The outdoor environment at Children's hospital, the University Hospital, Uppsala, is used by sick children at the Children's hospital, their families and the hospital staff. The staff at the Children's hospital wanted to render the site more attractive and available. This graduation thesis is a proposal about how the outdoor environment at the Children's hospital can be improved. The aim is to design an environment for the sick children, their families and the hospital staff that will serve as a place for relaxation and privacy, as well as for play and movement. In order to find support for the redesign of this site I read literature about theories concerning healing environments, healing gardens, children's play and designs for children.

The purpose of my study was to explore how preschool educators in Kenya look at children's influence on teaching. Researchers have argued that the formal educational system in Kenya today is a remnant of its days as a colony when people were expected to blindly follow rules without questioning them. I have used qualitative interviews as a method in order get the most concrete understanding of educators? views on the influence from children. The educators I interviewed were based at a school I visited in Kenya.

I denna studie har två förskollärares syn på musik i förskolan undersökts. Kvalitativa intervjuer har ägt rum på två olika förskolor ? en utan specifik inriktning och en avdelning med musikinriktning belägen i en annan förskola. Intervjufrågorna formulerades så att förskollärarnas syn på musikens roll och användningsområden i förskolan framkom. Svaren som gavs var i stora delar liknande, bland annat när det kommer till hur förskollärarna uppfattar musikens påverkan på barns språkliga utveckling.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to examine and analyze what discourses about children that can be found in three Swedish culture publications, and also to identify the different social roles that are attributed to children in these publications. The theoretical and methodological background is discourse theory, as described by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Additional theory used is social constructionism and Norman Fairclough?s critical discourse theory. Three questions are asked: What discourse/s can be found in these publications? What do these discourses tell us about the view on children within the library domain? What social roles are attributed to the children in the texts and what consequences do these have for the power configuration between children and adults? Furthermore there is a discussion concerning what effects these discourses might have on the direct and indirect reception of children in the library.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to obtain greater understanding of how children relate to the film medium and their experiences. This is obtained by listening to the children and observing their verbal and nonverbal communication in two focus group interviews. Children?s access to and selection of film are due to adult?s restrictions.

This report is a qualitative study on children aged three to five years who are in the Swedish preschool. The purpose of the study is to investigate how five experienced preschool teachers view the way children between three and five years acquire basic mathematical concepts, basic numeracy and geometry. The aim is also to find out whether teachers feel that the size of the group of children affects their learning.The study contains information about what preschool teachers think about the way children learn mathematics and how the size of the group of children affects this learning. From the results it can be seen that children learn Mathematics, both in everyday situations and when playing. Moreover, the group size does not seem to affect the mathematical learning of the child.

This study discloses Swedish human service organizations and their methods of integrating unaccompanied children into the Swedish society. The purpose of the study is to investigate how social workers at HVB-homes for unaccompanied children depict their experience in and knowledge of how the unaccompanied children are integrated into Swedish society. The method of investigating the questions raised by the purpose of this thesis has been qualitative analysis of answers derived from interviewing personnel at HVB-homes for unaccompanied children. In doing so we have made use of a semi-structured method of interviewing the above-mentioned personnel. The data derived from these interviews has thereafter been analysed and filtered through the concept of integration and the theoretical formations human service organizations and street-level bureaucrats.

This essay, with the title: Among children, laser swords and lions. ? How do we approach and utilize the cultural experiences of children? is an approach to participate in a scientific discussion in the field of cultural experiences. This text is an attempt to show the importance of paying attention to, how children express themselves, and place their activities in social and cultural contexts. By doing so and approaching children and their activities with an intercultural point of view, I can use my new found knowledge and use it to stimulate their future learning progresses in different fields.

The purpose of this examination was to make a qualitative study focusing on children's influence from a gender perspective. The study is based on interviews. We wanted to investigate teachers' perception of children's influence in the preschool.Earlier research on children´s influence and gender has also helped us in the conclusion of this examination.The survey consists of ten interviews with teachers of varied work experience in the preschool. We also chose to interview teachers in other positions, since this is often the case in preschools today. From the result we can see that there are different levels of skill and awareness regarding the topic of children's influence from a gender perspective.

AbstractIn this work, I have chosen to write about children in grief. Since children in grief is a large area, I have chosen to focus on how preschool handles and works with children who has loosed a parent, siblings or a play-mate by death. The aim of this work is to contribute knowledge about how you in preschool can handle and work with children in grief. To get answers to my questions, I have studied the current literature in the field. I have also interviewed five people with experience and knowledge of work with preschool-children affected by grief.

AbstractThe purpose of the study was to examine if manual signs used as support to spoken and written language can be a god mnemonic for learning of word-pictures. I performed my study as an experiment in which I made a Memory game with word-pictures. I played the game with the children twice. The first time, we played without manual signs and the second time I used sign as a support. I observed the children and noted the words they learned to read with and without the support of manual signs.

Different abilities are of importance to pragmatics, there among hearing. Hearing impairment can affect language development and also pragmatic ability. The aim of the present paper was to study the pragmatic ability in terms of request for clarification in children with Hearing Impairment (HI) in conversation with children with no known hearing impairment, henceforth normally hearing (NH). The present study also describes requests for clarification sequentially in detail, and also highlights points where there may be observable differences between children with and without hearing impairment. Eight conversational pairs consisting of one child with HI and one NH child were studied.

This study intends to examine why the Swedish children?s programme Bolibompa is produced the way it is during a larger catastrophe. Our intention was to find out how the editorial staff, in the children?s department in the public service television of Sweden (SVT),was handling the Estonia disaster, the September 11 attacks and the Asian Tsunami. To accomplish that, we first had to find out how the children?s programme looked during these catastrophes and also understand how the editorial staff was working with children?s programme during ordinary days.To achieve our purpose we have been interviewing five persons from SVT, who was involved in producing the children?s programme during these three catastrophes.

This essay deals with the issue of children and stress, and the impact that stress can have on children. The purpose has been to explore how I, in my role as teacher, can prevent children from developing stress in preschool, and how I can prevent stress to develop inside of my own department. My essay is structured as follows: First, I describe my practical work with children. Then I analyze some research literature on stress, and finally I reflect over what I have described earlier and try to connect the practical with the theoretical.In the practical part of this essay I describe the various events that I have observed during my work in preschool, where I have seen how stress can affect both children and teachers. Then I describe how the increasing size of children?s groups can create stress because of the noisy environment of the department.

This study was designed to describe and understand how children perceive and explain mathematical situations. During our work based training we have met several students who have been insecure in the subject of mathematics and therefore come to think that it's difficult and boring. The questions we have asked ourselves are why and how this insecurity occurs. In preschools around the country teachers actively worked to create opportunities for children to meet and discover mathematics. The question is whether the teachers are aware of how children perceive mathematics and how children think in mathematical situations. We chose to conduct a qualitative study using different methods of data collecting in order to approach the children's world.