Introduction
The name Kindergarten signifies
both a garden for children,
a location where they can observe and interact with nature, and also a
garden of children,
where they play together and express themselves in a smaller garden
world by means of play with their age group and they themselves can grow and develop in freedom
from arbitrary political and social imperatives.
Kindergarten school
For many people
a kindergarten is
associated with-
Ø a
nursery school equipped with toys, building blocks, book puzzles, art supplies,
and an outdoor playground;
Ø day
care attendance for the children of working parents;
Ø an
institution for early childhood development at the same time. Its aim is to
bring up self-confident and social personalities ready to communicate and make
a thoughtful choice.
Kindergarten school bus, play ground &
classroom
Background
Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel had an unhappy and difficult childhood with a
severe step-mother. His mother died when he was a baby and he was raised by his
strict Lutheran minister father. He was abandoned and treated strictly as a
child. Friedrich got to know what happiness is in the uncle’s family while
studying at high school. He had a huge desire for education, strong Christian
faith and love to the natural world. At 17, as an apprenticed forester he
decided plants and animals were better treated than children. Froebel was then
exposed to two important educators, Johann Pestalozzi [active, hands on educational activities] and Christian Weiss [geometric symmetries, chemical
composition]. He studied mineralogy in Jena and architecture at the Berlin's
Humboldt University. Inborn skills of an educator helped Froebel to realize the
failure of teaching system because of its incompleteness and absence of
agreement with the outer surroundings and nature.
Froebel
established first an elementary school and then a kindergarten with the goal of
leading children to a unity with
themselves. As important as Froebel was to education, he was equally important
to the worlds of art and architecture.
Establishment of Kindergarten
Friedrich
Froebel [1782-1852] was a Farman educationalist. He is best known as the father
of the kindergarten system, which he also
named. In 1837,
having developed and tested a radically new educational method and philosophy
based on structured, activity based learning, Froebel moved to Bad Brandenburg
and established his Play and
Activity Institute which he renamed in 1840
Kindergarten.
Friedrich
Froebel also used studying and nurturing plants in a garden for stimulating
children’s interest in the nature regulations. Here we can trace the identity
with the Montessori school system and Pestalozzian consideration of importance
to grow up in harmony with nature. Froebel
paid much attention to preparing for further school education by training the
infant innate faculties through the complimentary self expression,
creativeness, collective involvement, and motor activity. He considered
training of all the vivid faculties: artistic, imaginative, linguistic,
arithmetical, musical, aesthetic, scientific, physical, social, moral,
cultural, and spiritual, complete growth and harmonious development to be even
more important than any kind of knowledge.
The philosophy of education
The
philosophy of education of Friedrich Froebel, stresses the respect with which
the individuality and ability of each child should be treated; the importance
of creating a happy, harmonious environment in which he or she can grow; and
the value of self-activity and play as a foundation on which the integrated
development of the whole person can be built. Play is the highest expression of human
development in childhood for it alone is the free expression of what is in a
child's soul.
Froebel first came into teaching through a school
run along Pestalozzian lines. He believed that humans are essentially
productive and creative, and that fulfillment comes through developing these in
harmony with God and the world. His vision was to stimulate an appreciation and
love for children, to provide a new but small world for children to play with
their age group and experience their first gentle taste of independence. He
believed that "children are like tiny flowers; they are varied and need
care, but each is beautiful alone and glorious when seen in the community of peers."
His kindergarten system consisted of games and
songs, construction, and gifts and occupations. The play materials were what he
called gifts and the activities were occupations. His system allowed children
to compare, test, and explore. His philosophy also consisted of four basic
components which were free self-activity, creativity, social participation, and
motor expression. Froebel's kindergarten system grew internationally as an
educational movement. It is a well established part of the American school
system as well as many other parts of the world. Froebel’s upbringing theory
had such major establishments: toys for inventive play (so called ‘gifts and
occupations’). “Gifts” were objects with a fixed form such as blocks (Froebel
designed a large box of 500 wooden building blocks). Their purpose was to find
out the essential thought represented by the object the child played with.
Occupations were based on free will and represented things that kids could
shape and manipulate such as clay, sand, beads, rope etc. Games, songs and dances were accepted
by Froebel as the key for healthy activity and physical development.
Kindergarten system
Froebel's kindergarten was a school for the
psychological training of little children by means of play and occupations. The
kindergarten method as defined by Froebel is based upon a series of
geometrical gifts and a system of categories. In the
kindergarten, the child plays with one of the gifts at a time to discover its
properties and possibilities for design. The gifts were presented to the child
in sequence and the child was allowed to play with them freely. Whenever the
child ran out of ideas for play, the mother or teacher can invoke one or more
of the categories to suggest another way to play. The child is thus encouraged
to think about certain kinds of designs that can be made with the gifts.
Froebel's Gifts
In
the 1840s, Froebel designed 20 sets of geometric toys gifts as
merely a small part of his educational system. These included the following
gifts:
- solid wood
sphere, cylinder, and cube with dowels to make them tops and
connect them and a gibbet for swinging them
- wooden cube divided into 8 smaller
cubes
- wooden cube divided into 8 oblong
blocks
- wooden cube divided into 21 smaller cubes, 6 half-cubes
and 12 quarter-cubes, an elaboration of gift 3
- wooden cube divided into 18 oblong blocks, 6 pillars, and 12 squares, an elaboration of gift 4
- parquetry - flat wood shapes to be arranged on a grid
Other gifts consisted of slats, sticks, rings, strings and points, colored tablets, colored papers to cut, fold, weave and
interlace [album], clay and sand, peas, pencils and paints for net
drawing exercises.
Froebel's Categories
v Forms of Knowledge
It is
included mathematical and logical ideas such as number, proportion, equivalence
and order. These ideas serve to define natural divisions of a gift and to
suggest ways of rearranging or transforming these parts.
v Forms of Life
It
represents things that can be seen in the outside world . . . buildings, house,
table, sofa, tree, etc.
v Forms of Beauty
Blocks arranged on a grid without
stacking to have some kind of symmetry, to form patterns viewed as ornament.
Conclusion
Reference
·
Brown, J.W, A.V, Instructional Materials
and Methods, USA.
·
Lay, E.J.S, Encyclopedia of Modern Methods
of Teaching, New Dilhi.
·
Haldar, Gourodas, Shikkhon Proshonge
Biddalay Shongothon o Shikkha Biggan, kalcutta.
THE END
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