Children's participation in the daily routine

The thesis represents characteristics of the daily routine and its enormous meaning for children, for which it – in the first years of entering kindergarten – represents safety. Elements of the daily routine are represented through author I. Medved (2004), who presents key guidelines for ensuring optimal environment for children, where simultaneously comparing activities of preschool teacher once and today. The daily routine or routine activities, as some authors name it, is in the thesis represented as part of hidden curriculum, which is – as the name tells for itself – often forgotten or »swept under the rug«. The main aim of this work and empiric part was observation of different parts of the daily routine, where autonomy of children was exposed – how much are they capable of doing by themselves and in what part/how much were they encouraged to do so by adults. Chapters about child’s participation are devoted to this subject, which is their right defined by European Convention of children’s rights (1989), focused also by some principles in Curriculum for Preschools (1999), which enforces them and about subjective theories of preschool teachers, because personal beliefs of professionals are one of the obstacles in realization of children’s right of participation. To test my predictions in practice, I have observed different parts of the daily routine in classes of different ages, after every observation I have interviewed teachers and recapitulated their answers. After evaluating observations and answers obtained with interviews, I have come to the conclusion that children in all three different age groups were substantially encouraged to autonomic behavior, but personal viewpoints of teachers still affects their behavior. Their way of working is obsolete (equal for all children), because the teachers in my sample disregard the different needs of children