How to Encourage Children
Encourage Children: Every single preschool environment working to professional standards will spend a lot of time and energy constantly trying to do better on the above subject.
That applies very much to Read2Grow’s Nollamara daycare centre.
Children need encouragement
Almost all children have a natural predisposition towards learning. That can be observed from the time they’re babies onwards. Their ability to learn accelerates as they grow up and their capacity to absorb new information and ‘learning’ is phenomenal.
However, it has also long been recognised that the environment in which they learn can play a massive role in how much and well they learn or conversely, how much their learning is constrained and negatively impacted.
One of the key concepts in helping children to learn faster and more effectively is that of providing stimulation through encouragement. Why?
Much of a child’s natural inclination towards learning is part of a basic animal survival instinct. The more familiar you are with your surrounding environment, its dangers and opportunities, the more likely you are to survive.
Yet human learning isn’t just about survival instinct. Humans are, as far as we know, unique amongst species in terms of trying to understand why things are the way they are and what makes them work. They also apply that understanding, once obtained, towards very significantly changing their environment – hopefully, even if sadly not always, for the better!
It is that latter learning and curiosity that, while latent, benefits hugely from being developed and stimulated. That is a role that a professional daycare centre should be excelling in.
How to encourage children’s learning
There is no single method. For example, we are proud expert practitioners of the Jolly Phonics program, designed to help children learn to read faster.
Yet there are other core principles we also apply:
- to provide stimulating and highly variable surroundings and scenarios that, through play and more structured teaching, give children things that will appeal to their natural curiosity. Children tend not to be encouraged to learn if things are routine or overly familiar. That’s a hair’s breadth away from being seen as boring;
- never to criticise a child’s efforts or ignore their questions and inquiries. Nothing demotivates children faster than thinking their natural curiosity is somehow ‘silly’, misplaced or anything other than welcomed;
- never to suggest that they have somehow failed or haven’t done as well as another child or children. No human being should ever be told they’re a failure and that is most certainly true of highly emotionally vulnerable preschoolers;
- to always offer praise when they’ve tried to do something – even if, in reality, their efforts were somewhat less than successful! Of course, this is also accompanied by constructive and helpful suggestions as to how they might do better in future or perhaps more accurately, what the next step in progression is. A careful balance needs to be struck here, as a child should not believe they have mastered something and there’s no room for improvement.
In our experience, these approaches encourage children to explore and take steps towards realising their full potential. They are an excellent stepping-stone towards future full schooling.
If you’d like to discover more of our Nollamara daycare centre development philosophies, why not call for an appointment to come over and see us?
