Elections in preschool
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As trying to operate a play-based school, every single activity kids enter triggers us to ask ourselves: “Is this play?” Cause in principle, school and play are different concepts. Free play is spontaneous and unconditional, while education has rules, procedures and time frames. Well, we try to solve this by giving children the authority to decide what to learn, when and how. And in 99% of the situations, what they do is bring real world into class and end up with some kind of fabulous life-derived play! A good story on that comes from May 2014, when kindergarten kids came in school one Monday talking about the forthcoming European Parliament elections. Parents were talking politics in home and children brought it in school. And they started asking their teacher about. The academic way would be teacher to explain elections for the class. So boring! Our teacher’s way was to ask children “ok, why do you believe people do elections?” A nice discussion emerged. The bottom line, as set by children: “people vote when cannot agree on something”. Well, right on these days our school kids could not agree on the name of our baby turtle. Toddlers were calling him one name, pre-K class another. And kindergarten kids were calling him “Spike”. That was a perfect issue of not having an agreement! So? By bearing tons of enthusiasm, kindergarten class decided to organize elections in school, to solve the disagreement on turtle’s name! First thing, they called in three of their moms, professional lawyers, to explain class how elections are really held. After learning the process,
preschool & kindergarten
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