The purpose of our examination was to survey how one preschool works with so called language groups, if the mother tongue is important and if the informants can see any complex of problems in the inclusive/exclusive way of working with language groups in the preschool. The literature review provides for example the three most important areas of mother tongue, which are the emotional, the social and the intellectual (Ladberg, 2000). Further it describes the difference between the conceptions integration and inclusion, when today the concept inclusion is preferred (Tøssebro, 2004). We were inspired by qualitative interviews as our method and from a phenomenographic perspective described the informants? perceptions about the named phenomenon.

I have written an experiential essay about my role as a preschool director and the important work decisions that I face. What is best for the child? That is something that I think is important to take into consideration.In the narrative, I describe how an induction occurs at my preschool. We use an "old" tried and true method which spans two to three weeks, which I believe is best for children under the age of two. They need to first connect withone educator who they are comfortable with before they are secure enough to play and explore the environment of the preschool.In recent years, another method has emerged which is shorter and which has quickly became popular in many preschools.

After having worked within the preschool and it?s system for a number of years, we have often reflected over the fact that many educators tend to look at children with language difficulties in several different ways, and many of them being conflicting. Something that might contribute to this problem is the fact that the term itself, language difficulties, is defined differently between individuals, who in turn affects the way educators and preschools deal with the problem.The aim of this study is to create an understanding of the problems related to language difficulties, and how it is being dealt with within the preschool environment. To achieve this we have chosen to work within a qualitative research approach, alongside a discourse analysis. The selection of informants we have chosen consists of ten, qualified educators.

The aim of this study is, from a norm-critical approach, to find, investigate and analyse human representation in the visual culture of one preschool in order to understand if the children enrolled are represented or not. The research questions are: In what ways is there imagery of human representations in images and materials designed for play? What skin-colors and origins are dominant in the data collected?We carried out a qualitative study in the form of visual ethnography. This method allowed us to use a combination of different data collection tools such as photography and ethnographic field notes to collect our data. The photographs we took of images and material used for play, was then analysed through semiotic picture analysis.

The aim of this study is to investigate how preschool teachers reason about gender stereotypical and gender neutral toys and other material. I would also like to see how the pedagogues reason about gender segregation when it comes to toys. To investigate the issue, I have interviewed three pedagogues from different preschools. The results showed that the work procedures differed a bit from school to school, although they all wanted to achieve the same goal. A goal that our curriculum mention as well: Not to make a difference between boys and girls.

The Swedish early childhood system is considered among the best in the world, however, in spite of this, we feel that there exists a conflict between educators? and parents? expectations of ?a good preschool?. During our teacher education training we have observed many different preschools and almost in all of them we have listened to anecdotes about one or more conflicts arising between educators and parents and which we have been able to pinpoint toward differing expectations. After talking with a preschool director, who also perceives that expectations of the preschool aims sometimes differ, our idea brought us to conduct this investigation.In this study, we have investigated parents? expectations of preschool and compared them with educators? expectations.

The purpose of the study is to investigate into professional knowledge of the bilingual teachers, compared to monolingual, and what benefits they give to pre-school. Qualitative method was used to get an understanding of informant´s perspective on bilingual teachers. The informants believe that bilingual teachers are able to understand all the children. A bilingual teacher can make the children feel secure. If one has a positive attitude toward bilingualism, the bilingual children also show a positive attitude that in turn contributes to learning and development of the language..

The purpose of this work is to investigate how 4-5 year olds perceptions of materials and material properties can be developed through an educational activity. The study is based on two interviews with eight children in that age category. The interviews were conducted before and after an activity where the children were first introduced to the subject by the tale of The three little pigs (Harris, 2009) and then given the opportunity to explore various materials related to the book. The kids got to experiment and explore how water affected materials and to compare different materials properties. The children were also attracted to build and create the material that was offered during the activity.

Swedish preschools have a variety of children of different ethnic origins. The intention of this thesis is twofold; firstly to deeply examine how preschool teachers work with languages and secondly how to integrate the Swedish language with other native languages in practice. Hence, the aim is to get a deeper understanding and knowledge about how to integrate multilingual children that have other languages than Swedish as their mother tongue. The data collection for this dissertation is based on observations and interviews with three preschool teachers and child minders. The theoretical background is taken from literature which describes the social cultural perspective.

Syftet med min undersökning är att jämföra hur svenska pedagoger arbetar med sång och musik på en förskola med barn som har svenska som modersmål respektive en förskola med barn som har ett annat modersmål än svenska. Jag observerade och intervjuade tre kvinnliga förskollärare från två olika förskolor. Resultatet visade att pedagogerna på de båda förskolorna arbetade mycket med det språkliga, men på olika sätt. Pedagogerna som arbetade med barn med ett annat modersmål än svenska hade mer språkliga mål och syften med sitt sång- och musikarbete och framhävde mer den språkliga förståelsen medan pedagogen som arbetade med barn som hade svenska som modersmål mer såg på vikten av att göra det lättare för barnen att minnas, samt på utvecklingen av det sociala, exempelvis samspel och gemenskap. Pedagogen som arbetade med barn som hade svenska som modersmål, gav barnen mer utrymme för samtal och frågor än vad pedagogerna på den andra förskolan gjorde och gav mer utrymme för båda könen.

One of the main goals in this study is to investigate how young children's identity formation and social relationships are depicted by today's consumer society.  In order to reach the goals of the study I also concentrated myself on questions regarding the reflection of symbolic aspects consumption in younger children's interaction and preschool-teachers' ideas about how and in what ways children's consumption patterns are created and developed nowadays. In order to answer the presented research questions I used the theoretical arguments of researchers in the field of pedagogy Gert Biesta in connection with the ideas and concepts of the consumer society characteristics developed by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.The thesis' methodological approach consists of a combination of semi-structured interviews with teachers and observations of children's interaction, which contributed to a systematic investigation of the thesis' problem area and served as a tool for obtaining answers to the research questions.The results demonstrate that consumption occupies a lot of space in young children's lives, which means that it greatly affects their social relationships today. Both consumption and knowledge of the known brands prove to be the child's path to the desired community on the one hand, and the children's way to the consumer world on the other (hand), which in turn points to an obvious dependence between children's consumption and their social relationships.The results also show that there is a tension between the perception of identity formation as preschool-policy-document on the one hand and the attitude of the identity prescribed by consumer society norms and regulations on the other..

This essay is about the meeting of the pedagogic mission and the reality of the conditions in preschools. It is about the frustrations that I, as a pedagogue, experience when I cannot fulfill this mission. An example of this is working when understaffed.My purpose is the acknowledgment of two main areas of the curriculum: caring and learning. This essay demonstrates the diversity of the occupation and it ?s constant need of positioning.

The purpose of this essay is to closely study different studies and texts within the subjects ofanimals and nature in order to, from different themes, analyze and determine whether or not animalsis a useful tool to apply in school as well as preschool. Above all else, this study serves to answerwhat animals and nature can bring children, and when you as an educationalist can benefit from it inyour classes within school and preschool. This study also serves to point out what you should keepin mind when using animals as a tool in your classes, since there are a few obstacles to consider.The method used to analyze the different themes is discourse analysis, which is a sort of textanalysis.About one hundred years ago when our society was industrialized, different theories and theimportance of preserving and to sojourn into nature began to grow among some theorists, biologistsand educators. The value of spending time outdoors was realized, which we today have a greatunderstanding of. Our interest for the impact of animals on us is also starting to grow, and there is alot of research that is of the opinion that animals are good for children in many different ways, andfor many different reasons.

The aim of this thesis is to show gender equality in school for teacher's choice of words with gender-sensitive language related to children's literature "Do you know Pippi Longstocking?". Work has focused on preschool and grade 1. The theme of the thesis is that the teaching profession should look human. The study provides a literature review of the teacher's choice of words in the gender order as the words hen, man, gender, sex, etc., and a review of Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren on the basis of the related concepts.

The aim of this study is to obtain a deep knowledge about identity creation of preschool child-ren at the age of four to sex with creative pictures and its aesthetic learning processes with childrens perspective as a starting-point. The issues that I have used in this study are how childrens identity creation relates to the aesthetic learning processes in the preschool enviro-ment, how children experience the figuration of their own identity related to other individuals and the enviroment by taking different positions in aesthetic learning processes and how childrens identity creation becomes visible in preschool.In order to explore Preschool childrens identity creation in aesthetic learning processes the qualitative research-oriented approach has been implemented with unstructured observations and the informal interview as the methods for data acquiring.This studys theoretical points are sociocultural perspective and symbolic interactionism. Both these theoretical perspectives emphasize the significance of communication, taking different perspectives and learning in an interaction between an individual and enviroment within given sociocultural frames of referens which results in an individuals identity development.Results from the study show that childrens painting is more than an occupation with a picture as a product. Childrens painting is rather a playfull aesthetic expression form and a relation-oriented, dynamic learning process which is related to the enriching of individual self, the consciousness and the creation of meaning within preschools frames of reference.My expectation is that my study will contribute to didactic discussions about childrens iden-tity creation while using aesthetic expression forms..