique and with its own unique individual traits. While some are friendly and confident, other are introvert and rather shy. One of the objectives of a nursery school is to provide a comfortable environment for the kids, which will allow them to develop their social skills, regardless of their personalities properly.
Cognitive skills
Kid’s cognitive skills are developed and strengthened by engaging in a wide variety of activities that challenge them to ask questions, observe their surroundings closely, solve problems, and test various ideas. The goal of nursery school teachers is to understand the needs of the children and provide the explanations that are perfectly suited for them. To properly stimulate the children’s cognitive processes, the teachers will rely more on “magical thinking” and the kids’ senses, instead of reason and common sense, so as to explain common things, such as why rocks sink, etc.
Language skills
Young children’s language skills must be nurtured from the earliest stages of their lives and in a highly “language rich” environment. In between the ages of 3 and 5, a kid’s vocabulary usually grows from around 1000 to more than 2.500 words. Also, their sentences become longer, and their syntax skills become more advanced. Nursery school teachers try to help the children acquire new language skills and further develop the old ones in a conversational manner, and by asking thought-provoking questions during art or science classes, during snack time or some other activities. To bolster their speaking skills, the kids are strongly encouraged to act out stories, sing, and read aloud their favorite books.
Early math skills
In a nursery school, a child will obtain an early understanding of categories and sequences, as well as numbers, all of which will support later math skill acquisition. This is achieved mainly through a variety of counting games, sorting games, board games and matching games. Also, with the help of puzzle games, a child will be encouraged to plan, come up with problem-solving solutions and notice patterns.
Physical and fine motor skills
Last, but not least, a nursery school also presents a perfect environment for children to properly develop their physical capabilities and fine motor skills. Through various physical activities and games, they will learn more about their bodies and the ways they can use their physical capabilities. This way, they can properly develop their muscles, bones, as well as coordination skills.
Also, by working with items such as scissors or some other crafts, the children can develop key fine motor skills, which are required for more complex activities and tasks in the future.