That boy needs therapy

A CHAIN of 10 bilingual nurseries in Almeria have designed an ‘early stimulation’ programme, aimed to optimise attention, concentration, emotional expression, language, and creativity.

The education brand offers almost 900 places for boys and girls aged 16 months to three years.

The new format was designed in-house, with input from two psychologists from the Integrated Graduate Studies (IGS) program sponsored by the Department of Employment, Business, and Trade of the Andalucian council.

It comprises three main sections: Bits Baby, Baby Gym, and Baby Music.

“An early, profuse, regular, good quality stimulation from childhood guarantees the proper acquisition of cerebral functioning,” says Isabel Fernandez Munzon, Director of the nursery at the University of Almeria, “That is why we are committed to developing educational techniques that enhance brain development, stimulate curiosity, improve attention span and increase vocabulary.”

She added that stimulation must be applied early in childhood, because the brain is in full development with a high learning capacity between the ages of zero and three.

The strategy for achieving such stimulation is through the introduction of games and exercises that exploit each and every moment of development, maximizing children’s potential skills and abilities, at a time when the brain is almost sponge-like in its capacity to learn.

According to Fernandez Munzon, music therapy “can stimulate language (spoken and body), attention, concentration, motor skills, ability to follow instructions, ability to synthesise and analyse and creativity.”

The Baby Bits portion of the program is based around numbers, and the director said: “In the first three years, a child can acquire the neurological capacity for mathematics, with it ceasing to be a mystery for him or her. In this sense, we use ‘bits’ of mathematics, a method that involves giving the child a large number of visual stimuli using sets of circles from 1 to 100.”