Preschool curriculum offers a variety of different activities from various fields. One of the fields includes nature, which is of outmost importance for children. With it we expand the children’s abilities to actively include themselves into the physical and social environment. It is important that a child gets some experience with living beings, natural phenomena and letting them enjoy the exploration and the discovering of new things. Subsequently, the knowledge and experience are long lasting and useful. A preschool teacher can add to this by providing a child with an environment that encourages active learning. That can include a field, a meadow, a forest or also just a playroom. A preschool teacher should offer children the freedom to explore and prepare concrete activities, where children are able to independently think and explore. This is the only way they will acquire the actual image of the world in which we live in.
In my thesis, I will focus on the way preschool children could, with the usage of role play, learn about the importance bees have for the man, the social relationships of bees in a hive and nature. The purpose of my thesis is to make children and parents aware of the importance bees have for us. The aim of my research is for the children to learn more about the lives of bees through play.
In the theoretical part, I will describe a bee family, who composes it and why is the bee so important for us. I will also focus on teaching with the usage of role play. Before I begin carrying out the activity in the preschool, I will conduct individual interviews with the children according to the before prepared questions about their knowledge of bees. I will be mostly interested in the importance bees have for the man and nature. I will also conduct the interview at the end of the project and that is how I will be able to spot the difference in the knowledge of children before and after the project. The attitude preschool children have towards bees is very important, since it is very much connected to the preservation of bees amongst us. Children had a pretty negative attitude towards bees before the activity itself, since most of the children would decide to kill the bee if it flew into their room. Only a small percentage of children would make sure that the bee was humanely escorted outside to the meadow. Their previous knowledge about bees, which was pretty poor, was definitely a huge factor for their unfavourable attitude towards bees. Children believe that bees don't bring pollen or nectar from the meadow, but rather gather honey. They weren't able to name the members of the bee family. They only mentioned the queen bee and their principal purpose, which is to gather honey. The imperfections in their knowledge could be noticed when a question of what would happen to the bee, if she stung us, was asked. Most children weren’t aware that the bee dies. They thought the bee continues its journey to the meadow and gathers more honey. Right after the end of the activity, their answers changed drastically. The children remembered that the bee brings pollen and nectar from the meadow to the have, they were able to list the members of the bee family and their roles in the bee house. It is evident from the results that the children didn't know about the importance of bees for us, since almost half of the children didn't know the answer to the question of what would happen to us if all of the bees disappeared from the world. The other half linked the disappearance of the bees to the disappearance of humankind. After the activity finished, a large number of children thought that the bees' death is largely connected to our death. The results astonished me after a 2-week long break when most of the children said that if all the bees disappeared, so would the honey. Only two of the children connected the latter to the disappearance of all flowers. By doing so, they partly understood the importance of pollination. Games, which are for children of great importance, need to be included into the children's daily life in various ways, since this is the only way they can expand their knowledge for years to come. Role playing, as seen in my activity, contributes to the expansion of their knowledge and the change of their false beliefs about the life of bees.
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