What Are the Finnish Early Childhood Education Curriculum Areas
(and Why Yuyu Activities Are Based on Them)
By Solja Sulkunen
April 14th, 2021
4 minutes read
Here at Yuyu, we believe that including pedagogical elements to the activities and play together with your child, can have a major impact on your child’s development and also self-esteem, for example. Of course, we do this in a fun and interesting way. With this in mind, all Yuyu games and activities are created with the learning areas and practical implementations of the Finnish Early Childhood Education Curriculum in mind.
So what are the learning areas in the Early Childhood Education Curriculum?
1. The rich world of languages
In the center of this learning area are linguistic development and the ability to express oneself effectively and in versatile ways through language(s).
2. The many forms of expression
This learning area is about learning to express one’s own emotions, thinking, and worldviews in different ways and forms of art.
3. Me and my communities
This learning area focuses on understanding and learning about the community and communities a child belongs to and lives in, and how to interact with them and be an active participant of the communities.
4. Exploring my own surroundings
This learning area means that children are guided to interpret, get to know, and learn to operate in the different environments, for example, natural and built ones, they live in and learn to appreciate them through forming a relationship with them.
5. Growing, moving, and developing
This learning area’s purpose is to support children in physical development, motoric skills, and knowing and appreciating one’s body as a whole.
Through acknowledging these learning areas when designing the activities and play sessions, we are able to provide all adults content that they can use with the children in their lives knowing that they are actually doing something pedagogically (developmentally) solid with their dearest ones. These learning areas include a variety of skills needed in life and we help to turn them into a format that enables anyone to be a Finnish teacher for a brief moment to their child.
Sounds fascinating, doesn’t it? But oh, there’s more!
In addition to creating all activities around these learning areas, Yuyu play sessions are built upon four pedagogical methods that are also in the center of Finnish daycare. Let’s take a closer look at them:
1. Play supporting the interaction and forming of the relationship between children and adults
Play is an informal way of learning and it is a way to live and make sense of the world. Through play and the experiences gained during it, emotions and curiosity towards different things and phenomena have room to awake. It also provides children with pleasure and joy. Playing allows children to be active agents who explore and study the world around them, create social relationships and form meanings about the things and situations they experience.
Play provides a safe place to learn about oneself and others, try out and model existing as well as new things and habits. It lets children take and try out different roles and test ideas they would not do otherwise.
Here at Yuyu, we want to keep play in the center of our actions, just as it is the center of all Finnish daycare operations as well. Providing a safe, mutual, and developmental play session for adults and children is the main goal of our operations as well.
2. Linguistic development
Yuyu is heavily focused on linguistic development because during the age range of early childhood education a strong base for wide vocabulary is created. Language is both an object and a tool for children to learn. It allows a child to take over different situations and to interact with others, express themselves, and acquire knowledge.
In Yuyu play sessions, there is always a short story, poem, or piece of music attached to each activity designed to strengthen a child’s vocabulary. Storytelling in different forms of art and rhymes are great tools to support play. In addition, the child is able to tell and explain his or her thinking during the play sessions, which in turn strengthens the child’s development of language skills.
3. Supporting self-expression
Thinking and learning skills develop as children explore, interpret, and create meanings to different things by practicing a variety of expression skills. The ability to imagine and create mental images is important to the development of a child’s ethical thinking, for example.
In Yuyu’s play sessions, helping children practice their self-expression skills is right at the center of the activities. The activities challenge and encourage children to imagine and interpret what they see, hear and feel.
4. Becoming heard and seen
Children’s experiences of being heard and adults responding to their initiatives are important in developing interaction skills. Therefore Yuyu’s play sessions focus on children being heard and providing adults an easy way to become involved with children’s play and their world.
What should you take from this?
Finnish early childhood education curriculum might seem a bit overwhelming. We know that first hand, here at Yuyu. It is no wonder that our teachers study to become experts in early childhood education for years. And this is the battlefield where we built our careers and gained expertise. With this in mind, we created Yuyu. So we could create easy-to-use, engaging, and educational content for our readers and their little ones.
Join us and get a piece of Finnish Education to your home! We promise an interesting journey 🙂
