Regaining Their Health in Kindergartens

Kyiv’s sport and healthcare kindergarten No. 285 has opened a new, specialized group for children with impaired locomotor systems. This daycare facility has long had two speech therapy and three extended-care groups. The ordinary groups also pay special attention to health improvement. It is no accident that last year this kindergarten won the children’s physical training prize in Kyiv and came second in a nationwide competition.

Children do physical exercises here barefooted throughout the year, while skeptical parents are invited to visit classes to see that their kids are all right. Youngsters walk on wet iodine-soaked towels and rugged mats made of pinecones and gravel. They acquire basic skills in lawn and table tennis and basketball; they learn to walk with a small bag filled with sea salt on their heads and to draw with their toes. These unconventional exercises are mostly the result of the extensive, painstaking efforts of Liubov Vanina, the kindergarten’s PT instructor, who has some forty years’ experience. Ms. Vanina says that in order to develop adequately, every child should walk barefoot every day for at last two and a half hours. They should also move a lot not only to become physicaly strong but also intellectually. Oddly enough, children’s language development is based in their fingers, and exercising the small muscles of the hand provides excellent stimulation, while drawing with the toes develops logical thinking and coordination of movements.

What always displeases kindergarten principal Iryna Balasanian is parents’ indifference to their children’s requirements, because the kindergarten’s efforts should be supported and continued at home at least on weekends. But computers and all kinds of expensive Lego- type play sets have replaced such simple and indispensable things as balls and skipping ropes. Even the simple act of squeezing a ball is an excellent hand exercise for a child who is about to go to school. One more thing: many parents have a rather strange attitude to advice dispensed by nursery schoolteachers. When a young child is flatfooted and still stands a fair chance of getting rid of this defect, parents refuse to have the child wear remedial shoes in order to preserve the child’s nice appearance.

There are thirteen children today in the special locomotor-correction group. Next year a similar group will include up to eight tiny tots, including those with a light form of cerebral palsy. Until then, remedial techniques will be tested on “easier” diagnoses, such as flatfootedness, spinal curvature, and knee joint problems. Olena Bondar, assistant professor at the National University of Physical Education and Sport, will be working with these children. The classes will be videotaped so that the university can develop individual sets of exercises for such children.

Experts have noted that parents are increasingly eager to register their children for special groups at daycare facilities. Today 1,500 preschool establishments run more than 4,000 special groups that cater to 60,000 children with serious health problems.

According to Natalia Rezenchuk, chief of the Preschool Education Section at Kyiv’s General Department for Education and Science, on September 1 three more groups opened in Kyiv for speech-impaired children (in addition to the one at kindergarten No. 285) and five extended-care groups that will be housed at ordinary kindergartens in various parts of the city. “Two for children who often suffer from upper respiratory tract diseases and three for those with digestive disorders. We are also planning to open a group for totally deaf children at an ordinary kindergarten in January,” Ms. Rezenchuk says.