Kipinä features a globalised version of the Finland National ECE Curriculum, blending fun and structured learning.
While Kipinä is the closest preschool curriculum to the approved national core curriculum for early childhood education in Finland, there are some
Kipinä features a globalised version of the Finland National ECE Curriculum, blending fun and structured learning.
While Kipinä is the closest preschool curriculum to the approved national core curriculum for early childhood education in Finland, there are some practical adjustments and improvements that we’ve made.
The approved Finnish Curriculum is largely a guide or road map. Finnish teachers have a lot of autonomy in how to bring the curriculum to life, and how to manage their classes.
This can work well in smaller groups of children who come from very similar cultural and spoken-language backgrounds but it does not offer the same benefit to diverse, larger, multi-cultural classrooms which are far more typical in the rest of the world.
We’ve done a lot of work to help teachers focus on in-classroom guidance, by creating hundreds of weekly lesson plans that the teachers can bring to life, keeping in mind children’s interests, the different ways children learn and the different rates at which they learn.
Children in Finland don’t start formal education until they are seven years old, and there is only one exam in schools. This means there is no urgency about developing numeracy or literacy skills early in life.
However, in most countries children start formal education at age 4 or 5, and some even have to undertake assessments or tests to transition into K-12 schools.
Therefore Kipinä has an “Intentional Play-Based” approach. Where learning through play is the guiding principle in Finland, Kipinä brings more structure to the play to ensure children gain the literacy and numeracy skills they will need in the regular school system.
There are also two elements that 