Kindergarten

 

 

 

Aims of the Kindergarten

 

A lot of emphasis is put on creative learning, helping children to discover the world around them, and laying the foundations for the language and number skills, and physical abilities, they will need later on.

 

Children entering the Kindergarten must be aged four in the year they start. If places are available children aged 3½ (cut-off date 31 December) can also be accepted.

 

The Kindergarten aims to ensure that all the children are given the opportunity to develop their potential. The Kindergarten covers these broad areas of learning:

  • Creative learning, i.e. art and craft, creative language, drama and self-expression, music and dance.
  • Investigative learning, i.e. natural science, mathematics, the lives of men and women in the world and other topics.
  • The foundations for the acquisition of skills in language, mathematics and physical control.

Alongside this broad programme, attention is given to the social and moral development of the children.

 

Nursery school at the European schools has several objectives:

  • to provide four-year-olds with an opportunity to socialise for the first time with children of the same mother tongue, preferably in a group comprising children of a slightly different age (aged four and five)
  • to teach children how to behave in a classroom group: listening, asking permission to speak, waiting one’s turn, sharing toys with others, concentrating for some time, etc.
  • to introduce four- and five-year-olds to play-based learning, without formal systematic teaching and learning: basic mathematical language, quantification, seriation, classification, etc.
  • to teach children how to handle coloured pencils and drawing implements, to use construction cubes, to participate in team games
  • to teach children to obey the rules of communal life, to eat their snacks tidily, not to push, to respect other people’s property
  • to prepare pupils for entry into their first year of compulsory education, namely primary year 1, by ensuring that they acquire the basic competences
  • to diagnose possible learning difficulties in pupils and help them to overcome them through early (preventive) intervention.

 

 

General introduction to the nursery and primary school curricula

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We provide mother-tongue education—in different language sections—from Kindergarten up to Baccalaureate level (university entrance) for around 1000 pupils from a wide variety of backgrounds. Currently 16 languages are taught in the school, and 49 different nationalities are represented. The European Baccalaureate, awarded ONLY by the European Schools, is recognised as a qualification for university entrance by all member states of the European Union and by other countries including the USA.