Studying at a Higher Vocational School for Early Childhood Education in year 5 provides students with the chance of applying their professional knowledge of teaching in nursery school to other subjects, for example in English. This is why students were asked to demonstrate their knowledge on the topics „pets in nursery school“ and „children with special needs“. Below you can find some good examples of these texts.
Viktoria Portschy
Posted by: Natalie St.
Date: 30th Nov 2018, 9:11
Subject: Pets in kindergarten
Hello fellow Nursery Teachers United readers!
Yesterday I read an interesting text in the local newspaper about pets in our daily workplace. I had the thought of how it would be, if we also had pets in our kindergarten workplace and found some interesting points.
Imagine you had a dog in your kindergarten group. Or maybe a cute bunny? What would change? What impacts would it have on your children? Well, first and foremost the children would probably learn to take care of something, an animal in particular and what it means to have responsibilities. Also, I believe the stress level of the children and also us adults would decrease, if we could pet an animal at work.
But we have to be careful with this matter. Some parents could say that this is not a good idea, and don’t want to have pets in their children’s group. Children could get dirty and sometimes smelly, which some will not like. It could also mean a great distraction for the kids when they have to concentrate and some will be unsure about who pays the costs. Additionally, you have to keep in mind that under no circumstances you can have a pet in your group if a child has an allergy.
Under these preconditions you may ask if it’s worth the trouble. Well, I thought about this issue beforehand and arrived at some conclusions how you could easily hold an animal in your group. You should prefer smaller animals. For those you could have a cage in your garden or in a small extra room. They’re easy to care for and don’t cost as much as a dog or other bigger animals, for which I believe you need more food in proportion.
Hopefully I could give you an helpful insight into this topic, and maybe made you a little curios, so that in the future there will be more cute animals in our kindergarten groups that we and the children can grow on.
All the best,
Natalie
Pets in nursery schools?
by Corinna L. on “Nursery Teachers United!” – 30 November 2018 – 09:10
Many people have got pets like dogs or cats at home. Nowadays it is quite normal to take this animal with you to your workplace. According to an extract in a newspaper, there are many positive effects of pets in the office. But what if you are a nursery teacher?
It is not a secret that children love animals. Especially the smaller ones like cats or rabbits. But these pets are not only loved by the kids, they have positive effects on them, too. Stroking a dog for example, can calm them down after having had an argument with somebody. Moreover, they learn how to treat animals correctly and what these animals need.
Nonetheless, not all parents like the fact that there could be pets in the nursery schools of their children. They often believe the pets would injure their kids by biting them. But the most common fear of the mums and dads out there is that their children are allergic against dogs and all the other animals.
They are not wrong. There is always the possibility that pets can injure the children or trigger an allergy. But for that reason it is important to have guidelines which prevent such incidents. Parents should be asked about possible allergies of their children, before pets can visit the nursery school. Also, there should be times, in which pets are not allowed to come. This could be hours but also months. The maybe most important guideline should be the agreement of the parents.
Pets in nursery schools are not a bad idea. There only has to be the right preparation for having an animal there and of course the agreement of everybody.
Stop disparity
Autism, paraplegia or attention deficit disorders are all special needs which cause limitations on a daily basis. As a consequence, those children are often excluded, because nursery teachers don’t know how to handle those difficulties, but how can we change this exclusion?
Autistic people, for example, struggle with showing empathy for others, as well as getting out of their routine. In comparison, children with attention deficiency disorder can cause a kindergarten routine to totally get out of order, caused by their restlessness, even though that is not their intention. Accessibility for children with impairments like paraplegia, is an important element to manage their daily routine.
But not only accessibility is significant for children with special needs, they often are treated differently, which makes it impossible for them to be treated equally. That’s why inclusion is so vital. Inclusion assumes that all children have specific needs, which have to be pleased. Moreover, it is easier for them to fit in with the rest of the group, when handled equally.
Sometimes it’s really hard for parents to hear that their child is different and also deals differently with the rest of the children attending kindergarten. That’s why every parent out there should not only see the negative, but also start seeing the positive aspects of their child. We really have to keep in mind that some children do not have the opportunity to go to kindergarten. Another important factor to memorize is that every child deals differently with different situations and not only children with special needs require more scheduling beforehand.
To conclude, we should really try to treat all children equally and also start accepting that everyone is different despite their problems, in order to enable a good childhood.
Joy Sch.