The earlier and more appropriate children start learning a new language, the faster and better they learn it without damaging their mother tongue. At Eureka, children learn the other language in the way they learnt their mother tongue, i.e. by naturally and unconsciously taking it up from the language environment and communication situations. A child aged 2-5 is not yet ready to learn grammar rules, but is best able to memorize what is related to personal experience and learn languages by actively practising, playing, communicating and using a language. We are convinced that children who know more than one language have better reading, writing, cognitive, intellectual skills and a better memory, so they do better in higher grades.
We do our best to make a child’s vocabulary expressive and broad so that a child would be able to express personal thoughts, feelings, and opinions clearly. We develop children’s communication with peers and adults through playful methods. Non-standard and children-friendly educational tools improve children’s vocabulary, pronunciation, intonation, sentence consistency, and ensure successful application of the communication skills in practice. We pay much attention to concentration. Eureka’s children achieve this goal through attention games, listening to interesting fairy tales and stories, and creating their own stories. With the help of rhythmic educational poems, our children learn to feel the rhyme, the play, and the sound of words. We believe that the more opportunities children have to hear and express their thoughts, the better they know the world.
By providing a cozy letter environment at Eureka, we aim at cultivating children’s love for books and the natural motivation of little explorers to read. If a child early understands that reading is the key to the remarkable world of books and the potential to read a favorite fairy tale independently, this understanding will become an incentive for a child to achieve the desired result faster and to become a reader. Children listen to a teacher reading them a tale at the beginning of the rest time, we read books together during the evening library time, analyze books and fairy tale characters when discussing contextual topics of a week, children retell the stories they have heard, create their own story characters and are involved in children’s book cognition events.
We do our best so that the explorers at Eureka are able not only to name the words but also to write them down. We learn this in small steps: at first, we try to repeat the symbols, letters, shapes, and numbers written by a teacher; later, children try to name and write them down by themselves. To make the process more interesting, we invoke unique and playful methods – we write on snow, sand, light or rice spilled on the table, try to mold 3D shapes, and so on. In the first months, we write words together, and after children tame pencils, we embark on a journey of the art of writing.