Some Categories of Pastoral Care

The Nursery Child and Early Childhood

The Nursery Child and Early Childhood

Nursery classes are what some branches of church education schools call the “Angels” classes. This age is characterized by the following features:

1. The Remarkable Ability to Memorize:
   The child has a pure, blank memory that can receive a very large amount of information, in which everything is imprinted. This is unlike adults, whose memories are occupied with many matters and do not have the capacity to absorb much.
   According to one of the scholars of education, a child in the first four years of his life memorizes a complete dictionary, because he begins with no vocabulary at all, then comes to know hundreds of words that he uses to express all the needs of his life.
   Therefore, the teacher’s duty toward the child at this age is to give him the greatest possible amount of memorized material, whether teaching him to memorize the Lord’s Prayer, or “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” or hymns, tunes, or verses from the Bible.
   At this age, it does not matter to the child whether he understands what he memorizes or not. Generally, he does not perceive many of the meanings of what he memorizes, but he is able to memorize, and he may even like the music of what he memorizes.
   The teacher must not belittle the mentality of young children and their abilities and refrain from giving them something to memorize. If he refrains from this, they will fill their memory by memorizing other things from home, from friends, from the radio and television, and from chants and songs, and so on.
   In doing so, the teacher deprives the children of the opportunity to memorize, and when they grow older they will not find the same ability. Alongside the ability to memorize, the child of this stage is distinguished by another characteristic, which is submission and acceptance.
2. Submission and Acceptance:
   The child at this age accepts everything that is said to him and submits to it without discussion or argument. Therefore, this age is one of the most suitable periods of life for planting doctrines, principles, and values.
   Later on, if he asks, seeks understanding, or debates at an older age, this will be on the basis of a firm foundation of stable faith that has existed within him since early childhood.
   It is not good for the teacher to deprive the child of this opportunity and to stuff his mind with trivialities that are of no benefit, belittling his mentality and abilities. This does not mean that complex doctrines should be presented to him; rather, simple faith in simple words that the child receives and memorizes, and later at an older age its depths are explained to him.
3. Imagination:
   One of the characteristics of this age is also the breadth of imagination, and the love of stories told through animals, birds, fish, flowers, and the forces of nature. He accepts and loves them. At this age, a story such as Balaam’s donkey can be given, and he will not debate it, as well as other miracle stories that require submission, which his imagination accepts. He also delights in stories of angels.
4. Love of Stories:
   At this age, the child loves to hear stories and desires to hear more of them, and he loves the one who tells them to him. The successful teacher is the one who memorizes many stories. These can be stories from the Bible, from history, from the lives of the saints, or from animal stories.
   Therefore, teaching children at this stage requires competence in the teacher and his knowledge, depth in his preparation for the lesson, and skill in his method of presentation. Not everyone who teaches is suitable for teaching children.
5. Imitation:
   The child at this age is passionate about imitation. He imitates his parents, imitates the Sunday School teacher, imitates the sounds of birds and animals, and imitates movements and words. Therefore, the teacher of this stage must be a role model in all his behaviors, words, and movements, and even in his facial expressions, because the child may take all of this from him instead of the lesson itself.
   Thus, a teacher who has certain faults, even unintentionally, is harmful for this age. He must not only be free from faults that the child may absorb, but positively, he must be an example that the child imitates in every virtue.
   The teacher must be gentle and loved by the children, and must not use methods of beating, severe scolding, or punishing children in a way that frightens them or repels them from the church and its servants.

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