PBL – Project Based Learning

With Project Based Learning, children learn to plan and research, ask questions, make choices within alternatives, and apply knowledge gained within their regular classes.

A project is an in-depth investigation of a real world topic worthy of children's attention and effort. Projects can be undertaken with children of any age and they do not constitute the whole educational program. Younger children will play and explore as well as engage in projects. Older children's project work will complement the systematic instruction in their program.

The key feature of a project is that it is a research effort deliberately focused on finding answers to questions about a topic posed either by the children, the teacher, or the teacher working with the children. The goal of a project is to learn more about the topic rather than to seek right answers to questions posed by the teacher.

The Project Approach refers to a set of teaching strategies which enable teachers to guide children through in-depth studies of real world topics. It is not unstructured. There is a complex but flexible framework with features that characterize the teaching-learning interaction. When teachers implement the Project Approach, children are more highly motivated, feel actively involved in their own learning, and produce work of a high quality.

Projects enrich young children's dramatic play, construction, painting and drawing by relating these activities to life outside school. Project work offers older children opportunities to do first hand research in science and social studies and to represent their findings in a variety of ways. Children also have many occasions in the course of their project work to apply basic math and language skills and knowledge.

Both research and developments in education have recently led to instructional innovations designed to make the classroom into a learning environment which is more responsive to the varying learning needs and interests of individual children. For example, there is increasing curriculum integration: continuity between the children's learning in the different subjects.

There is more opportunity to relate home and school learning. There is concern for memorable learning as well as memorized learning. Children are expected to work cooperatively on complex and open-ended tasks as well as follow instructions in step by step learning. The project approach provides a way to introduce a such wide range of learning opportunities into the classroom.

Project work in the early childhood curriculum provides children with contexts for applying the skills they learn in the more formal parts of the curriculum, and for group cooperation. It also supports children's natural impulse to investigate things around them.

Projects are especially valuable for young children because it is during the first years that their intellects are rapidly developing and significant long-term results can be achieved. Research has shown that being able to have an impact on their own work has many advantages during later years.

It is consistently observed that children who have attended preschools where activities are child rather than teacher-directed, are more successful in every area, and especially in basic reading, language and math skills.