Kindergarten

Introduction

St. Kilian's kindergarten teaches 4 and 5 year old children to open themselves to the world around them and to learn the basic social, motor and mental skills to face their environment confidently and happily.

Research has shown that bilingual children have a more comprehensive cognitive approach to intellectual matters because the second language system stimulates more brain areas. This is why St. Kilian's helps children to accept a bilingual environment and teaches them to feel at home with two or more languages spoken.

• Social skills are developed by doing things together.
• Motor Skills grow when the children play together, run and jump, climb and dance. Fine motor skills arise from work with glue and cardboard, scissors, crayons and construction toys.
• Mental skills are acquired through the children being exposed to a second language. Also the St. Kilian's kindergarten introduces the senior kindergarten children to elementary literacy and numeracy.

Above all we try to make the children happy and confident that they are wanted and loved.

German in the Kindergarten

In recent years, about a third of the kindergarten children have been German speakers.

The kindergarten teachers are bilingual. It is their task to pursue two apparently diverging objectives:

• They make sure that all children experience a normal development of their linguistic potential in their mother tongues;
• and they try to ascertain that the children learn each others’ languages.

Learning how to speak a foreign language works best in an environment in which this language is actually spoken. This is why German speakers learn how to speak English easily in the language environment of Dublin, while German requires the support of a teacher.

Learning German is fun in the St. Kilian's kindergarten!

Contact: Elvira Byrne

Timetable