SUMMARY
Plants are an important part of our daily lives. However, many adults and children are much less aware of them in their environment than of animals, which means that they're less understood and their importance and value for both life on Earth and for humans isn't recognized. This phenomenon is referred to by experts as "plant blindness". Many young children don't even recognize plants as living beings.
The aim of our work was to find activities that would stimulate preschool children's attention and interest in plants, promote a positive attitude towards them, support learning about plants and thus prevent plant blindness. Based on literature, previous experience, and tests, we compiled a selection of activities that are suitable for the developmental level of four- to five-year-old children and achieve the set goals. We followed the principle of active learning, focusing on learning through direct experience, interaction with living things and learning through play in the natural environment. We also investigated the effectiveness of these activities in achieving the set goals.
We conducted a study that included an experimental and a control group. The study involved 47 children aged four to five years.
We first conducted semi-structured individual interviews with children from both groups (experimental and control group) to determine their initial perception of plants in the environment, their attitude towards plants and their knowledge about plants. Each child first saw a picture of a forest with forest organisms (plants, fungi, and animals) and a picture of a meadow with meadow plants and animals for the purpose of the study. They were then asked to list what they had seen. We were interested in how the children perceived plants in a particular environment: what they noticed first in the picture and what they noticed more: plants or animals. We assessed the children's attitudes towards plants using six questions in the form "How would you like to...?". The questions listed activities related to plants (...looking at books about plants, growing a plant, helping in the garden, visiting a flowering meadow...) and the child had to answer whether he/she would like to do this activity very much, moderately, or not at all. The interview questions on the assessment of plant knowledge related to the plants included in the planned activities.
With the children of the experimental group, we then carried out 7 activities over 14 days in one month (from May to June 2023). The activities, many of which included playful elements, took place in the forest, in the meadow and in the classroom. In the forest, the children-built houses for imaginary creatures from plant parts and learned about the plant materials used to build them. They filled out a special book in which they were offered plant parts or whole plants from the forest to search for their pairs. Finally, they created a "forest in a large, closed bottle" in the classroom with the materials and organisms collected in the forest and observed its development for a month. In the meadow, they decorated illustrations of children with flowers. However, only the flowers that were already attached to the illustration were allowed to be used as decorations and the children had to find them in the meadow. We dug up some meadow plants and planted them in the classroom and then grew them under different conditions (including no water and no light). The children also systematically observed the germination and growth of the beans. In all activities, the children learned about the diversity and characteristics of plants, their names, the life processes of plants (germination and growth, photosynthesis), the needs of plants and the role of plants in ecosystems. In the control group, we did not carry out the activities described with the children; their activities in kindergarten did not include any specific plant-related content during this time.
The day after the activities were completed, we carried out final interviews with the children in both groups (experimental and control group). The interviews contained the same questions as the initial interviews. The results obtained were analysed quantitatively and presented in the form of graphs by comparing the children's responses from the initial and final interviews in the control and experimental groups, we gained an insight into the effectiveness of the activities carried out on knowledge of and attitudes towards plants.
The results showed that the conducted activities significantly increased children's interest in plants in the experimental group. Children observed plants better in the environment, and their knowledge of forest and meadow plants also improved significantly. In the control group, the responses of children from final and initial interviews did not differ significantly.
We found that the selection of activities developed and implemented in this work is an effective way to prevent plant blindness in preschool children. Activities that were interesting to children also stimulated their interest in plants. We suggest that educators implement these activities into their practice more frequently, thus significantly influencing children in early childhood, which is a crucial stage for forming a positive attitude towards nature.
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