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.