A preschool child manifests a natural need to explore, to discover, search, and at the same time, it is sensitive to the surrounding environment. Direct contact with the surrounding nature elicits astonishment, often delight... [ view full abstract ]
A preschool child manifests a natural need to explore, to discover, search, and at the same time, it is sensitive to the surrounding environment. Direct contact with the surrounding nature elicits astonishment, often delight in children and raises a lot of questions. Natural sites are inspiring incentives for specific action, transformation. In addition, the study of nature provides the child with many opportunities to enrich its knowledge, promotes emotional growth, influences the development of personality, shapes the child’s needs and interests. Adopting such a point of view by the teacher should be associated with specific activities, with the creation of as many opportunities to explore the world as possible, with making hypotheses and verifying them, and above all, it should mean giving up describing the world in favor of studying it. This is the only way that a child will be able to satisfy the natural cognitive curiosity and develop their own ideas about the natural world while building the attitude of a researcher at the same time.
Conducting experiments in the field of animate and inanimate nature, observation of animals and plants are some of the educational solutions to explore the diverse world full of mysteries and "things" to discover.
The researcher’s activity may take the form of self-discovery, during which the child has the freedom of action, determining the working time while learning by trial and error method at the same time. The teacher is also important since he/she assumes the role of an initiator of the situation, provokes asking questions, provides methods and research aids.
Therefore, the important questions are the following: How is kindergarten education organised? Does self-examination of the world and gaining experience remain only declarative or is it an intentional action, organized in direct contact with the environment?
Keywords: environmental education, research activity, experimentation
