Picture book as a means of interdisciplinary learning

At the preschool age, children discover and experience the world as a whole, so it is necessary that during preschool education in kindergarten we provide them with an interdisciplinary acquaintance with all the fields of activity and thus encourage an integral development of children. With this interdisciplinary approach, we ensure the quality of the educational process in accordance with the characteristics of a child’s development and learning. Consequently, we achieve a more useful, thorough and permanent knowledge. A picture book with all its characteristics represents a quality base for the planning of diverse activities, where different curriculum areas are tightly intertwined. Moreover, the design and content of a picture book motivate the child and offer a wide spectrum of activities from different content fields that provide a more active and thorough experience of the story. In the theoretical part of my thesis, I will present a picture book, its classification, its elements and its role in the integral development of preschool children. Next, I will pay attention to kindergarten literary education, its goals, the criteria for the selection of appropriate picture books, the role of adults and the procedure of a kindergarten reading event. I will describe in detail all the fields of activity from the manual The Kindergarten Curriculum (Kurikulum za vrtce, 1999), including the goals and the role of preschool teachers. I will concentrate on interdisciplinary learning with an emphasis on the intertwining of the language area (literary education) with the rest of the curriculum areas. Finally, I will present the concept of interdisciplinarity from the Croatian and Finnish curriculum, comparing their view on it with the Slovenian one. The empirical part of my thesis includes a presentation of the performance and evaluation of the project Picture Book as a Means of Interdisciplinary Learning. In the context of this project, the children got acquainted with the Slovene picture book Kdo je napravil Vidku srajčico, written by Fran Levstik and illustrated by Roža Piščanec. I planned and carried out numerous activities from diverse curriculum areas, taking the picture book as my starting point. The children had the opportunity to learn the content of the story, perceive it through different points of view and develop their knowledge and abilities in all the areas of development. With the use of the picture book as a means of interdisciplinary learning, they linked knowledge from different curriculum areas and in this way acquired a more useful, thorough and permanent knowledge