Lifelong Learning – Stimulating Knowledge

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Investigation and integration

Young children are unable to decide for themselves which learning experiences further their intellectual and emotional development and which do not. It is up to parents, significant figures, educators, developmental psychologists and neurobiologists to investigate this. Ultimately, every action in which we are unable to engage on an emotional and creative level is reduced Stimulating knowledge 16 | CREDO to simply going through the motions or done for the sake of pure amusement and does not leave any lasting impact on or establish connections in the mind.

Another barrier to learning is created when teachers and significant figures try to impose their own ideas and life experiences on children. The extent to which curiosity can be continuously reignited and maintained depends largely on whether the significant figures in a child’s life are able to recognize the child’s point of view and state of intellectual, emotional and linguistic development and integrate this into well-thought-out concepts.

Identification

As a teacher, I am keen to encourage kindergarten children to tell me about all sorts of things and to express themselves with the help of familiar images from their world when they talk to me. This enables me to find out what they already know and how they learn about the world and to understand the children’s thought patterns.

Since they are in the company of other children, they also learn to listen to what others have to say, what experiences they talk about and what linguistic forms they use. In doing so, they become curious about one another and learn to understand what the others are saying – they share their knowledge. Different ideas, beliefs and views can only be expressed once a dialog has been established.

Allow me to give an example: today I brought in leaves from various trees and shrubs found on site for each child in the kindergarten. Their task was to sort the leaves according to similarity, and they quickly identified matching pairs. We compared the leaves and tried to describe their shape, which is not an easy task, but they still managed to find a number of adjectives to describe them, such as “oval,” “round,” “smooth,” and “jagged.”

Then we went out and looked for the trees that the leaves came from – in our case, chestnut, oak and copper beech. We examined and touched their bark and branches and recognized the clear differences between them. The bark varied between smooth, gray, gray-green, silvery-green, black-brown and cracked, while the branches might be springy, rigid, bent or green-brown. The children were astonished to find that there was so much to discover and describe in a single tree.

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