You can help your child adjust to nursery school by taking her for one or two visits well in advance of her start date. Encourage her to play with the other children and to sit at one of the work tables or play with some of the equipment. But try not to push her to socialize with other children if she doesn’t seem eager to at first. Some children(Tackling Problem Children) are naturally more gregarious than others, and she adjust in her own goo time. The aim is to make her visits as enjoyable as possible. If you stress all the fun things she will do, her eager anticipation for school will be stronger than her worry about leaving you. If she is having trouble adjusting, most nursery schools will let you stay with her on the first day and for steadily decreasing periods of time on the following days. Make sure you pick her up yourself for the first week when she is most insecure. Once she is confident that she’s not being abandoned, you’ll be free to make other arrangements for pickup.
Your child’s personality, maturity, place in the family, and willingness to leave home all will influence the way she settles down at preschool. In general, boys are more likely than girls of the same age to cry when their mothers first leave them at nursery school and they tend to cry when frustrated or angry with a teacher or helper. On the other hand, your child may enjoy being with other children as much as she does anything else about preschool. It’s not unusual for two little boys or girls to rush eagerly toward each other when they meet at school.
Although your child is now attending nursery school, this doesn’t mean that your part in her education is finished. Ask her what she has done at school and who she played with. By getting her to talk over her school experiences you will be consolidating the new words and skills she is learning. You can help her to improve her use of language by repeating what she says in the correct form, though not by directly correcting her. Your preschool child will be constantly seeking new information, and you should always try to answer her questions truthfully. If you don’t know the answer it is best to suggest you both look it up in a book, or ask Daddy whether he knows, rather than just try to put her off.
How Children Behave at Nursery School
As a rule boys are more task-oriented in nursery school play while little girls talk more about being friends, recognizing similarities in each other, admiring one another’s clothes, discussing who’s friends with whom, and so on.
Dominant and aggressive behavior in little boys is very much in evidence in a preschool setting. Intelligence and ability to get along with others are as important to popularity in preschool as a boy’s size or physical prowess. Popularity fluctuates from day to day. Hitting is a common form of aggressiveness in preschool groups. A few girls strike out at others, but this behavior is more common among boys. Boys take longer to learn not to hit others and make unprovoked, if rather mild, attacks on girls. Some may, for example, push little girls or gesture menacingly at them.
