How pre school trainee teachers understood the living-democracy.com chapter on the eating habits of toddlers

The Serbian team member of the living-democracy advocacy campaign, Svetlana Lazic, describes in her report how her students responded to the website materials, which were written mainly for parents. Svetlana gave a great new option for the use of the information on living-democracy.com. Svetlana Lazic works as a teacher trainer in the Preschool Teachers Training College in Novi Sad. She teaches obligatory and elective courses within the field of pedagogy.

“For a long time, I haven’t read anything which has been so useful for my work with children. This manual is very nice: the way it looks, the colour of the pages, the way that the tasks and chapters are divided, the examples of games which can be played together with the additional tasks to be completed during free time. I didn’t find anything unclear. Every chapter and every task is very well explained, as is the method of implementation.

I’m sure I will use this manual in my future work with new generations of children. I say in my future work, because I already had the opportunity to implement some of the tasks. I work in a kindergarten in Belgrade (as a volunteer) and during the last several months, in my free time, I completed some of the tasks and played with the children too. The children liked everything that came from the manual and they fully engaged with the process of learning.

In the beginning, I took two dolls and gave them names Ana and Kosta, just like the names of the children in the FACE 1 manual. I introduced them to Ana and Kosta and we talked about the behaviour children need to have in kindergarten in relation to their peers, since Ana and Kosta already are in kindergarten. We went through the chapters one by one and we became familiar with each other, since we had the opportunity to fully introduce ourselves. Games like: “Who is next to me?”, “Try not to laugh!”, “Write on my back!” were very interesting for the children and we played them after breakfast. I think the final game is very important, since every new child in the group can play it. The next game and workshop was “The little thumb”. The children were sad about the thumb and that the other fingers had left him out because he is fat and small. They said it is not good behaviour and that we shouldn’t reject some children just because they are different from us.

In the workshop, “I’m healthy”, we became familiar with our body, we learnt it can do such wonderful things, we became aware of our senses and learnt what is healthy and less healthy for us. We made our healthy market where children tried the taste of different fruits and vegetables, expressed the taste in words and learnt what is sour and what is bitter.

Textbook FACE 1 (Families and Children in Education)