How to set up a Finnish Experience Preschool?
The Learning Kingdom, Malaysia
“We are happy the parents have selected us to facilitate their children. The Finnish program gives us an advantage as we are the only provider of the Finnish program. It gives new insight and understanding for the parents.”
The goal
Many countries around the world are now renewing their education systems. They then look for best practices around the world and Finland comes up as a leading nation to learn from.
Little more than a year ago, The Learning Kingdom set up the goal to be the first Finnish Experience Preschool in Malaysia. They turned to Finnish Education Solutions Sdn Bhd (FEDS) and Mr. Petri for help.
What is Finnish Early Education?
Finnish early childhood education and care comprise care, education, and teaching to support children’s balanced growth, development, and learning, as defined by the Ministry of Education.
Much of the early childhood education and care in Finland centers around play, free discovery, collaboration, interaction, own initiative, concentration, and learning to take responsibility for one’s own actions. ECEC in Finland emphasizes the so-called soft skills of balanced growth and taking others into account, over quantifiable metrics.
All pre-primary schools and daycare centers in Finland have an action plan in place, based on the national core curriculum on ECEC. Strong emphasis is also placed on the informal sharing of the child’s daily activities with the parents. Learn more from Kindiedays E-Book “What is Finnish ECEC?”
The project
The Learning Kingdom included 7 branches with close to 400 children aged 3-6 years in the project.
Four branches are from the Plato Learning House chain with the vision “To be the Premier International Preschool in both global and local communities”. And three branches are from D’Kingdom Kinderland chains whose child philosophy is to “Ensure that each preschooler under our care is safe, healthy, encouraged, engaged and challenged”. All originally followed their own curriculum.
The Learning Kingdom and FEDS explored how Finnish research and best practices could be adapted to the Malaysian context and culture. Five Finnish partners were chosen to provide the building blocks for the new approach. Kide Science provides expertise and lesson plans in STEAM, Eduten provides digital math learning, Moomin Language School provides an immersive English learning service, Code School Finland teaches coding and robotics and Kindiedaysprovides a mobile platform to support the learning process for all experiential activities in a consistent way. Kindiedays also supports the strong engagement of the parents. All companies have created their services and products based on Finnish research and practical experience from early childhood education.
The Finnish Early Childhood Education Curriculum and Finnish best practices were studied, and relevant elements have been included and adapted to the visions of the branches as well as to Malaysian national and cultural needs.
The partners
Kide Science
Kide Science offers the most engaging model to give teachers the confidence to teach science & inquiry-based lessons with play and stories to children aged 3-8. Kide Science is a library of play and story-based lesson plans and professional training materials at your fingertips.
Children are active learners by nature. Because children have a strong tendency to explore and experiment, the pedagogy shifts science learning into imaginative science play.
Eduten math
Eduten is a digital math learning solution for grades K-12 and beyond. Developed by one of Finland’s top universities, Eduten has spread to over 50 countries worldwide and is used by more than 1 million students.
Created by teachers, for teachers, Eduten is based on Finnish pedagogy and is adaptable to any curriculum worldwide. Eduten’s ready-made weekly program includes hundreds of high-quality tasks for students to build and improve their math skills. Eduten’s content library includes more than 200,000 gamified and varied tasks.
Moomin Language Schools
The learning application and activity plans help you teach children English through games, songs, and stories without hours of planning and preparation. Run the activities as they are or adjust them to your liking.
Introducing English learning doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. The staff doesn't need to be English teachers. As long as they have a basic level of English and are excited to learn and try new things, they can start using Moomin Language School right away.
Code School Finland
Code School Finland helps teachers and schools to teach coding, robotics, and AI in a way that promotes the development of 21st-century skills. The curriculum and teaching materials are based on academic research and the Finnish education model. And are aligned with the learning objectives of international and national curricula.
With Code School Finland all teachers - even those with no computer science background - can start teaching technology and future skills in K-12.
Kindiedays Pedagogical Management platform
Kindiedays mobile solution creates the foundation for the childcare center. Kindiedays empowers teachers with the tools to support the whole learning process based on Finnish best practices:
- Use a preinstalled or flexibly localized curriculum framework to guide the learning.
- Document children’s learning with photos, videos, notes, and curriculum objectives.
- Engage parents and show evidence of children’s learning progress in the curriculum.
- Access automatically generated portfolios that include pedagogical objectives and evaluate and develop learning with reports and statistics for formative assessment.
Educator App
Family App
Manager Web App
Kindiedays also includes attendance management, event management, and messaging with parents to make daily routines efficient to provide safety and time for quality education.
The new service
The Learning Kingdom launched the Finnish Experience Preschool concept in early 2022 and has gradually started to take full benefit from the solution.
Branch Manager Tew Ling Chuan from D'Kingdom Heritage explains:
"I am a teacher and also a manager in one of the branches under The Learning Kingdom. My role is to assess teaching methods, monitor student achievement, encourage parent involvement, design a teaching plan and use activities and instructional methods to motivate children.
Our goals are to provide each child with an opportunity to learn and practice the essential social, emotional, problem-solving, and study skills that he will use throughout his schooling. Most children are naturally curious, but some do not know how to focus or use this curiosity. We are directing our child’s curiosity and natural love of learning. Our core value is to nurture a child from Curious, Universal, Brilliant (CUB) to Leadership, Excellent, Optimistic (LEO)”.
Implementation schedule
The Learning Kingdom started by managing the daily attendance of children with Kindiedays. Continued with the daily report and uploaded the children's daily activities. After that, update the full learning progress through Kindiedays.
Now the Finnish curriculum is implemented in daily teaching and daily activities. Kindiedays is used to update the status of the children and keep the interaction with the parents via the journal. With the Eduten games, the children learn to love mathematics and enjoy solving addition and subtraction. Kide Science is used to let the children know more about nature. They love to discover more from the experiments. Moomin Language School lets the children have fun when they are learning new words or new sentences from the games. It is great to have these activities included in the syllabus.
