EMPIRICAL TEACHING IN PRESCHOOL

Kindergarten or preschool are some of the first learning experiences that

children have access to. Everything that happens in these spaces will affect the
future of their educational process: from the content and activities they carry out
to the challenges of socializing and sharing with others. Hence, some teachers
have highlighted the importance of this initial stage and recommend innovative
strategies for teaching in preschool.

Value of play in the development of intelligence

A teacher will have to understand these evolutionary moments: understand the

parallel between children's play and culture as a form of play. Indeed; The first
thing that the teacher must take into account is that play constitutes the child's
fundamental activity and that, thanks to this activity, children manage to turn
fantasy into reality.

Play and education

The introduction of the game in the world of education is a relatively recent

situation. Nowadays, play plays a determining role in school and contributes
enormously to intellectual, emotional and physical development. Through play,
the child controls his own body and coordinates his movements, organizes his
thinking, explores the world around him, controls his feelings and solves his
emotional problems, ultimately he becomes a social being and learns to occupy
a place. within your community.

In this sense, mental activity in play is continuous and, therefore, play involves
creation, imagination, exploration and fantasy. While the child plays, he creates
things, invents situations and looks for solutions to different problems that arise
through games. The game promotes intellectual development. The child learns
to pay attention to what he is doing, to memorize, to reason, etc. Through play,
their thinking develops until it becomes conceptual, logical and abstract.

Through play, the child also develops his or her motor skills while running,
jumping, climbing, going up or down and, in addition, joining a group facilitates
social development, relationships and cooperation with others, as well as
mutual respect. Furthermore, by interacting with other children through play,
language is developed and perfected.

The game, the educational resource par excellence

Taking into account all the reasons explained above, we can declare that "play
is the educational resource par excellence" for childhood. The child feels deeply
attracted and motivated by the game, an issue that we must take advantage of
as educators to propose our teaching in the classroom.

Following the child's evolutionary process, we must contribute to facilitating the

maturity and formation of his personality through different functional games that
can help the child achieve his psychomotor coordination, his sensory and
perceptual development and improvement, his location in space. and in time.

The teacher and his role in the game at school

The role as teachers should be that of animator of the game or even just
another player. If we want to become "directors" of the game, "adult and
serious" people who command, organize and arrange, we will never achieve an
adequate climate where the child expresses himself autonomously and freely
through play. This does not mean that we should leave our students alone, but
that we should guide them, give them ideas and encourage them, so that,
during their play periods, children find in their teachers someone to whom they
can turn in a somewhat more relaxed To do this, the teacher should take into
account, in his role as "animator-stimulator" of the game, a series of elements:

Design of game spaces

The student must be provided with the best possible conditions for the game
and must be able to organize the game environment. The environmental space
will be as safe, stable and calm as possible. The classroom will be structured in
recreational spaces that enable spontaneous and free play, play in small groups
and play among everyone, always with certain rules and educational purposes.

Materials for the game

The recreational materials that our students are going to use must be carefully
studied and selected. The toy is a kind of "pretext" that we must take into
account. We will select recreational materials that encourage divergent thinking
and creativity in students, such as puzzles, abacuses, puppets, stories, songs.

Structuring and organization of playing times

Every child must develop both free play and organized play; they must play
individually and in groups. Various research indicates that the game between
two children lasts longer and is more productive than the individual game or that
of three or more children; However, we must add that spontaneous and
individual play is enriched by the contributions and experiences that collective
play provides. Therefore, the teacher must structure and organize time for each
type of game used in his or her class.
Teacher's attitudes towards the game

The teacher must try to develop a series of attitudes in his role as animator of
the game. These attitudes are:

 A great capacity to accept the child's erroneous expressions and

responses, justifying them, when they occur, as something normal within
the child's maturation and development process;
 The creation of a relaxed, tension-free and permissive climate: the child
must work in an environment of freedom but with firm respect for the
rules; You should not feel subjected, much less obligated. The teacher
must create a friendly relationship with the child, but always keeping his
distance, that is, keeping in mind that the student has to feel like what he
is and has to see the teacher as an adult who is in charge of his
education.
 A permanent attitude of listening and dialogue: the teacher must remain
open to everything and everyone, being willing to develop the child's
communication and understanding.
 Do not anticipate the solutions: you must let the child discover them for
himself and encourage the student to find out and invent; In this way, the
child's motivation and involvement in the game is greater and the
learning is much more significant.
 Do not speed up the development of the game: it is about respecting the
sequence of the game. The teacher should not instigate the child to
excessively accelerate his process of evolution.

Teaching strategies for preschool education:

The ultimate goal of the preschool curriculum is to facilitate the comprehensive

development of the child, which entails two important practical effects: one is
that all activities to be carried out with the child must respect and adapt to the
process and pace of their development, graduating according to the sequence
in which the different needs, interests and abilities appear, this must also be
done respecting the individual differences and personal styles that children of
the same age show.

The other practical effect of this conception is that activities are defined
according to the relationship they have with the different areas into which
development is divided: physical, psychomotor, cognitive, socio-emotional and
language. In relation to this point, it is good to highlight that this is a
methodological division to make the work easier, but these areas in the child
are integrated, they are all related to each other; Therefore, a given activity can
promote the development of the cognitive area, but at the same time allows
children to have intense socio-emotional interaction, in addition to promoting
their motor skills. In this sense, the preschool curricular orientation adopts as its
central goal to facilitate the comprehensive development of the child.
The general purposes of preschool education are considered in light of a
principle, which places it as a process that, in addition to being guided by the
teacher, involves a deep interaction between the child, the family and the
community. For Eliason, S. J. (1987), this principle summarizes the general
purposes of preschool as follows:

Assist families in the care and attention of their children under 6 years of age.
This assistance is understood in the sense that the preschool institution and
teachers are sharing tasks and responsibilities with the child's parents and
relatives.

Provide children with experiences of a cognitive, psychomotor, linguistic, social

and emotional nature that enrich their lives and facilitate the full development of
their potential in the various areas of their personality, as well as in subsequent
learning.

Strengthen families and communities in their capacities to care for and educate
young children. This is a very important goal given the growing number of
children living in poverty.

Pay special attention to the characteristics of the development of those children

who, because they come from economically and culturally depraved
environments, are at risk for their future development.

Contribute to the formation of work habits and social solidarity that allow the
child's future participation in democratic life and in the solution of community
problems.

Promote the development of positive activities and interests in the child towards
the values of their language, their culture and their environment. (p. 17).

The concern of teachers to join the movements that can be called innovative,
with which the expectations regarding child development can be met, managed
to awaken innovative ideas. The result of these ideas is the new education
strategy called "Open Classroom."
This is a modern teaching-learning system based on the pedagogy of action,
which constitutes the most interesting and innovative movement in
contemporary education. The starting point of this strategy is based on freedom,
individuality and man's ability to learn from his own experience. This is known
as a fundamentally inside-out education, that is, based on the needs of the
student. Education begins with life and must proceed gradually, adapting it to
the various stages of the individual's development. Education must teach how
to live, be active and realize oneself in an environment of freedom.
Furthermore, it must attend to all aspects: physical, intellectual, social and
emotional, that is, it must be comprehensive.
In this sense, the character of education as "learning by doing" stands out,
since only manual and intellectual action promotes experience, and education is
nothing other than a continuous reconstruction of experience. This principle of
education through action rejects mechanical and formal, routine and tyrannical
learning; but it is equally opposed to educational anarchism.

The pedagogy of action, on which the Open Classroom system is based, can be
summarized in the following set of pedagogical principles:

Activity: serves as the basis or foundation for the Open Classroom. The
fundamental idea here is that of practical and experiential learning, since the
child learns much more by doing than by listening or seeing what others say or
do.

Freedom: true education comes from the inside out, spontaneously and based
on the needs and interests of the learner, and not as something imposed.

Responsibility: the child has the freedom to learn based on his or her own
experience and direct contact with objects. He feels master of his own
experiences and executes them with greater satisfaction, therefore, with greater
responsibility.

Creativity : the possibility of developing learning from direct experiences and in

an environment of freedom and responsibility must lead to the act of creating.

Individuality: taking into account individual differences in the process of

physical, intellectual and emotional development of the child, effective learning
can only be conceived based on the individual attention of the students.

Sociability: the child is, by nature, a social being, that is, he requires other
human beings for his own development; Therefore, the school must encourage
his connection with others. (p. 13).