A spiral of learning around the snail: A STEAM approach in a daycare setting

Abstract

In early childhood, each game, each experience, each new finding, should be seen as an opportunity for the development of new learning for the child. Those moments must be an opportunity for the development of learning, where the educator must explore paths that predispose the child to observe, question, analyze, reflect, build, think, and assign meaning to their actions and observations.

The project presented here, developed with a group of children aged two and three, was born out of the spontaneous curiosity of a child around a snail, and integrated the areas of knowledge in a STEAM approach. The different activities launched around the snail, with the issues triggered by curiosity and interaction between children, together with the challenges and issues raised by the educator, triggered meaningful learning with the irreplaceable contribution of the resulting communicative structures.