What are the advantages of bringing a young child to the nursery school? How do children learn at a very young age and why is early emotional development important? These are just a few of the questions we’ve asked Ioana Botez, counsellor and systemic psychotherapist in charge of children’s emotional development at Avenor Nursery. Ioana has 12 years of experience in working with children, following the British Curriculum, designing educational training materials for disadvantaged groups and mediating communication with foreign childcare professionals.
Avenor College: How can nursery activities help very young children develop self-confidence?
Ioana Botez: Nursery schools help children experiment with all kinds of activities that they have never done before or they wanted to do but they never had the opportunity. Here, children become aware of what they are capable of by: jumping, rolling, practising fine motor skills, role-playing and looking at books. In fact, we start looking at books and developing our passion for books from a very early age.
Role-playing builds language, critical thinking, and social skills as children take on roles and develop their own ideas and stories. This is why it is important for toddlers to be guided in all the new activities they are beginning to experience.
A.C.: How do you approach emotional regulation with children as young as 2 years old?
I.B.: Feelings and behaviour are quite a challenging subject at this age, but that’s why we have togetherness and stories. We are looking at the characters and we are discovering that they have similar feelings to ours, such as: happiness, sadness, anger or fear. Moreover, we learn in an experiential manner that it’s absolutely natural to express the way you feel as long as your emotional self-expression does not hurt others. We learn about rules, ways to follow them, but also to break them, because as you may know, at two and three years old, it’s quite fun and useful testing rules as an expression of independence.
A.C.: Why are relationships important at this young age?
I.B.: It’s been well known that relationships help children make progress in all areas of development. If you are looking at children playing in different areas of experience, such as the Maths Area, Small World Area, and so on, you will find out that they build on each other’s knowledge with facilitation from an adult. It’s very important to let children socialise with peers for an extended period of time in order to enable environments for them to spend time away from their main carers, develop physically in both fine and gross motor skills, use and perfect language, as well as build positive relationships with confidence.
