Education enables children to acquire academic achievements that help them better interpret life situations and make good decisions. It also teaches them how to deal with stress, which is a vital skill that can serve them well in the future.
Educators use play to develop children’s motor skills, sensory experiences, and imagination. They also introduce kids to various art and music activities.
Nurturing Environment
Children who are raised in healthy environments develop emotional resilience and a growth mindset. They also are better able to cope with stress and other challenges. This allows them to become productive members of society.
Nurturing environment can help reduce the prevalence of multiple problems – such as academic failure, crime, mental illness, drug addiction, risky sexual behavior, poverty and physical illness – by providing opportunities for prosocial behaviors and promoting positive health outcomes.
Educators understand how to capitalize on young children’s interests and elicit their curiosity through meaningful activities that promote cognitive development. They use their knowledge of the learning progressions for subject area knowledge and of the common misconceptions that occur at different points in these progressions to design educational materials that advance children’s understanding of a given topic.
They also use their deep knowledge of each child to provide the right amount and type of scaffolding based on their unique strengths and needs.
Social and Emotional Development
Children’s social-emotional development influences all domains of their learning. It helps them become confident and empathic people, able to form meaningful relationships with others.
It also allows them to manage their emotions, build self-esteem, and learn in different social environments. These skills can help them succeed academically, develop positive relationships, and contribute to the community.
Teachers help kids build these skills through establishing trusting relationships. They do this by modeling appropriate behaviors, providing reinforcement, and teaching empathy and cooperation.
In addition, they teach emotion regulation strategies, such as distraction techniques and cognitive appraisal methods (i.e., choosing to focus on positive aspects of a situation).
Girls are particularly at risk for missing out on their right to quality education due to conflict, natural disasters, poor health and nutrition, geographic isolation, social exclusion and poverty. Educating them supports family stability, bolsters communities’ economies and improves child protection. Educated girls are more likely to stay in school and thrive at home, in school, and in the workplace.
Academic Development
The foundations of the subject areas that children will study later in school, from language and math to science and social studies, are established early in childhood. Even as young children register the superficial appearance of objects, they are constructing explanatory systems—implicit theories—that organize their knowledge. Educators need to understand this developmental process so they can support it with learning activities that challenge children and help them move beyond the implicit theories they have developed.
Educators also need to have subject-area knowledge, an understanding of the learning progressions within each area, and pedagogical knowledge about teaching each subject’s content effectively. These domains can differ in the ways they are categorized by different fields and research and practice communities. Nevertheless, it is important for educators to use common terminology and a consistent framework to promote clarity and communication across these domains and subject areas. In doing so, they can avoid misunderstandings and misconceptions about children’s cognitive abilities that can lead to inappropriate educational strategies and materials.
Life Skills
There are many life skills that children should be taught in order to prepare them for adulthood. This includes basic hygiene, how to cook and clean, how to use money wisely, and how to stay safe.
These are all skills that will help kids function in society and be able to provide for themselves as they grow older. Children should also be taught how to deal with problems and challenges as they come up in life.
Children should be encouraged to try things out and be courageous enough to accept the outcome. This will build their self-belief and confidence to learn more new things. Also, teach them to understand that there are some things they can control and some that are out of their hands. For example, if it is raining and they want to go to the park, but it’s too wet then that may not be something they can change. This will help them develop their understanding of causal inference.