Preschool teaching and education

Abstract

Pre-school Education has awaken a progressive interest in the pedagogical field, indoubtedly, due to its rapid generalisation and implantation in many countries. However, it results that the pressure of the demand has often supposed the mechanical transposition of the school models in the pre-school circle, converting this stage as an appendix of the basic education. A competence limit is necessary to clarify the fuctions and establish the limits of one with respect to the other, obseming of course, the necessary coordination between both stages. In the didactic field, there are disparities which allow to speak of a diferential didactics in the pre-school stage. This didactics however, has some conditioning characteristics which, although continue to exist in the basic education, are of great importance. The group characteristics in the pre-school stage are marked by the little homogenity in the children as far as maturity is concerned; an indispensable requisite so that teaching should takle with rudiment readers, writers and mathematicians. Maturity , therefore, is the central theme, but not in itself the aim of teaching; the former is a pre-requisite so that the latter could take place. The emergence of aptitudes during the pre-school stage characterize the reaching attitude, the mission of which, will be to facilitate, wait and, in the given moment, to teach. The greater part of success which the child reaches during this stage are mostly to be adquired in the farnily circle, by means of a spontaneous education, non intentional non systematic, without the intemention of a person who acts as a teacher. The processes of sensorial and motor discrimination are adquired indepently of the cultural context; they are alike in all countries. There is, therefore, only a unique alternative: the employment of didactic techniques directed to experiencing, living situations, circunstances and environment which furnish these maturity processes leaving behind the temptations of instruction -in the sense of transmitting cultural contens- unti1 the emergence of the aptitude or aptitudes which conform the possibility to learn them. The pre-school stage is caracterized therefore by the intervention of the educator in the environment, potentialling its richness and favoring the experiences of the child, always within his field of interest. We differentiate therefore three great moments in this pre-school period: the learning process in interaction with the environement and by means of experiencing the rudiments psychomotors; the experiencing of these learnings in order to apply them later on in adquisition of specific cultural contens and the beginings of the instrumental learning within the written, read and mathematical.