We follow the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Pre-primary Education for the preschoolers. Depending on the setting, we also follow Helsinki and Espoo City curriculums for ECEC. Together with the children and parents, we draw up action plans in the groups and settings describing our pedagogical principals. An individual ECEC plan is also drawn up for each child.
The whole day pedagogy at Carousel Nursery Schools is also influenced by the Reggio Emilia approach. The approach values a powerful image of the child, believes in reciprocal relations and collaboration and emphasizes the importance of using the environment.
Participatory pedagogy is based on listening and placing value in the child’s opinions and wishes when planning, implementing, and evaluating early childhood education and care. This approach enables the children to be active learners, co-construct their knowledge and experiences and take ownership of their learning process. Our projects are based on children’s interests and the areas of learning providing children opportunities to explore, observe, hypothesize, question, and discuss to clarify their understanding. The sense of community is highlighted as we work together on projects discussing and reflecting on events and phenomena in a group.
The Finnish National Curriculum for ECEC is based on the children’s prior experiences, interests and knowledge and skills. Early childhood education and care lays the foundation for children’s transversal competences and pedagogical activities strengthen the development of these transversal competences. In the ECEC curriculum, there are five interconnected transversal competences. The goals of these transversal competences form a continuum from the National Core Curriculum for ECEC to the core curricula of pre-primary education and basic education.
Play is central in early childhood education and care. Play promotes children’s development, learning and well-being as well as produces joy and pleasure for children. The learning areas describe the main goals and content of the pedagogical activities in early childhood education and care. As learning is holistic and children are active agents in their learning, the themes from the learning areas are combined together and applied to practice according to the children’s interests and abilities. The children’s interests and questions form the basis for the integrative pedagogical activities. The areas of learning have been divided into five groups:
Pre-primary education is planned and implemented to give children opportunities to be inspired, experiment and learn new things. Play and other approaches characteristic for children’s learning are the basis for integrative instruction. Children’s interests and the joint objectives for instruction form the point of departure for all learning modules. Children take active part in planning, engaging in and evaluating learning modules. The joint objectives for instruction have been formulated to five entities, the objectives and contents of these different entities are combined in a pedagogically appropriate way when forming learning modules:
