In the pre-school period, children learn a lot from discovering and exploring through games, where they are led by internal motivation and curiosity. However, when the learning is carried out in an interaction with peers and other adults, they also learn about social norms, communication skills and skills in general as well as how to cooperate with other peers. The latter to me seems to be of crucial importance when connecting the kindergarten and the school which is a child's immediate environment in which the child develops and learns, and at the same time, with the child's participation, it facilitates the transition to a new era and the experience with entering the school.
In my thesis, I was interested in what the cooperation of preschool and elementary school children is like, so I decided to observe the latter with conducting the experiments in the first stage of natural science, since because the children already show an extraordinary interest in nature in the first couple of months of their life. They show immense interest in people and objects around them. I have presented the general cooperation between kindergarten and the school, and how important this is for the later transition of preschool children to kindergarten. In the following, I focused a lot more intensively on the cooperation of both institutions that "live" under the same roof of the primary school Jurij Vega and the educational protection unit Vojka Napokoj, where I am also employed. I emphasized the importance of learning in a social environment and on collaborative learning, where I have presented a more in depth presentation of the “peer teaching” method, which is among the more successful methods.
I have presented the course of the project in the empirical work, which took place in April and in May, with pre-school children aged 4-6 and students aged 14. Through experiments selected by students, I investigated the cooperation of children and the motivation to work on the experiments, and what kind of attitude the children have with the students and vice versa. The results have showed that the children were even more motivated to carry out experiments because they were carried out by students. This was also confirmed in the survey questionnaire. In the interview, all of the students answered that they feel that it is reasonable for the school and the kindergarten to connect in such a way or a form of cooperation. Students also agree that this in way helps the children ease with the transition from kindergarten to school, where children can see the school in a pleasant and in an entertaining way, while at the same time the children learn a lot from the students which they have as examples.
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