Areas of Focus

Recent research suggests that children’s interpersonal experiences have a marked effect on their cognitive development with experts discussing ‘goodness of fit’ (the compatibility of a person’s temperament with their surroundings), as a key component in helping children to develop self-esteem and achieve success.

These interpersonal experiences are underpinned by the development of emotional literacy, which is defined as the ability to understand and express feelings. Emotional literacy involves the recognition of one’s own emotions, knowing how to manage those emotions (self-regulation), and then learning about how to express them. Building on this knowledge, children also learn to recognize the emotions of others and to feel empathy for them.

At The Educationalist, we believe that the exploration of literacy should be both interactive and moving – with literature presented in various modalities such as rhyme, poetry, song, drama and play – methods that encourage participation on the part of the learner – and bring stories to life.

We are also passionate about empowering children in terms of finding their own unique voice, developing a sense of agency, and effectively communicating their ideas and perspectives to others.

Mathematical concepts are present in everyday life and form part of children’s learning from a young age.

Young children have a natural attraction to order and exhibit a mathematical mind, which tends to estimate, to see similarity and difference, to order, to categorise, and to control error. Time, shape, pattern and sequence are just a few of the mathematical concepts that children begin to make sense of in their earliest years.

Play provides children with the opportunity to explore unfamiliar ideas, to hypothesise, to construct complex scenarios and to multi-task in order to ensure that these scenarios unfold in the way they envision. It introduces children to a world of imagination, metaphor and symbol, the use of which has beneficial effects on brain development. It allows for analysis and meta-cognition (thinking about one’s own thinking), the flourishing of creativity, and it aids in the development of language by facilitating the verbal expression of thoughts and ideas, with children often using more sophisticated vocabulary when immersed in imaginative play.