Abstract:

The child's formal learning process begins in pre-school education which takes place in kindergartens. In Slovakia, children from 3 to 6 years old attend kindergartens. The pre-primary education supports the personal development of children, develops skills and abilities, forms them for further education and prepares them for life in society. The legislation of the State Educational Programme for Pre-primary Education in Kindergartens sets the areas of education and educational standards. Similarly as in primary and secondary school curricula, there are precisely defined areas of education. One of the areas is "Man and Nature" which emphasizes the early development of natural science literacy. Natural science competences that can be developed in the pre-school age include observation (purposeful acquisition of new information from the environment), categorization (comparison and sorting by targeted observation) and empirical communication (expressed by self-experience). This educational area is divided into the following sub-areas – perception of nature, plants, animals, man, inanimate nature and natural phenomena. Nowadays, the interest in natural sciences is constantly decreasing and, therefore, it is necessary to arouse the interest of children in the early age by playful and interesting activities. The aim of the paper is to popularize geography as a science by applying activating teaching methods in pre-primary education. When teaching "geography" in kindergarten, we used a didactic game which aim was to discover individual continents or countries based on famous fairy-tale characters (Pinocchio, Masha and the Bear, Mulan, McQuen, Bella, Pocahontas, etc.). The role of 5-year-old children was to assign their favorite fairy-tale heroes to the world map based on the information from where these characters came from. Before applying the proposed didactic game, we used a pretest where the children colored in the world map according to the Olympic colors. After completing the didactic game, we repeated this activity in the posttest trying to find out whether the children had learned to recognize individual continents using the proposed didactic game.

Keywords:

Geography, pre-primary education, Slovakia, didactic game.