The Jungle Gym of Speech, Speech-training in a natural learning arena

Growing up, our children spend many years in school. Their education outside the home starts in preschool, where the foundation for formal education is laid. Writing, reading and mathematical skills is a platform for all learning, a basic requirement for every aspect of life. To learn these skills well, the children have to be skilled speakers. They need to have a good vocabulary; they will have to learn about how their language is constructed. Furthermore, they need to learn to count and measure in order to understand basic mathematical terms. Speech-training is one of the major subjects for preschools, emphasized in the Norwegian National Curriculum. For me as a teacher in preschool teacher training, it is important to learn more about what the preschools find necessary to work with and how they work with it. Only then can I supply my students with the proper training that will make them skilled professionals for a profession as a preschool teacher. The project presented is one in cooperation with our close partner preschools, Tusenbein Barnehage, close to Mo i Rana. Here they have constructed a jungle gym in the woods not far from the preschool, where the children can work with both bodily-kinesthetic skills and linguistic skills; they call it the Jungle of Speech. I will also show how this project can be used in a preschool teaching training programme.