Browsing by Author "Huttunen, Fanny"

In addition to well-being children’s involvement can be seen as an indicator for quality in early childhood education. The purpose of this study was to describe kindergarten teacher’s experiences of children’s involvement in day care center’s activities. My research questions were how children’s involvement appears and in what kind of activity children involve to. I also wanted to find out what kind of means kindergarten teachers use to get children to maintain or possibly add children’s involvement and which factors affect children’s involvement. My study was qualitative and I used theme interview as a method. I interviewed three kindergarten teachers who work in Helsinki metropolitan area. One of them teaches in a group of children aged 1-3 years, the other one in a group of 3-6- year old children including integrated children with special needs and the third one in a preschool group. All of the kindergarten teachers observed a lot their own groups. Two of them especially observed and measured children’s involvement level. According to the kindergarten teachers children’s involvement appears by strong presence, motivation and concentration. Children express their involvement by different verbal and non-verbal signs for example by taking contact to adult or by fixing their gaze on the activity. Children’s involvement was highest in activities which were functional. Children involve when they are interested in the subject and when they are working on their zone of proximal development. Kindergarten teachers took their observations of the children into account when planning activities. Planning was an important key to get the children to involve. They also thought that supportive approach helped the children to involve. Children were involved higher when teacher herself was involved, when they worked in small groups and when the activity was challenging enough. Children’s involvement was lower when they were for example hungry or tired or the environment was restless.