The Whole Child Development Guide
By Edith Ackermann
Children are Natural Born Learners: Look at a newborn baby. Few competencies are apparent when you look at that innocent little being, but their inherent capacity is enormous! Within four years this baby will have developed into a person who will run, jump, ask questions all day long, play princesses or superman and twist you round her little finger!
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Defining Systematic Creativity
By Edith Ackermann, David Gauntlett and Cecilia Weckstrom
Godtfred Kirk Kristiansen, the founding father of the LEGO® System of Play, believed that children should not be offered ready-made solutions, instead they needed something different that would strengthen their imagination and creativity. He devised the notion that a range of toys should fit together to form a system, in order to create a toy with value for life.
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Kids on Campus: Optimal Learning Environments in Japan
By Frans Ørsted Andersen
At Saitama University, a few elementary schools and a growing number special afternoon schools in Japan, a new, exciting concept for ”optimal learning” is being developed. In this article researcher, Frans Ørsted Andersen from the Danish University of Education (www.dpu.dk) calls this concept “kids on campus” – a name Mr. Masao Ishihara, Japanese educational consultant and conductor of these teaching sessions, uses for some of the “optimal learning” activities. Thus the term ”kids on campus” is covering a variety of learning programmes for children of all ages (3 to 13) in different Japanese institutions.
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Optimal Learning Environments at Danish Primary Schools
By Frans Ørsted Andersen
In recent, international, comparative, educational studies, like the OECD Pisa studies1, Denmark gets a top ranking position when measuring student well-being and motivation. According to the flow-theory of professor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Claremont Graduate University, this could suggest high levels of flow at Danish schools – and an on-going study, conducted by researcher, Frans Ørsted Andersen from the Danish University of Education / LEGO Learning Institute, indeed seems to confirm this.
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What do Children Need to Learn to Become Powerful Players in the World of Tomorrow?
By Anne Flemmert Jensen
An increasing number of research findings show that the trend toward pressuring children to acquire formal academic skills before entering school is strong, and to some degree replaces efforts of actively supporting the development of social, communication, and creative skills on the children’s own terms. This trend is particularly strong in USA, but also increasingly in UK and Germany.
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