Gülsüm Teacher and her children are doing various activities that support the learning through play approach with six brick materials during early childhood education.
Gülsüm Akcan, who works as a preschool teacher at Ankara Eryaman Başak Preschool, and her children welcome us in their colourful classroom surrounded by colourful bricks.
4-year-old Deniz says: "I love my school, where I learnt numbers and some shapes. I also love petting the cats in the garden. When I grow up, I want to heal animals." Her classmate Melek (4) agrees: "I like playing with the toy bricks and reading books here. I want to be an astronaut when I grow up because I want to meet aliens!"
Nazender (3), who says she wants to be a princess when she grows up, says, "I love my school, playing house, my friends, my teacher, building houses. It's also very nice to go out in the garden," she says with a big smile,"Let all children come to school!" she adds.
Emphasizing that the early childhood education period has a very important place in children's acquisition of cognitive, language, social, emotional and motor skills, Gülsüm Teacher says, "This period is a stage in which children are open to learning and show rapid development. In this period, when children are supported to prepare for primary school and the foundations of personality development are laid, our aim is to raise people who know themselves and can respect themselves and others.
Talking about the different learning centers in the classroom, Teacher Gülsüm says, "We support the development of children by organising the classroom with learning centers according to their interests and curiosities within the framework of the preschool education programme and by applying types of activities such as science, mathematics, games and art: "Children choose the learning centers according to their own interests. We only offer them learning environments that we have prepared in advance. In these centers, we prepare the appropriate environment for children to learn by doing and experiencing."
Teacher Gülsüm states that children choose the centers according to their own preferences and that children's opinions are important at this point. "The day before, I create an activity plan according to their needs. I do not use the centers in the same way all the time, I make changes. For example, if I have three centers today, the next day I prepare three different centers using different materials and attract children's attention to these centers. Of course, children like this very much."
Gülsüm Teacher says that she aims to guide children to learn by discovering on their own by involving them in the process and adds: "We observe children and plan activities and carry out projects in line with their interests, needs and curiosities. While planning a learning process that will develop children's creativity, we also support them to explore their emotions and experience the joy of working and learning with their friends. In other words, we provide learning environments not as a teacher but as a guide and give children the opportunity to make discoveries on their own."
He says that they take the education process out of the classroom and organise field trips to areas such as museums, libraries, forests or school gardens, where they have the opportunity to explore different educational environments: "In such areas, they learn and discover by doing-living."
Gülsüm Teacher, who has previously carried out activities with toy bricks in line with the learning through play approach with families as well as children, states that this learning style is very effective in the 3-5 age range. Stating that they have done many activities with bricks with the learning through play approach, Gülsüm Teacher says, "In learning with toy bricks, we discovered how we can learn many things through play without the need for paper, pen or scissors. We have seen that we can touch all our development areas with them without the need for any other materials. We were able to use them in many activities such as maths activities, art activities, play activities, drama activities, music activities. On behalf of my children, my school and myself, I would like to thank the project to increase quality and access in early childhood education and its stakeholders for providing us with this opportunity and enabling us to benefit from the project."
The ongoing project "Increasing Quality of and Access to Early Childhood Education" will support more than 50,000 children under the age of six. The project is implemented in partnership with the Ministry of National Education, the Ministry of Labour and Social Security (MoLSS), the European Union (EU) and UNICEF.
The ECE Project aims to increase access to and quality of early childhood education services for all children. The main target group of the project consists of children under the age of six, teachers, school principals and other ECE service providers.