Six Important Life Skills Children Learn In Preschool

A child learns constantly. Every new experience creates opportunities for acquiring life lessons. Preschool teaches and reinforces skills in a nurturing setting. By interacting with each other and receiving gentle guidance from teachers, preschoolers learn valuable skills, qualities, and values.

Making Good Decisions

When young children interact with each other, there are plenty of opportunities to learn from choices that are made. As they play and work together on an activity, they quickly decipher which behaviors are acceptable and which are not. They get to test boundaries while seeing the direct consequences of their actions. Through their interactions, they learn, for example, that cooperation is met with approval while pushing or grabbing leads to lost privileges. By playing out different scenarios and experiencing the outcome of different choices, children figure out how to make good decisions in a safe group setting.

Communicating Well

Through songs, play, and age-appropriate lessons, young students learn how to communicate well. In addition to acquiring basic writing skills, they are practicing how to speak in complete sentences, how to verbally ask for what they want, and how to explain their point of view. Each school day provides new opportunities to verbalize ideas and express them to peers and patient teachers. Communication may be simple at first, but with practice even the quietest preschooler will soon know how to communicate effectively one-on-one and in a group.

Making Friends

This important lifelong skill can blossom in preschool. Young children learn the essentials that go into making a friendship. They figure out how to be a good friend, and they have the opportunity to experience friendships with classmates who may have different interests, abilities, and backgrounds.

Helping Others

Children have a natural desire to help others. When preschool teachers trained in classroom dynamics and human behavior guide this innate inclination, a child can display qualities like compassion and empathy. In class, children are encouraged to help one another. When a preschooler sees classmates helping each other, it strengthens that innate desire to help others.

Sharing

A preschool setting also strongly nurtures sharing. An activity like coloring, for example, naturally creates the opportunity to share crayons. Playing with toys, puzzles, and building blocks also leads to informal lessons on cooperating and sharing, as well as patience, taking turns, and working together as a team.

Developing Confidence

The early classroom setting offers excellent opportunities to try new things and, over time, excel at them. This process of trying something repeatedly until achieving success is the way to develop confidence. Also, activities that give a child the chance to contribute in a visible, meaningful way build self-confidence.

Participating in show-and-tell or serving as a classroom helper can increase and reinforce a sense of confidence in every preschooler. This can-do attitude developed early in life will carry over into primary and secondary grades to give each child the necessary internal strength to embrace life confidently at every stage.