The first kindergarten was established by Froebel in Bad Blankenburg in 1837. He renamed his Play and Activity Institute to a ‘kindergarten’ two years later in 1840. That Bad Blankenburg Infant school used play, games, songs, stories, and crafts to encourage children’s imagination and widen their physical and motor talents. “Kommt, lasst uns unsern Kindern leben” Come, let us live with our children’ turned into the catchphrase of the early childhood education.
Froebel’s upbringing theory had such major establishments: toys for inventive play (so called ‘gifts and occupations’). “Gifts” were objects with a fixed form such as blocks (Froebel designed a large box of 500 wooden building blocks). Their purpose was to find out the essential thought represented by the object the child played with. Occupations were based on free will and represented things that kids could shape and manipulate such as clay, sand, beads, rope etc.
Games, songs and dances were accepted by Froebel as the key for healthy activity and physical development.
Friedrich Froebel also used studying and nurturing plants in a garden for stimulating children’s interest in the nature regulations. Here we can trace the identity with the Montessori school system and Pestalozzian consideration of importance to grow up in harmony with nature.
Froebel paid much attention to preparing for further school education by training the infant innate faculties through the complimentary self expression, creativeness, collective involvement, and motor activity. He considered training of all the vivid faculties: artistic, imaginative, linguistic, arithmetical, musical, aesthetic, scientific, physical, social, moral, cultural, and spiritual, complete growth and harmonious development to be even more important than any kind of knowledge.
Froebel’s kindergarten system flourished globally as a didactic movement. Most kindergartens were organized for children of all social classes, ethnic groups and religious believes, Jewish as well as Christian. Froebel’s vision of kindergarten seems to be so familiar and proper, however it was a fresh and revolutionary look on early childhood education in his time.
