Nursery admission: Testing times for children & parents

BHUBANESWAR: With most schools in the city having already started nursery admissions, parents are spending more time with their children to prepare them for interactions with teachers. They are also working hard on their own communication skills.
Many schools conduct informal interviews or interactive sessions with parents before granting admission to their children.“It is difficult to get admission in a good school as there is a stiff competition. We have applied in four reputed schools and waiting for interview calls,” said Niharika Mohanty, mother of a three-year-old child.
Application forms of most schools seek qualification and income certificates of parents and how much time parents spend with the irchild. “We don’t conduct any interview but have a thorough interaction with parents and children during the induction process. We have some provisions like 1:20 pupil teacher ratio, minimum pressure on kids and we discuss the same with the parents. We also talk to children to understand their temperament,” said Shaon Mitra, vice-principal of BMPS Takshila School.
“Most children who come for nursery admissions have already been exposed to a pre-nursery or play school at an earlier age. So there is not much to assess them. But we talk to the child to get an idea of his or her knowledge so that it would be easier for us to select the right class for the child,” said Rashmi Pandey, vice-principal of SAI-Angan.
Some schools also conduct orientation programmes and training sessions for parents. “Talking to parents is important to know more about the children. Some of them may have certain special issues like a child may be left-handed or homesick or may be allergic to a particular thing,” said Smrutirekha Jena, a teacher of a nursery school.
Bandita Das, a montessori-trained teacher of a city school, advised parents not to put pressure on children and help their kids learn how to hold a pencil. She said parents should teach children clean toilet habits, a few letters of the English alphabets and counting. “We just give a toy or a ball to a child and ask him or her to play with it. From the child’s activity we can guess how smart the kid is and his or her level of understanding and exposure. We talk to the parents to assess how much time they can devote to their child,” she added.
There are also schools which admit students only on the basis of lotteries and first-come-first-serve basis. “We have some categories under which the application forms will be scrutinized. Then a lottery will be held for final selection,” said a teacher of DAV Public School, Chandrasekharpur.