Early childhood

We believe in the importance of the emotional well-being of all members of the school, young and old, boys and girls, and in the richness that these social relationships bring us. For this reason, we have been part of the Public Health program, as a pilot school, to work and delve deeper into the work of emotions with our preschool students in Barcelona for two years.

We understand emotional education as the ability to control and recognize our own feelings and emotions and those of others, to discriminate them and to use this information to guide our thinking and our actions.

Emotional education aims to respond to social needs that are not part of the ordinary academic curriculum.

Our goals are:

• Acquire a better understanding of our emotions.
• Identify the emotions of others.
• Develop the ability to control our emotions and take care of our well-being.
• Prevent the harmful effects of negative emotions.
• Develop the ability to generate positive emotions at an early age.
• Develop greater emotional competence from preschool.

• They contribute to the comprehensive growth of children, as they generate multiple experiences for those who participate. They promote the child’s activity and autonomy, allowing them to learn and discover, solving different situations on their own or with the help of their peers through play and experimentation in safe spaces for them.
• The environments are different learning spaces, where the child relates, communicates and, through different proposals, can observe, experiment, build, manipulate, invent and get excited, while interacting with their peers.
• With the learning environments we aim to respond to the need that children show to play, relate and discover the world through the five senses. It is a way of giving space to their interests and needs, while respecting the different learning rhythms.
• It is a space for interaction between students, since they are groups where children from all stages are mixed and some of the activities must be solved together. The children reflect and share the different actions they are carrying out.
• The fact that it is a single-line school makes it possible to mix students from the three kindergarten years and in this way the interaction brings us even more richness when children of different ages live together.
• Each environment is located in a different space and has a reference teacher. We dedicate one afternoon a week to working with this methodology.
• We currently have four environments in our preschool school in Barcelona: Fine Hands, Symbolic Play, Experimentation and Art.

• Organized in small groups, children learn to work as a team, collaborate and share knowledge. Simultaneous environments also enhance skills such as initiative, creativity and a sense of responsibility.
• They allow us to organize the classroom into small groups, each of which carries out a specific and different task.
• Depending on the type of activity, some environments need to be directed by the teacher, while in others the children can function quite autonomously.
• We teachers monitor so that each child goes through all the simultaneous environments over a period of time (week, fortnight, etc.).

Working through simultaneous environments allows us to devote more individualized attention to each child, planning learning activities adapted to their previous knowledge and skills.
These activities are carried out in a meaningful way and from a constructivist perspective, based on the knowledge of the different children, and some of them will be solved cooperatively.

Project work helps early childhood education students learn to learn, motivates them to discover and, most importantly, achieve meaningful learning. Project work is a methodology that is based on offering channels that can help children think for themselves, to investigate, to learn from their mistakes and their successes, and in this way also helps students to be critical and promotes their development. These projects have application in the real world beyond the classroom and seek to create an interdisciplinary education with meaning.

The teacher accompanies and guides students in their discovery and learning. It stimulates children and fosters learning situations that allow students to advance and enrich themselves. It provides the necessary resources so that they are the ones who build their own knowledge autonomously through activities.

Advantages of working through projects:

• It promotes children’s autonomy. They learn to be competent and solve the challenges that arise for them.
• Children are active in their learning process. They get involved in what they are working on and they are the ones who guide their own learning.
• It promotes meaningful learning. Children fit the contents together, forming a network of knowledge.
• It promotes interdisciplinary work, as it allows them to acquire knowledge from different educational areas.
• It allows for the diversity that we find in classrooms: flexibility in the pace of work, in methodologies, contents, etc.
• It uses new technologies. By doing research, they greatly improve their digital competence.
• It promotes a classroom environment in which very important values ​​such as respect, tolerance, solidarity and teamwork are practiced.
• Teachers and children work together, forming a team to solve the challenges that arise. They improve skills such as problem solving and task organization.
• It promotes cooperative learning. Great importance is given to group work and collaboration, since it is in these learning situations where children can learn from each other.
• Children are motivated in their training, because this methodology gives them the opportunity to choose what they want to work on and what interests them. This increases their involvement in the project and makes everything they learn meaningful to them.
• It allows children to connect with reality, beyond textbooks or master classes. They prepare them for real life.
• The child learns to think, search for information and investigate. Not to memorize and mechanically acquire certain contents.
• It strengthens social skills such as knowing how to be, knowing how to wait, knowing how to listen, knowing how to debate, knowing how to relate to others…
• It promotes children’s confidence and self-esteem. Children feel proud when they see that they have overcome a challenge.
• They exercise the scientific method, as they make hypotheses, contrast them and finally draw conclusions.

We all need this attention, which should not be related to the detection of problems but to personal peculiarities in the emotional, intellectual, academic and social areas.
Individualized attention or attention to diversity is a work in values ​​that aims to bring out the best in each of our students and that, at the same time, contributes to a good school environment and leads to social cohesion, also fostering the relationship between family and school.

As a preschool, we use several strategies and methodologies to ensure that the teaching and learning process is as effective as possible:

• Daily individualized reading in P5 and 1st year of Primary.
• Group splits.
• Individual or group reinforcements according to training needs.
• Flexibility of schedules and personalized attention according to the needs of each student and family.

The school also has a psychopedagogical guidance team, made up of two psychopedagogical teachers, a pedagogue, and a speech therapist. Some of their functions are the following:o Diagnosis.

• Management of attention to diversity.
• Guidance for students, families and teachers.
• Monitoring the evolution of students cared for outside of school.
• Coordination of the school’s mediation service.

We work on diversity by adapting to the different developmental rhythms and intellectual capacities of each child.

Individual and group reinforcements allow us to accompany the learning process in a more personalized way, reinforcing knowledge, skills and competencies according to the specific needs of each student. This support promotes better adaptation to the dynamics of the school and facilitates continuous communication with the family.

Speech therapy is a very important discipline in our early childhood education school in Barcelona, ​​as it encompasses the study, prevention, evaluation, diagnosis and treatment of language pathologies (oral, written and gestural) manifested through disorders in the voice, speech, communication and orofacial functions.

The students on whom the speech therapist intervenes are related to patients with problems:

• Voice (dysphonia, aphonia)
• In language acquisition (delay, dysphasia)
• In verbal expression, pronunciation (dysarthria, dyslalia, diglossia)
• In reading and/or writing (dyslexia, dysgraphia)
• In expressive and/or comprehensive language (aphasia)
• In speech fluency (stuttering)
• In breathing, sucking, chewing and swallowing. The treatment of these difficulties is usually specifically called Myofunctional Therapy and is performed on both infants, children of different ages and adults.

These interventions are performed from P3 (Infant) to 6th grade (Primary)

Today, mastery of other languages, such as English, is becoming a basic component in the education of children, which favors the learning of new technologies and the knowledge of other cultures in a global and connected society such as that of a large city like Barcelona.

It is good that the student learns these foreign languages ​​in a natural way, starting from a young age and that the learning is rich and immersive.

Learning languages ​​at an early age is very beneficial for children since it develops their linguistic competence and, in this way, they better assimilate other languages ​​(including their mother tongue), which helps their development and intellectual growth.

In the early childhood education stage, students spend 7 hours a week in our students’ English training, discovering new vocabulary and expressions through images, games, stories and songs. At this stage, children get used to the sound of the language and immerse themselves in it through dynamic activities. The learning methodology is based on awakening interest in communication in the English language through positive and pleasant experiences for children.