EXPERTS

Many animals have been to our kindergarten: ladybirds, a little cat that sometimes pays us a visit in the garden, a few sparrows, a few earthworms and also quite a lot of flies, bees and sadly also wasps, during summer. Last week, however, we had a very special visitor at our place: we had a visit from a little dog!
All the children at our kindergarten gathered around the dog in record time and they were very excited.

The performance pressure in our society, which determines very much the atmosphere and the way parents and children think and act in school life, can often be perceivable as early as in everyday kindergarten life. Parents wish for their children that they should learn and be supported as much and as intensively as possible. Many of them react with panic, or are at least anxious and filled with worry when their child doesn't correspond to the norm or doesn't manage what other children already can do at the same age.

We had planted potatoes in our little kindergarten garden. Now it was time to harvest. Digging them up was like a treasure hunt to the children. Every single potato turned into a coveted treasure! Each one was marvelled at and acclaimed. When we had gathered all of them, we counted them together. 1...2...3... - 88! We had exactly 88! One child goggled a lot and asked: "What? You can just find potatoes in the ground? You don't actually need to buy them?" Then the children were keen to sort the potatoes by size and to examine their different shapes. Some were sooo tiny that you really had to look very closely to be able to actually recognize them as a potato.

Now that the days are getting shorter and the trees are starting to change colour, we always enjoy doing some small projects on the season with our children. The children are supposed to collect all things possible outside that they feel are connected with the theme of autumn... coloured leaves, beechnuts, chestnuts, berries (while you need to take care that the children don't come back with anything poisonous or dangerous – if there isn't any opportunity to take the children outside, you can also take things with you yourself).

For the past half year I've been attending to two boys of two and three as a day nanny four days per week. It's going well altogether, the children have got used to me, and cooperation with the parents is working out well too. But there are situations time and again where I feel somewhat helpless and that mostly has to do with conflicts occurring between the boys.
For his birthday, Lukas (3) got a new digger that he loves more than anything.

In the last days' and weeks' discussion on migration I heard, with some horror, a number of comments made by certain politicians. Some of the theses that are being established there are making me wonder if they've ever had a look at what things look like in reality. In the debate we can hear things about the lack of integration starting from nursery age already, and other horrible things, too. Therefore I wanted to describe my experience from the angle of a person “concerned”, meaning that of a nursery nurse.

Hello, my name's Maike and I've recently completed training as a nursery nurse (finally!).
Many children are brought to our place by their parents in the morning by bike as long as the weather allows. Many of them have one of those bike trailers attached to their bike. Therefore I sometimes ask myself if these things really are safe. The parents can't see their children while biking, after all, and then the seats are so low – what if a car overlooks them? Neither do I know if these trailers are well sprung. I really do get worried about some of them, hoping that nothing happens to them on the way to kindergarten...
Does anyone have any experience with this or has this sort of thing ever been mentioned at your kindergarten?

I'm a nursery nurse and have only been working in this profession for half a year. The thing that I've already noticed in this short time, however, is the fact that some children are very “popular” from the beginning and easily make contact while others are literally being excluded.
Children simply don't show any consideration there, and I can't expect it from them at that age either, can I?
My question is how I, as a nursery nurse, can influence or rather steer this process of exclusion (I'm not playing with you, you're not my friend, he's stupid etc.) positively so as to provide every nursery child with enriching experiences if possible.

Now that I am old I often think about the time, when my daughters were going to the kindergarten. In that time I was working for a company, which was trying to get out of the crisis. We were working long hours, wasting time on meetings. Usually my wife picked up the younger daughter from the kindergarten. However, once I had to pick her up. Unfortunately we again had one of those meetings to find a solution to come out of the crisis. So I came to kindergarten late. All of the children have already left, only my daughter was waiting for me with the cleaning lady. She was happy when I came, however I was feeling very bad. Even today, after many years, I have a bad feeling when I remember this event. Looking back, I think that it is much more important to take care of your family than to be a workaholic, thinking that working long hours will get your company out of the crisis.

Our younger daughter liked to sleep-in in the morning. She was really upset when she had to go to the kindergarten early in the morning. She was crying and it was very difficult to make her go to the kindergarten. So I decided to do something about it. When we woke her up, I started to tell her stories. Usually I took her in my arms and brought her to the kindergarten (fortunately it was not far away from my home). All the way I was telling her stories. And it worked. We resolved the problem. I think that this is the right way. Unfortunately most of us are under so much stress and we are so afraid to be late for work that we do not understand what our children need. As the Serbian poet Rsumovic said: Dete nije dete, igračka za strine i tete dete je dete da ga volite i razumete. (A child is not a toy for aunts, a child is a child, that you have to love and understand.)

I have grown up in Sicily, and I did not go to a nursery school, but to a pre-primary school. My teachers were nuns and one of the toys available for us were little stilts. One time I asked one of the nuns if she wanted to try them, too.