About
Kindergarten dr. France Prešeren was established in 1947. It is located in the centre of Ljubljana. Its three locations with nineteen departments are surrounded by the Tivoli Park and several cultural institutions such as museums, galleries and theatres.
Kindergarten is attended by children aged from 1 to 6 years. The Kindergarten staff consisting of 19 kindergarten teachers and 21 assistants is permanently involved in training and projects on several areas of child’s development and are constantly engaged in reflection and evaluation of their work.
One of the Kindergarten’s important goals, besides meeting best interest of child’s needs and promoting methods of active and meaningful learning, is to strengthen the process of identification by giving a child the opportunity to learn about Slovenian cultural heritage and at the same time enable the child to get acquainted with other cultures and to appreciate cultural diversity.
We believe that artistic experience is one of the most important means of child’s social, emotional and cognitive development therefore we apply techniques and elements of dancing, dramatization, drawing, painting and sculpturing in our daily activities.
We are striving to establish strong partnership with parents and local community and are open to share and exchange our ideas and knowledge by networking and collaborating with different professionals and institutions on national and international level.
Informations for parents
An important element of a quality pre-school institution is cooperation with the parents. The parents have the right to take part in the planning of life and work in a pre-school institution or its teaching group. The parents should consider the professional autonomy of the pre-school institution workers, who - on the other hand - should consider the culture, identity, language, world view, values and convictions, customs and habits of the parents. The parents have the right to gradually introduce their child to the pre-school institution. The pre-school institution is obliged to provide written information about its activities: in publications and on notice boards.
The engagement of parents and families in their children’s education is of inestimable value. We view children's families as partners in our work, and regularly communicate with them in a variety of ways to keep them informed and to solicit support for their child’s learning. Furthermore, families are invited to contribute to the program by sharing interests, hobbies, cultural backgrounds, and special skills in order to help teachers meet their objectives.
Programs
The national curriculum for pre-school institutions (1999) is based upon appreciation of individual differences in development and learning, as well as on appreciation of the child's integrative and balanced development. The curriculum is open and enables implementation of various programmes (day, half-day, short). The objectives, contents and activities are designed separately for the first and the second age-group of children. For the sake of better transparency they are divided into various fields; however, the suggested curriculum themes extend over the stringent limits of a single field and are placed into the context of the children's every-day life in a pre-school institution. The following subject fields are included in pre-school institution activities: physical exercise, language, art, society, nature, study, mathematics. Interdisciplinary activities like ethics, health care, safety, traffic education are incorporated into all those fields.
Implementation of different subject fields goes hand in hand with the daily routine. Educational work is important for the child's personality (not only as a preparation for the next educational level), which is why it is based on the ability of children and their activities. Children's play enables the most natural way towards their development and learning.
The curriculum contains the objectives and principles of pre-school education, which importantly affect every-day activities, communication and classroom arrangement. In planning routine activities (eating, resting, sleeping, tidying up), the differences between children must be taken into account (gender, social and cultural origin, philosophy of life...) and such conditions must be created that those differences can be expressed. Children's particularities, the right to choose and their distinctiveness must also be regarded. The importance of communication for social learning is especially emphasized. The classroom should be flexible, diverse, safe and stimulative.