Preschool Program
Stepping foot into a school for the first time can seem like a frightening thing if you’re a kid. Integrating into a new community and adapting to a new set of rules creates a wholly different life situation, in which the only thing the child can rely on (besides the support of their parents) is their own abilities. Our preschool program helps children acquire knowledge and skills that will enable them to handle the tasks and difficulties associated with school life more smoothly and to take on new challenges with confidence. The sessions are led by a professional psychologist, who awaits children with fun developmental exercises and parents with useful guidance.
Partial skills for starting school:
- Spatial and body scheme orientation: An important point in a child’s development at the age of 5-7 is the emergence of spatial orientation and the recognition of their own body schema. Among other things, these sessions are aimed at preventing the development of learning disabilities by familiarizing the children with two-dimensional surfaces, an essential skill to have when it comes to learning how to read and write and how to orient themselves in the world of books and letters.
- Visual and acoustic perception, attention, memory: In a school setting, visual uncertainties usually lead to difficulties in reading and learning, while hearing impairments can interfere with distinguishing between background noise and audible text, but they can also hinder the child’s ability to develop articulate speech. Meanwhile, attention sharpens visual and acoustic perception, creating optimal conditions for understanding, commenting, and presenting information.
- Cognitive structuring: The development of cognitive structures is an essential prerequisite of school readiness – without the ability to form effective cognitive structures, children will have a really hard time solving problems, following rules, drawing conclusions, and expressing their opinions, no matter the subject. This skill can be developed by practicing diverse and playful tasks, ensuring that children will start the school year with confidence, armed with a well-structured and universally applicable system of thought.
- Fine- and graphomotor skills: One could hardly find a soon-to-be schoolchild who isn’t filled with amazement at the sight of his or her first rainbow colored pencil set. However, to properly use these magical instruments, the child must first master the coordination of fine motor skills. Exercises that contribute to becoming proficient in writing and drawing focus on training the muscles of the hand, teaching the correct pencil grip, and getting to know the basic elements of writing and the letters of the alphabet.
- Phonological awareness:By phonological awareness we mean the breaking down of words into their basic components, which is the foundation stone of not only reading and comprehension, but also of spelling. This awareness is developed through playful tasks: at the phonological level, the focus is on rhyming, segmentation and synthesis of words and syllables, while at the phoneme level, the emphasis is on the isolation, segmentation, and synthesis of speech.
- General skills: Environmental changes, such as those experienced by children when they start attending school, can pose a number of complex challenges to the child, the preliminary practice of which helps facilitate social integration and compliance. The development of social skills ranges from group collaboration and interpersonal adaptation to learning how to delay the urge to speech. In addition to picking up on how to follow rules, children will also develop their tolerance for monotony during the sessions, improving their concentration.
The goal of the preschool program is to develop these skills in a playful way.
Registration
- 2021. From May 20, 2021
