The game is the child’s work, it’s his job, it’s his life. That was the design Pauline Kergomard, general delegate to the inspection of facilities for asylum ancestors kindergartens established in 1881.
Once upon a time there was kindergarten
It was in 1881 that the asylum rooms resumed their original name of nursery schools. Children are welcome from their 2 years old up to the age of 7. On January 18, 1887, an implementing decree defined, at the instigation of Pauline Kergomard, the outlines of the education provided in these infant classes.
On the program: games, sports, songs, manual exercises, principles of moral education, and language exercises coupled with an introduction to drawing, reading, writing and arithmetic. Already comparable to an elementary school, this school vision of the nursery school ultimately displeases Pauline Kergomard who insists in 1905 on the primary role of this privileged place: “to be neither a nursery, nor an elementary school: it must only prepare and send children in primary school. ”
The nursery school was open to everyone from the 1950s, and no longer to children from low-income families. Gradually, it thus became the site of the first socialization from 1971.
Kindergarten for everyone, but with the parents’ consent
While France imposes compulsory education for ages 6 to 16, enrollment in nursery school is the choice of parents. They must, of their own free will, apply for enrollment in Kindergarten. 90% of the steps they take from their child’s 3 years old. This is a generalization of early schooling which is not unanimous in Europe.Thus, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Finland, Poland, Sweden and even the Czech Republic more generally welcome the majority of children on their benches from the age of 6.
Who’s wrong, who’s right?
Going to school at 3, is it so important?
As early as 1954, Suzanne Herbinière-Lebert, Inspector General of Public Education, wrote that “it is important to find the means to ensure, for all children, that primary education on which the future of the individual largely depends.”
A real sponge, the brain of children aged 3 to 6 is capable of great memorization. It absorbs nursery rhymes as well as songs as well as vocabulary words in all their diversity, at the rate of more than a hundred per year of kindergarten. This isa major challenge for anticipating the apprehension of reading and understanding texts.
“Today I drew”
Far from thoughtless sketches, nursery school provides a framework for the child. It teaches him to find his way in time, with a rhythmic sequencing of each day, but also to position himself in space.
How? ‘Or’ What? By coloring and regular flat colors, the play of materials and shapes. There are so many activities allowing him to develop his fine motor skills. The latter being the basis for learning graphic design and therefore writing, by training the hand and working with gestures.
