A Child’s Learning Methods
For children of the daycare (Kita) age, “the way is the game”. This means that playing is a way to learn self-determination and satisfy one’s own curiosity. Children acquire interest, perseverance and willingness to make an effort, through playing games. By playing, they are also exercising:
- Decision-making skills. They perceive and implement their own needs, e.g. choosing a friend to play with, where to play, duration, and role-playing.
- What it’s like to have experiences, wishes and anxieties through imitating something that they have gone through, expressing oneself through movement, facial expression, gesture and language.
- Self-confidence, self-assurance and the courage for achievement, by trying out new things and repeating the experience, taking risks, doing something after having done their own assessments.
- Intellectual activity (recognise and understand connections).
- Social behaviour, through working together on one object, consideration, compromise, dealing with setbacks/accomplishments, and show of emotions.
- Creativity through the enjoyment of developing ideas, finding and recognising possibilities in distinguishing problems and solving them.
- Motor-manual skills, by getting to know their own body parts and their physical strength, using them in a specific manner.
- Learning skills — through playtime, children need to focus during playtime thus exercising learning skills.
Consequently, we consider children to be the most important constructors of their learning worlds. In this case, education means self-education along with their needs and interests of being supervised. For example, children can choose playmates and toys on their own, as well as determine the pace of playtime.
Observation for us also means documenting, so that group leaders are able to reflect from them and discuss with each other. Our method needs to be differentiated from fixed learning units as well as cross-class or cross-Kindergarten curricula, which are intended for classes or learning subjects following a teaching plan/curriculum dictated from the outside. Since our work is non-coercive in all contexts, we consciously disregard such action concepts.