Our Educational Vision

The time at day cares represents a decisive pillar in the individual development of every child. Children should be enabled to successfully master a wide variety of situations in their lives. They should also be able to further develop these skills at primary school age. The goals of our educational approach are therefore:

• Children as active learners, researchers, and discoverers
• Children as creative and imaginative artists
• Children competent in communication and media
• Children who act in a responsible and value-oriented manner

In this context, we focus on strengthening the basic competencies of learning, linguistic competence, social competence, and fine motor skills.

Metacognition - Children Become Aware of what and how they Learn

In a constantly changing society, there is a need for the competency to be able to reflect on what one learns and to develop one's own learning and problem-solving strategies, i.e. to "learn how to learn".

The foundation "Haus der kleinen Forscher" therefore promotes metacognitive competencies, the ability to address one's own cognitive processes (thoughts, opinions, attitudes etc.). This is possible if the following principles are observed when conducting experiments in the day care:

• The phenomena originate in the child's experienced world and are embedded in complex contexts.
• Educational specialists and children address not only the themes of content, but also the learning process per se.
• The documentation of the activities supports the learning process of the children.

Co-Construction - Children and Educators jointly Define the Learning Process

Co-construction means that learning takes place on the basis of cooperation. Children learn through working together with adults and their peers, based on the example of others, through guided participation, but also through individual discovery and joint reflection.

The social interaction thereby becomes the key to the construal of knowledge and meaning. This specifically means:

• Educational specialists work out ideas and courses of action together with the children
• Children learn together and exchange ideas
• The experimentation is not only restricted to the "reproduction" of experiments

The goals of co-constructive educational processes involve becoming familiar with different perspectives, solving problems together, and expanding the individual horizon of what one understands.