Kiitos@21st Century Preschools - An integrated pedagogical approach to promote 21st century skills and a second language learning in Childhood Education

Kiitos@21st Century Preschools is an early second language learning (ESLL) project, which aims to promote a High-quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), in Portugal and in other European Countries, connecting different pedagogical approaches to support children’s global development, preparing and equipping them for the 21st century challenges.This project focused on the needs of 2 target groups: Children in pre-primary education, from a local School Cluster in Ponte de Sor, Portugal, and the pre-primary teachers and specialized teachers (English, Music and Physical Education) and school leaders.Given the wide range of approaches currently existing across EU, the partnership between 4 higher education organizations, from 4 different countries (PT, PL, IT, Tk) focused on the issue of curricular quality and appropriateness, analysed and learnt from Member States good experiences, in order to ensure the positive impact on preschool education.Hence, one of the main objectives of this project was to develop, with other partner countries, an integrated pedagogical aproach that combines the most effective, creative and innovative teaching and learning strategies to improve ESLL; and to develop 21stCentury Skills: as Creativity, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, Communication, Collaboration and Emotional Intelligence. Furthermore, we encompassed Music education as it is a component, which stimulates the development of a wide range of perceptual, physical, language, cognitive, and social-emotional skills.A second exceptionally important objective was to create a changing on the way teachers and school leaders look upon the learning process, and establish a commitment to develop a 21st century learning environment beginning at preschool. It is utterly important to change the mindset of school leaders, creating a collaborative learning environment, where all have an important role.Fifty-seven people were directly involved in the project Teams. These were highly motivated Pre-school, English and Music teachers, parents, teacher trainers and researchers.As for the resources created, they were:1. Kiitos@21st Century Preschools – Handbook guidelines2. Development of materials and resources for 21st century preschools in English Language Teaching3. Development of materials and resources for Music Learning4. Action research development – Scientific articleThis innovative integrated pedagogical approach embraced ESLL (Early Second Language Learning), Music Learning and 21st Century Skills in preschool education.We developed this project to have a deep impact on the educational community in general. Children are able to communicate with simple sentences in two languages. They learnt and developed cognitive and non-cognitive skills, developed critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, communication, collaborative work and emotional intelligence. The results achieved in this project will hopefully influence the educational policy regarding early second language learning in pre-primary education, and support a changing in policy. The benefits of this project were:More skilled young people, with solid foundations, which promoted learning to become more effective and more likely to continue throughout life, increasing the equity of educational outcomes and lowering the costs for society in the future. In addition, it contributed to support cognitive, linguistic, social and emotional development, of all children, especially those with a socioeconomically disadvantage, or with special educational needs, which facilitates the early school leaving decrease;The combination of Early Second Language Learning (ESLL) through a systematic exposure to a foreign language in the context of pre-primary education, encouraging the development of appropriate curricula, which fostered the acquisition of both cognitive and non-cognitive skills.The development of 21st century skills: creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, problem solving, and socio-emotional skills, which had a great impact on the foundations of children’s entrepreneurial aptitude and ability in the future;The implementation of a culture of transformation at school which involved every member of the educational community, school leaderships and other peer organizations, teachers, staff, parents and children.As Charles Darwin says “It is not the strongest of species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change”. We truly believe we have promoted this outright important skill in everyone involved in this project.