There are many tiny animals living in the stream we do not even notice without a planned survey. They are an important part of freshwater ecosystems. These animals are mostly unknown to preschool children and often also to teachers, therefore exploring the stream is not a common activity in our kindergartens. That is why in my thesis I have decided to lead the children along guided activities of research and learning about the animals in the stream.
40 preschool children participated in the research: 20 in the experimental group and 20 in the control group. I first conducted semi-structured individual interviews with the children of both groups to determine their initial ideas about stream animals. I was interested in how many stream animals they knew and what they knew about them. The children answered one of the questions with a drawing. In the following, I designed activities suitable for the developmental level of these children, during which the children should get to know the animals in the stream through direct experience and in an active way (their names, external structure, nutrition, importance in the ecosystem, peculiarities). I carried out these activities with the children of the experimental group. The children of the control group were not involved in any activity on the topic of animals in the stream. After the activities, I again conducted semi-structured individual interviews with the children of the experimental and control groups with the same set of questions as the initial interview. In this way, I investigated whether the planned activities influenced the children's knowledge about the animals in the stream.
The results of the research showed that the children's initial ideas about the animals in the stream were mostly wrong or very superficial. The children did not know animals or they listed and drew sea animals, and among them there was rarely any animal belonging to the stream. After the activities, the knowledge of the children in the experimental group significantly improved. The children's answers were mostly correct. After the activities, all the children in the experimental group recognized at least two animals (the mayfly nymph and the Gammarus fossarum) and named them correctly. If we compare the answers of the control and experimental groups, we notice that the answers of the control group in the initial and final interviews are almost exactly the same, but the answers of the children of the experimental group have changed significantly in the direction of improving their knowledge about stream animals.
The results of my thesis show that even preschool children are able to learn a lot about stream animals if we present them in a way that is appropriate for their developmental level. Nowadays, freshwater systems are increasingly polluted and destroyed, and their importance for the life of our planet is great. What children come to know and love in early childhood, they are more likely to be ready to protect later as adults. Therefore, I conclude that it would be good if similar activities, as I carried out as part of this thesis, are carried out more often in our kindergartens.
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