Miscellaneous incentives to address mental challenges are especially important in the first years of a child’s life, since in these early ages, the child’s development is most advanced and the development curve is very steep. The child is facing the mental challenges during playing, his primary and independent activity, and with their solving, he learns new concepts and ideas and thus obtains new knowledge, experience and skills. On the market, we can find a lot of toys, which are all designed in a way that the child’s play is foreseen or pre-structured.; such toys do not encourage the child’s creativity, since they do not represent mental challenges and various possibilities for their use/playing. Contrary to this, in nature and among waste material, we can find numerous substances and objects, which due to their unstructured nature provide the child with more opportunities for use, realization of their imagination and creativity and present numerous mental challenges.
Through active learning, where the child is the constructor of his own knowledge, he comes to new cognitions about objects, phenomenons in his environment and outside of it; knowledge, obtained in such a way, is permanent and the child is just constantly upgrading it. An important role in active learning also has the environment, in which it takes place. The environment must encourage learning in ways, which ensure numerous encouragements (challenges and problem situations), which are interesting for the child and attract him. Very important for active learning is also the support of an adult person – educator, which establishes positive interactions with the child and enables his independence.
The empirical part presents a project, which was carried out in the first age group of preschool children; its purpose was to create an encouraging learning environment with non-structured material - elastic bands. The key-part of the pedagogical process is to observe the child’s dealing with the material or (group) the play, which is being established in this way. The observations are recorded in the progress record and evaluations of individual activities, which present the reactions of children, my expectations and perception of possibilities for improvements and goals, which were reached during individual activities. This way, the development and process curricula was put into practice.
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