Caring for Animals

Caring for animals can offer several developmental benefits to young children, from fine motor skills, to emotional growth and cognitive enhancement.

Fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination develop as children learn to hold the food for the animals to eat, or even to hold the bottled milk just right for the young animals to drink from. They also learn to give just the right pressure when carrying or caressing the animals.

Children are usually on the receiving end of being cared for. So, it’s quite a different experience altogether for children to be giving care to another living thing. This makes them feel ‘big’ and ‘grown up’. Their self-esteem and sense of responsibility grow with the experience.

As children come up close to the animals and touch them, they learn new things about the animals, as in the texture of the animal skin, detailed features of the face, the feet and more. Young children are very observant and in Montessori’s terms, they are at the sensitive age to observe very minute details. 

The children at Saraswati Preschool had an amazing experience last week feeding farm animals from goats, to pigeons, hamsters and rabbits, cows and chickens, even the turkey (or 'Daddy Chicken' as one child called it) and lots and lots of fish at Kuntum Farm.