Project Space and children's participation in kindergarten

In my thesis I have presented the entire project titled Space, which was formed by the 3rd year students of preschool education at the Faculty of Education in Ljubljana, in 2015/2016. In addition to the presentation of the project, my aim was also to analyse the degree of success of each individual performance in regard to the procedural and content goals and at the same time show the importance of children's participation in the problem-solving process. Through the entire process of planning the project we tried to prepare the activities or rather problem-solving activities in the manner which would encourage the children to become active participants in forming new knowledge. With the help of my research questions I came to the conclusion that if you want your project to be successful, it is of key importance to plan out good activities, which are supported with reasonable goals. In our project specifically, we reached all our goals, partly also because we didn't limit or push ourselves into making sure that the children would remember all the given information, but we strived towards them hearing different phrases which they will be able to use later on in life. We tried to make a difference in the learning process through research oriented activities and active participation of the children, since in this way (according to our expectations) the children's participation and motivation was on a higher level. They did need a bit more encouragement and adjustments when it came to the part of preparing their own plans (especially plans that were made in smaller groups), I suppose this happened to the fact that they don't have many experience with this kind of activities. They also needed some more guidance with their communication, because often the dominant children tried to lead the group and they didn't give the other group members a chance to speak, but we managed to successfully solve the situation – with a discourse and by raising the children's awareness that all of their opinions, assumptions and questions are being heard and taken into consideration. Before presenting a topic to children, it is very important to have a certain amount of knowledge about that topic, which means we needed to refresh and upgrade our knowledge about space. In that way we were able to pass on the information to the children and simultaneously co-create the project through literature, modern technology, original activities, play and most importantly we allowed and prompted the children to use/express their own imagination. We stimulated their interest with different materials that they were able to use. In this way we provided them with the possibility of choice, while following the main purpose which was to make sure the child was an active participant in the learning process