Enfant Premiere

From pre-school to junior high school preparation, Enfant provides a full spectrum of services

We provide all support necessary for entrance examination preparation

Ecole de l’Enfant help students build an overall foundation for successful enrolment in pre-schools, Elementary schools, as well as Junior High Schools. While bolstering up their academic potential, we also provide physical training and empower students for personal growth. We inspire children to use their own personal experience to think for themselves and work out how much time, and what knowledge and skills they need to solve a problem. Our goal in the Premiere programme is to gain insight into each child’s level of development based on our everyday interaction with them, and to use those insights to improve our instruction and provide advice to parents.

Fostering the personal growth of children

Our philosophy is to foster a habit to study in our students, cultivating a foundation of academic ability required to pass an upcoming entrance examination. We work hard to help students discover the joy of learning, and to receive praise for its achievements. This way, an eagerness to learn grows naturally within the child, a tremendous boon on the path to the entrance examination. To feel a sense of achievement is important for any child. Encouragement is a vital part of education. Being told that “You did really well!”, or “you’re really good at this!” instills confidence in children, allowing them to tackle problems without fear or hesitation. This way they find out that many things are not as hard as one might think. They respond to their feeling of success by exclaiming “I got it!”, or, “wow, it’s simple!” – proof that they experience the satisfaction of understanding, something that is very important to a small human being. When they are rewarded by a gold star for good work, the good feeling will remain in their hearts, along with a sense of accomplishment. We place great importance on building confidence in children this way.

Growing children’s abilities

Ecole de l’Enfant utilise a variety of methods to elaborately cultivate important abilities in children, such as concentration, thinking ability, reasoning, attentiveness, and memorization, and create a good balance between these abilities. It is generally believed that children aged between 3 – 5 undergo an intellectual development in which the brain’s tendency to rely on  emotional problem solving gradually lose ground to logical thinking. We see this as an important opportunity to encourage the growth of children’s linguistic and logical abilities by means of a curriculum that emphasise stimulation without pushing or stressing the child.

An important part of this strategy is to utilise non-intellectual stimulation, such as physical exercise. How? The idea is to train children physically, not for its own sake, but to use the exercise to let the body be part of and contribute to their intellectual development. For example, learning how to control one’s body and keep the balance contributes to a child’s motivation and concentration. This in turn greatly improves his or her learning ability. This is why we purposefully integrate non-paper based training in our programs. Helping build this vital connection between body and intellect in early childhood using non-paper based methods is at the heart of our educational philosophy. It is part of the Enfant way of stimulating stable intellectual and physical growth.

Early learning at Enfant Premiere

We at Enfant believe that there are many things a child can learn at early age that is hard to teach theoretically or at home. Enfant Premiere devote considerable effort cultivating a healthy attitude to learning, for example, trying new things before rejecting them, curiosity about a wide variety of things in the world around us, and so forth. Our instruction aims at helping students discover the joy of success, and to bring that feeling with them to the next grade. Nevertheless, eagerness to learn will vary between students. There will always be parents, especially parents of pre-elementary school children, who hesitate to put their child in prep school. Our curriculum is composed with such parents in consideration, and we encourage them to let their children join our classes.

Ecole de l’Enfant

There are parents who worry that their child is too young to take part in classes. This has to do with the school year in Japan, which starts in April, not in September like in the United States and other countries. Children born in the final of the three terms (January 1st and April 1st) are thus considerably younger than those born in the first. However, it is not our job to put pressure on children. We start our preparations for entrance examinations for preschool, elementary school and junior high school early, so that there is no need to rush.

We offer preschool entrance examination courses as needed for applicants to 2 and 3 year kindergarten. We train children to spend time away from their mother and give them time for free play, to let them gain all kinds of experiences.

Increasing awareness an extra boon

When a child joins Ecole de l’Enfant her parents awareness will change, as well as her family life. One hour weekly classes are of course important, but so is the week running up to the class. It is necessary to review at home, and to help the child at home. We hear parents say things like “our child cleared small hurdles one at a time, growing along the way,” during the year long preparatory course, or “we become more aware of the importance of child rearing”. It’s a year that is both intense and challenging. It’s far from studies only, but one spent becoming more aware of everything from colors and numbers to words – everything in the child’s’ environment helps it grow during this important time.